How To Create A Life Of Freedom - Dan Martell

the bigger it gets the harder it gets is that a rule of business most people would think so I think that the truth is if you do it right that as you grow the bigger it is the more resource you have and it should get easier my the way I think about it is I'm kind of on a mission to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate cuz I have so many friends people I've seen around that they're great creators they're artists they're they get a passion to solve the problem that's for sure but their own craziness it's almost like the entrepreneurial CRA like it it takes a certain level of like kind of being crazy I mean that's why people call them crazy because you're willing to do things that very few people are willing to do you can hold a vision that most people can't see the problem is is that if you don't adjust that version of you will be the Achilles heel to actually growing a business you know and often times your Achilles heel to growing a business is the thing you're best at because it's the thing that you're going to be most monacal at you won't you won't allow you won't allow anybody else to do you don't know how to work through people um so it'll get you some level of success but yeah most people believe the bigger it gets the harder it'll get and because of that they they self- sabotage to play small cuz it feels unsafe your superpower becoming your Achilles heel is something that I felt basically throughout my entire career in business um to give you my most obvious ridiculous example of this uh I ran one of the biggest events companies in the UK for about 15 years and our first big weekly that we ran was a Saturday at a club called Riverside anyone that watched Jordi Shaw which was the UK equivalent of Jersey Shore that was where they went every Saturday and uh we were absolutely crushing this was the hottest event in town between a, and 1500 kids every weekend and uh it was just churning out uh cash not insane money you know we maybe make five grand a week or something like that bottom line would be sort of two and a half to three something really really great money I'm 24 23 24 25 phenomenal money between me and the other guys that ran the company and uh we would need to set the club up we'd need to hang Inflatables from the ceiling uh the smoke machine the haze machine the banners that go over the barriers outside you just sort of get the club built ready for this every Saturday for four years without missing a single Saturday for four years 210 208 Saturdays in a row I built the club with my business partner it we could have paid any of the 400 400 students that worked for us 400 of them and they would have happily done it for 5 or6 an hour but I was adamant that nobody else could hang the inflatable inqu the right place that it needed to go that what if this thing was missed off this would be the beginning of the downfall of the business because if the smoke machines 5 Ines to the left then Asian society's going to stop coming to room two to watch R&B and that's going to be the beginning of the end I'm going to be homeless under a bridge um so for four years and the first weekend I'll never forget the first weekend when I missed it was because I had such a bad um stomach infection thing that it just ripped me out of it and I couldn't and then sort of the veils fell from my eyes and I realized why have I spent four years of Saturdays from 11:00 a.m. until 2 sometimes 3: in the afternoon when I could have been having fun could have been working on the business could have been doing anything as opposed to just spending a bit of time training somebody up and you know 60 pounds a week uh to get someone else to do it it's one of those things because I had my equivalent experience on that just processing physical mail every Sunday for hours go get the mail from the PO box and just sit there and process mail what was the business it was a software company that sold Enterprise and it was just like contracts checks like this old school this is not 2004 2005 and it was you know I remember reaching out to the CEO because I just thought I got to be doing this wrong and he laughed I said who processes your mail this guy ran like a $100 million insurance company and he says well my assistant well how do you you know what is that and how do you find them I just thought like that's not something people that start companies should have in the early days I had all these beliefs around it but you know it's it's funny because it's also the reason you're successful because there's like in a level of attention to detail that's required that creates a product like you obviously created a product and I'm I was a big I have this like a secret addiction to reality TV so I'm very familiar with Jord Shore funny enough um and and then again it's just at a certain point maybe it would have been 6 months not four years you know handing it off to somebody else could have been a better use of your time even just even energy if you think about like just the amount of stuff people do they shouldn't be doing and how much head space it takes with the energy whereas they could be a lot more present with the people they're with or more creative it's uh it robs you know distractions rob a lot of people from bigger bigger Visions yeah it's uh it's kind of embarrassing to realize you know there's something called path dependency which you might be familiar with so path is also called the Ein Stelling effect and it explains why we kind of get locked into particular modes of working so for instance the querty keyboard on laptops is a path dependency from the query keyboard on typewriters yeah where the most common uh letters would be out on the little fingers and letters weren't closed together so it wouldn't fire two at the same time there are other layouts for keyboard yeah my my software programming friends use different ones cuz they're more efficient some of them actually have like four Direction it's like a touch and it's like a it's it's a direction oh so when you hit it you can yeah so it's like I think there's only 10 buttons but you push it in a direction oh my God so you're never moving your finger away finger has a button ergonomically it's it's like 100 a minute so you've got this path dependency and it's basically you know the entirety of the Insight is the tools that got you here won't get you there um there's a lot I think that sort of correlates from your background to mine uh I didn't grow up in a trailer part quite so much but um very much sort of super working class environment the idea of Leverage the idea of Outsourcing um you know really was not a skill uh that was instilled into you from childhood it's a a type of physics that you have to learn when you're 28 and fold this into your work your worldview with your uh Puritan work ethic guilt that you have over getting somebody else to do something that you could because you've been told the opposite your whole life I mean I mean I don't know about you but like I was told by my dad or the people around me like if you want done something right do do it yourself correct right and you know just like all these money beliefs or Outsourcing beliefs or you just hear it all the time who does the real work and like it's frowned upon to be somebody that doesn't do certain things like you should be somebody that knows how to fix your car and take care of your stuff it's like till you just have so much you're trying to do that it's just physically impossible I mean like I don't know I just luckily you know 28 30 years old I realized that there's no way I can do what I want to do and possibly do it all and that was like so I'm sure you know Nal rant and his stuff um that was like when I understood the kind of the high level concept of Leverage like that was like I've always been like I was 4 Hour Work week when it came out you know did and that's what really inspired me to stop doing the mail right I was like okay this is yeah yeah that you know email the autoresponder messages all that crazy stuff I mean I picked some stuff up left the rest but nval taught me I moved to Silicon Valley and started building tech companies there it was just the idea of if you think about it there's only four ways to get leverage there's the the code side so software automation I know that world that's my world so you know to the degree that you can automate a task that doesn't require any thinking you never have to make that decision again I mean that spoke to me because of my software background like I wrote code that's the essence of it content so like you've got documents Sops training this like videos like this so that was kind of an interesting concept cuz I never really thought about it but obviously anop is the equivalent of writing code but for a manual task checklist then there was Capital which is the Silicon you know the valley is built on Capital leverage raise a bunch of money try to deploy it and you seeing even with your product like it's it takes money to make money for certain categories that have you know raw materials that have to be turned into finished goods so like then the last one was collaboration which really took me a while to figure out it's like how do I work with other people like I just had a hard time letting go I would get anxious I would get nervous I'd be worried this person's going to cost me my money and sometimes it did like there was situations where like I was on the hook for somebody else's Behavior so those four Paths of Leverage occurred to me that if I could study them work at them like that those are like the four Master skills I call it like if I just get really good at these four things then to the degree I'm good at those then really I shouldn't have any constraints in anything I want to create and that was like probably one of the best things I ever learned from Nal amongst many other things but it was like it was huge well given that most people intend on buying back their time when they become wealthier and more successful why is it the case that so many successful and wealthy people suffer with more busyness and Chaos rather than less as they keep on growing I mean my experience was I was so scared my first company that finally work I I just started young I was 17 I think when I started first company you know and there's always like the projects how many domains do you own let's put those aside but corporations so I went through two failed companies 17 and 19 that left a scar and it wasn't until I was 23 I decided I'm going to do this again try something different and in the first year finally got traction like did like 900 and some thousand in year one which is like blew my mind the problem was I didn't know why I was successful so I was running around spinning plates and I only had one tool which is essentially work my butt off like when I say 100 hours a week there was no there was no leisure there was no travel there was nothing it was I don't want this to implode yet again I don't actually know why it's working and I'm just I'm gonna keep doing what I do terrified of failure like Mor like so terrified like well you become so I have never understood the sentence people aren't scared of failure they're scared of success until I heard you say the reason that people are scared of success is that they have a higher point to fall from now yeah you go okay so it's still failure it's just failure from a higher altitude yeah a perceived failure of attainment of something it's either where I'm at and I fall down or and really it's I'm I'm not I'm not scared of winning I'm scared of what I'd have to get that I'm scared of having to renegotiate the new standards at that level with everybody in my life because that's what happens with success is that you start worrying about like it's like if you lose weight like most people don't even want to lose weight because then they got to keep it off cuz if they put it back on then they fail so it's easier to just maintain what they got like I don't want 10 millon and like what's funny is the language they use they actually like poo poo it they like it's not about the stuff you know it's like I'm not a car guy I hear all this stuff and I'm like no it's actually a lot of fun driving around in a fun car like so don't say it's not you're not a car guy you you're you're telling yourself these stories so you don't have to attain because if you do then you're going to have to ask yourself like what's this new level of responsibility what's funny is that most people when they start and I know this is true for me when I started the mental model I had about success was actually a lot I was way more driven it's when I got up the mountain and I was halfway and I had something to lose now I started getting scared and acting out of you know trying to protect so I I I call that the big dog syndrome when you become the big dog amongst your peer group it feels good but you're but you but you know inside you're just not there and honestly I want to say this about your pod like what I love about what you've created is you continue to push like you push dude like it's just it's really cool from outside watching because I'm like oh no this is a guy that cares about the craft and there's no like if anything every resource you get you're like how do I pour it back in how to and I think that's I didn't have that when I started it was something that I think I had to develop to respond to some of my desires and honestly do the work and be honest with myself but yeah I think um I think everything it's like you know pain of fear and then there's you know if you're lucky you get to a place where you you get pulled forward from a desire to do something bigger and that's a different energy right there's a dark energy of like moving away from Pain and then there's a light energy of moving towards some level of of creating something that's never been created before mhm yeah I think if you don't ever learn to let go of that fear of failure as you become more successful the fear grows rather than diminishes because of that it's a dirty energy yeah that higher altitude that you fall from okay so getting into the uh buyback your time and the buyback principle it seems to me that there's sort of going to be broadly two groups of people that this applies to the first one is going to be you know aspiring little bit of uh disposable income within the business professionals and then somebody another group uh who maybe don't have the entrepreneurial side but have got a little bit of disposable income within their personal lives and are just wanting to sort of free themselves up for that take me through buyback principle how this works for someone that's never been introduced to it yeah so the the concept that I learned that that helped me get to this place is calendar over capacity so and it sounds so subtle but the mistake to make is to add people to your life that can do what you already do because then it costs money and you didn't actually get an Roi so I always look at my calendar I don't add capacity so like if I was a logo designer and I was overwhelmed most of them would go hire another logo designer ER but what you should do is figure out the other stuff that isn't logo designing have somebody take that off your plate so that you could do logo design because that's where you get paid the most money the buyback principal States you don't hire people to grow your business you you you grow your business by buying back your time because if I buy back my time then I can go do the thing that is the kiles heel or the friction point or the the bottleneck of why I'm not growing and if you do that that's where you can build a business you don't grow to hate because as you grow you have more freedom and it's kind of bananas because when people see it and it doesn't even take money so like how do I get somebody else to help me with something it could be an intern right it could be um a friend you can literally ask friends you like you said you could ask one of the 400 students um and the whole premise is look at your calendar for the past two weeks and just ask yourself where am I been doing tasks that are not things I enjoy doing okay I call them the energy suckers that I could have paid somebody at at least a quarter of what my hour is worth okay so a quarter or less to do and the reality is if you're doing anything on that list you're working against your dreams like it's this is this is mathematical equations if your if value Creation in the world is what value you create within a unit of time and let's call it an hour then your ability to create value in that hour is the the most the most important thing so you should not be doing anything for eight bucks an hour setting up the design thing when closing another or getting another contract to go promote another show could bring you on average $100 an hour for your effort like it's just bad math and that's why like my background in software really kind of made me think about like what's the first principles to leverage right all those four Master skills okay cool but how do I translate that into some kind of equation that I can kind of run through this Loop so the buyback loop I run through it all the time all the what is the loop the loop is as soon as you feel pain okay so I always say that most entrepreneurs hit a place where they they hit a pain line okay where their opportunity they could say yes but saying yes would create chaos in their calendar and guys like us that's every day we are not at the mercy of not enough opportunities some people are that's not us and what you want to do is that when you accidentally get to a place where you have that pain then you have to go to the audit so it's audit transfer fill so audit stands for looking at my calendar twoe window and literally printing it off if you're diligent in putting stuff in your calch a lot easier but if you're not that's cool and you just highlight and red things that take your energy and dollar sign one to four $1 sign is very inexpensive $4 doll sign saying paying somebody to do what you do and then you take all the Reds and all the $1 sign stuff and you put them in a bucket and that is the only person you should hire next and if you don't you're literally making it hard on yourself so I always when people see me scale companies fast they go how did you do that well I just I follow that principle now as you get bigger all of a sudden you're Outsourcing more complex skills but that is actually the that's the skill to learn how do you hire a creative director how do you hire general manager how do you hire VP of sales like these are you know it's easy to hire an administrative assistant and even some people have a hard time with that one but like learning how to build the machine that runs a machine is what I call it and that is where you know some people say work on the business versus in the business I always use my calendar because I want to I want to literally audit then transfer so the way I transfer is video cameras I literally record myself doing the thing so for example I do trons I have a lot I got one of these fancy bikes I got two bikes my road bike and my TT bike and they have like computer chips and all this stuff and C like all the Garmin devices and it's actually like a pain in the butt to M the maintenance of it so I had my assistant did a video of me doing it here's how I do the chain here's how I plug the machines in it has to be done this cycle and I just recorded myself for like 12 minutes and then messag them that video they created the so for the bike maintenance they followed the bike maintenance and then if there was any tweaks I put it in the document but it's got a training video and it's got a document so I call that the camcorder method that's the transfer side so how do I take something in my calendar I don't want to do no no longer transfer it and then fill this is a part most people get wrong most people hire folks before they know what they're going to do with that new time so then they feel lazy then they feel guilty so they hire an assistant and all of a sudden they have 10 hours back and they just they watch Netflix they chill out they go to a friend so that's not what I'm I want to help people build Empires like the subtitle of my book is build your Empire and for me an Empire is a life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from like I really want to encourage every Creator in the world every entrepreneur every artist get to a place where as you think to create you have the resources to create and the constraint is a byproduct of your creativity and the fill part is asking yourself well who do I need to become so if I'm 100K a year and I want to make half a million well what are the skills you got to acquire what are the character traits you have to acquire what are the what what how do I look at the world dude most of it's beliefs right it's the money belief for me I had to like work in the early days of like valuing my time my selfworth was almost zero when I started off the reason why I worked 100 hour a week is because I didn't value me but you want to prove to yourself that you're not a piece of [ __ ] all of it I'm not enough the subtext that you've been taught from every workingclass person ever is your value you add to the world is not your output it is how hard you work and if I was that's the fundamental problem with leverage you don't understand that you can multiply inputs over outcomes yep it's not about effort because if it was if it was hard if it was about working hard I would have made a lot of money when I was putting roofs on houses yeah Mark grov says uh there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little that's delate it's beautiful yeah so that was like that was the beliefs the the the traits I had to develop and that's the fill part and if you don't do that you don't actually complete the loop so some people are really good at auditing their calendar hiring people transferring the stuff to them but then they don't know what they need to do so they don't evolve they don't become better and they literally oscillate so what what do they do what do the people who fail at F do uh they do a lot of stuff some of them take time off because they've been burning the candle at both ends some of them um have vices that they don't even realize are taking them away from becoming better uh I call them the five time assassins they um you know they get working in the business again they just kind of move around it's like a like that bit's being filled so I'm going to obsess over website design or something else yeah yeah they launch a new project they self sabotage hand grenades it's like why yeah why do you need a new website you just did it 16 months ago it's like I don't know it's could be better it's like yeah it could be but is that the right problem to solve so they get that's why I say distractions has been the biggest destroyer of wealth because they just they because the the fallacy is they think they're actually being productive because they're working that's why the whole like when people say hustle I know what they mean I just don't agree with them because their version of hustle is working a lot my version of hustle is doing things that scare me so if you're hustling it means you're inherently doing something ideally for the first time a little anxiety right I think you should choose goals to grow you like I when I look at Opportunity one of the big filters for which direction I go is will this teach me some new skill s will this push me outside my comfort zone whereas most people their hustle list is literally stuff they know how to do and there's nothing hard about it it's just a lot of time we'll get back to talking to Dan in one minute 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heading to Nom matic.com modern wisdom that's Nom matic.com modern wisdom it's interesting you made a passing comment just before about how your the only constraint to what you put out into the world is your own supply of creativity essentially that's so antithetical I think to how most people experience life that they have all of these things and ideas and sure probably 80 95% of them are [ __ ] and not going to work but they don't even have the opportunity to stress test whether they are [ __ ] or not because they haven't got the ability to deploy it and a lot of this may be I I I think I would have found this conversation quite triggering 10 years ago I think that this would have activated inside of me a very Puritan uh workingclass mindset I would have really felt like oh this is sort of luxurious chattering class Bourgeois it must be nice I I would have felt I think some of that come up I would have also felt no these guys don't understand I work harder than them um and that's not true I definitely work harder than I did 10 years ago but also I don't think that that's why people are here we're not here to work as hard as possible on tasks that we've done a thousand times before uh that that doesn't sound fun or cool and I think it is a a fallacy to believe that you can't make running a difficult complex business fun uh I'm yet to prove it to myself that it's true but I know enough people that have made it work but yeah just to think that you know you have all of these uh ideas these dreams these goals the sort of creativity deployment and you don't have the resources to be able to channel that down you're just throwing away stuff that presumably would fire you up that would be really interesting to do uh great opportunity either for revenue or for life or just for memory dividend in Bill Perkins language so you can look back and think you remember when we did that you know it made a little bit of money or maybe even sort of netted a little bit of a loss but God it was cool it felt so good to do that and if you don't free up that additional capacity to take ideas into reality yeah you're on the hamster wheel yeah you're just throwing them away and someone else will do them I love I love what you said Bill's book is one of my favorite it's like a companion book to my book I want to teach people how to go be rich so they can then die with zero um but I would have you know it's fine I would have had the same response 15 years ago how what would your advice be to the that person the me or you you 15 years ago who you know they have that sort of antibody immune reaction to this this odd guilt coming from somewhere you're not good enough I would literally tell me Dan you can have it all you're not good enough comma yet what do you mean by that dig into that I'd have to tell myself I i' have to jolt myself out of it because I would be in the delusion that the harder I work the better my life's going to be the goals are going to happen and and unfortunately I would just I would be and I know what I was telling myself I was selling this this pipe dream that that someday like I used I was engaged to a woman and I worked my butt off to create a future for us that she never asked for and she laughed and because of your absence 100% I was so selfish told myself a story what was it actually for if it wasn't for her the not enoughness to prove to yourself yeah validation earlier yeah me I mean that's again that's just the dark energy we most young men start with that we're trying to prove ourselves to our parents or dads or whoever and you know recently I was on a hike with one of my friends and you know he I think he was doing like 3 million in Revenue he wanted to get to 10 and he's like you know he has young family and he's like I'd love to do it I know how I could do it I want to do it I just I I think to myself well if I go on the journey to try to get to 10 to then have the freedom to spend time with my kids I could actually but I have the time now I don't want to give it up and I said oh no that that's not true because what do you mean I said dude I love you man but I'm going to tell you like you're just not good enough you can 100% go for 10 and have more time for your kids he's like what how and I said dude you're you see me do it every day like you're my buddy you you stay at my house you see my friends like this is you're you're watching me operate just look at the difference between how you are literally addicted to your phone you you have to be involved in everything you can't there's no strategy everything's from the hip it's like daily like I I literally sit there and again I'm a lighthouse not a tugbo I will sit back and let him do that he's still one of my best friends but don't tell me you want to do something and then you can't because of this thing when the truth and if you admit like I'm just not good enough then cool then hopefully you decide how do I get better what good enough you just don't have the skill yet to do that so you say well I don't want to do if I have to go to 10 I'm going to give up my time no you don't you just suck what does suck mean and what is Su means you don't understand leverage you don't understand how to let go you don't understand how to create a system what are the component parts of that that's this it is the uh audit transfer fill you don't know how to look at your time you don't wor you don't value it I mean even the idea one of the things I like to share with people is the concept that people don't buy your presence they buy your standard like if you build a business that delivers value the person is buying the problem to the or the solution to the problem and if you built the machine that solves that problem they don't care if you're there they want the problem solved at the highest level so for example the guy that was the the owner of the bike store I used to bring my bikes to used to bring my bikes to man I probably spent 50 Grand on freaking bikes that I pushed around my they weren't even ebikes these are these stupid like carbon thing mag Jigs and all I wanted was the thing to be done when you said it would be done yep or to show up when you said I would show up or what like and instead he had this belief that if I'm the guy that meets Chris at the front door and hey Chris how's the family da da du that that was that was business so I just wanted him to run the company I think that I learned a particularly bad lesson in this uh from running nightclubs and this is I guess where changing standards internally within a company changing expectations with partners and stuff like like that very difficult when it's with partners and outside um stakeholders or or whatever uh because you don't get to control their interpretation but for instance I've stood on the front door of about a thousand club nights in my career uh that's from 9 to 11 is until 2: to 3: in the morning and then you cat the till but the reason that we stood there the reason that we couldn't just Outsource this to the boys was 50% that we needed to be able to see what was going on to kind of keep a that's the money maker right that really is our skill set our skill set is building designing Brands putting a team together and then just making sure that the operation on an evening goes well because it's experiential um but it it wasn't an unbelievable sort of skill we could have got someone else in they could have had some sort of sop for writing a report the real reason that we stood in the front door is that if it's November and it's pissing rain in Newcastle and the manager of the venue stood there you stand next to him he's miserable so you're miserable too and you [ __ ] stand there and you stand there until 2: in the morning and then you go upstairs and you cash the tail with him and it was this sort of very obvious symbol of I am invested in this event I am working hard and that I guess reinforced to me that there is kind of this like peacocking Pride some people call it pride I I think it was it's it's kind of like a very costly signal of commitment yeah that's what you were doing you were saying hey I I almost know that this is [ __ ] pointless but this is how how much I care and we could see we would know uh from other events other uh companies around town if one of the guys one of the owners like us stopped showing up on the front door and consistently did that for maybe sort of two or three months we go that's that event going to fall off a cliff because the manager's relationship with the uh events company owner is so important all of the [ __ ] contracts were made of toilet paper in any case so someone could slip stream in and say oh it's been little while since uh Jerome's been stud on the front door you a little bit worried do you think he's really committed oh well we have had numbers down a little bit over the last couple of months so you were there as this sort of weird buffer that was built into stuff and that resulted in me spending you know 10 between 5,000 10,000 hours of my life stood on the front door of nightclubs throughout my 20s it's one of those things where you you know I always go back to is there a business like mine where somebody owns it and they don't operate it that's I always go to First principles like doesn't matter what kind of company I'm in is there a business like mine in the world where there's an owner who doesn't operate in the business I it's very rare that I say that I hear no like there is one right doesn't matter if it's like people say you can't make money in restaurants there [ __ ] tons to do they just do so so then then the then the question should go to how do they do things different ly so even the idea of having somebody step in on your behalf so in my camcorder method one of the philosophies is what is the what are the five criterias that you've taught somebody to look for that after they're done the thing that you could prompt other people to give feedback on as a sensor on how well it did so I have sensors set up in my companies that report up so that there's thresholds just like you would do for a production line where it's like red green yellow and unless it goes to yellow red I don't need to know about it right so you could ask yourself for example in your situation what would some of those numbers be would it be attendance over time would it be some level text message hey how is the night you know feedback one out of five complaints customer complaints exactly so so then because this is the part that broke my heart the first time I realized it you may have somebody on your team that are going to get better numbers than you and I'll tell you man just even recently I have a company I'm involved in that that coaches software CEOs biggest in the world and I hired a CEO to run it it was actually in Austin in February I came here and I I transitioned I guess from the guy to the talent or whatever and he he asked me not to come to 98% of everything and just do a 45 minute Q&A and I went I did my Q&A and then they did The NPS score at the end of the event net promoter score which is like a customer satisf action score and it was the highest we'd ever gotten that one hurt cuz I mean essentially the the business in manyu was an extension of who I am I was part proud but I'm not going to lie man it it really hurt I was like and then it made me question where else in my business life am I bottlenecking the team how can people who say okay Dan I I I trust that you're not lying to me I believe that I can overcome my Puritan work ethic from my workingclass background but I've got this existential connection to being the guy I have this sort of need to feel needed and and and to contribute and stuff like that how can people learn to relinquish some of that uh existential guilt it's beautiful because I actually want them to lean into it so I love that people have that that's like if you didn't you're you're going to fail in business so let's just start that so like they they've got the right desire it's just their approach is wrong so like most people are like that they hire people and they want to see the person succeed so they jump in and help them out well you just hired somebody and then did the job for them so you didn't actually buy back any time so how about instead for example one of my philosophies is we train we don't tell so if I see something that somebody's doing wrong if I Outsource something or if I give somebody else accountability for something I just say hey I used to do this I no longer do it you now own it there's clear ownership anytime I see a defect in their work it didn't get done the way I would have loved to or I would have done it you write it down and you train them why would you do it that way well that way I record the training so then the next person if somebody else doesn't work out they get that training so most CEOs this is fascinating to me and I got to get the stats around this most people spend more time training customers than they ever do training their own internal team and I mean like training like sitting down and saying like here's a great example I was coaching a CEO and he was pissed off at his team most cosos are and I said can you make a list of everything that frustrates you about your team right now he's like yeah easy I said cool let's write them down and they topby had like they don't ideate with me in meetings they're quiet uh they don't care as much as me I was like well try to be a little bit more specific so like it was a bunch of stuff from like oh they forget steps da d d d da all right cool so you got a list there's like 13 things I said cool rank order it based on the thing that would make you the most money in your business so for like whatever the value metric is like what rank order like if this was solved this would make me the most money and impacts the most people on your team so like they don't know how to do email that was probably everybody in your company that would be and I'm not sure that would make you the most money but let's say it's customer service or something then I want you to ask yourself where in your company have you trained your people to do that and he goes ah I get it said dude leadership is building leaders you build the people the people build the business buddy like this is again when I say to my friend you're not good enough that's what I mean as a leader I love the have the desire to like you know roll up your sleeves late nights do the work awesome but also before you do that ask yourself is this building the machine that runs the machine because like for example I had a revenue leader and his job was to hire somebody to replace him and it was like delayed delayed delayed and I asked him why I said well I'm too busy coaching the team I said how many hours you spend coaching your sales team he's like oh probably 15 hours last week I said said well this is the thing man every hour you do that and not the thing you're actually not building the machine so so you're working against our goals your goals your desires cuz you want to roll up into a revenue officer like and he's like oh I go and it's so subtle because like that he of course he felt like he was doing the right thing but he wasn't because he didn't understand the problem to solve was I need to hire a leader to build a machine to make those people's coaching his problem so I can move up and take care of the bigger picture so I love the desire I just think the execution of the response is flawed yeah and it's it's so difficult to let go of because that hard work mentality is what got you there bore fruits in the past 100% you're letting go of a strategy that is proven to work to try and do a new strategy with a new person that is not proven to work and it's just existential pain over and over and over I'm terrified that this is going to go wrong terrified that it's going to mess up it's not going to be as good as me they don't care as much as me they haven't got the same they could they could cost me my business that these are real things and I get where it comes from the fear of like they could embarrass me they could cost me money they could cost me the whole thing I get that I had a guy one time he was working on site with a client we were deploying some software Friday afternoon he made friends with another guy in the office and him and that person had some Choice words to describe the manager and what they were planning on doing on the weekend and involved some white stuff gets picked up by the firewall sent to the CTO kicked back to the manager they read the chat logs I get a call they're not only are they not moving forward they're going to sue me because not moving forward cost delays in their business blah blah blah blah I think I was like 12 employees I was just like I can't believe my whole company's goingon to go down because of one freaking dude so luckily I got some good advice for Mentor he this is crazy I'm in Canada this customer is in New Jersey he says Sunday he goes if if you want to show the the customer the client that you're serious you get on a plane you you be there before they show up I was so nervous I'm 25 26 suit and tie get on the plane and luckily they still kicked us off didn't buy the software but they decided not to sue us but that but again that was the pain that made me go okay they buy my standards not my presents how do I instill a standard how did what did I do on the intern chat log yeah like but I hired the guy and I knew he was a little wild but he was really technically brilliant but I also know the first time I ever met him he like I looked at him I go that guy's a guy that likes to party like the reason he loved doing what he did is cuz he like traveling getting paid to do it and every weekend was like uh how can I replicate Vegas kind of situation so again I I think that's the the big idea you know my my buddy in regards to the the the conflict you know my friend Sam said he goes um what did he say the other was so good he goes if you're not contradicting yourself you're not growing fast enough what got you here won't get you there so you have beliefs that you had when you started that you have to redesign because they're just not going to support the future that's an interesting point you it's an interesting pivot on if you're not embarrassed by the previous version of yourself then you're not growing quickly enough yeah but if you're not contradicting yourself is another interesting one and it gets to something I've been thinking about a good bit recently Sam ens who uh used to I've known Sam for yeah he did some software stuff back in the and he's crushing it with school now seems like I mean I think he interviewed 400 people for that CTO role um anyway I was away with him last year and I asked him why did you stop making for the people that don't know Sam used to kind of be a he was like the OG online info guy he taught all the early guys correct yeah he he's like a real sort of God up there you know sort of the Russell Brunson of the world but more more front-facing less Mormon and he I asked him why did you stop making content he said I'd begun to feel like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public and that's what's interesting about the contradicting yourself that a lot of the time we plan to stake in the ground I've done that I've done that before with the boys I've said you know the guys that used to work for us uh the managers I'm like hey look be on time I was on time I'm freezing my tits off stud in the front door so you freeze your tits off stud in the front door but if I'm going to be evve through this I need to go back and go you know when I said that I stand on the front door guess what I don't stand on the front door anymore but you still have to so there is this uh yeah you you sort of create these odd standards for yourself when and another thing as well is at the beginning of your business just you know rolling up your sleeves spitting sawdust is the way to go because there's no one else to do it and you don't have enough [ __ ] spare Capital SS of the axe just go yeah yeah so it is it is the right way okay I I really like this sort of uh framework and I think it's important for us to get people across the line with this uh philosophically first before getting into the tactic the mindset and Bel first and then they'll do the thing I think so so hopefully we've managed to erode some of the uh blockages that people may have had I really want to get like just super duper duper tactical just before we even get to that the pain line that you mentioned there what are the warning indicators that you have crossed the pain line threshold I mean it's everything from um being on your phone the whole time you're on vacation um having your partner in life you know upset at you all the time for being delayed I mean I did it all I mean so I I'm just kind of like what else did I do uh it's you know even even like I think 10 years ago I decided to take on a new project and I didn't talk to my wife and I all of a sudden I was doing calls at 8:00 to and we had kids and she's like what are you doing like you you've you hadn't done this in years oh I started a new thing and I never talked to her about it and and and like so like over the years I've just like oh that's that's a symptom um not having space to think not having space for yourself I think a lot of people again they don't there's no self worth so they'll start sacrificing the workouts sacrificing the routine sacrificing the the the the resets the recharges oh this is Noble yeah this is what build they're they're dying on the sword and it's like no you you just suck like it's actually not the way to do it you're just you just don't know how because I can show you I can I wrote about it I can introduce you to people and Richard Branson is a big inspiration for me watching this guy like literally just live life and also run billion dollar companies so it's possible you just need to learn the skill set um but the symptoms are just overwhelm but and physically dude I I work with a lot of people I talk about in my book one of my client Stewart he had like um got shingles like even physical responsive you ever gotten shingles no what is it shingles I got them once I had this this this spot on my back it was like red and kind of patchy and it hurt when I touched it and I went to my doctor Aaron and said uh I got this thing and he showed it to me he goes oh he goes what's he goes you stressed out I said no man things are awesome you know he goes what's what's going on in your life I said well just closed a new round for my company so it Clos about million and a half bucks uh oh we're having a baby my wife's pregnant just found out and oh we decided to move back to Canada and he goes SEC he leaves he goes gets this this this pill box or whatever and then he goes and he pulls up Google and he types he goes this is what it was about to look like shingles it's aach your nervous system and it literally is your body's response to stress so there's physical uh adrenal fatigue some people have that if you've never felt that it's literally like you're drunk all the time or hung over sory you're hung over all the time but you can't it's like you don't know why um anxiety attacks that's a big one that a lot of the women typically have I mean so there's as much as like I used to be the guy that was like positive mental attitude mindset put like can deal in hard oh man I give it to me yeah not like I'd I literally would say to myself I'd rather die I'd ra like give it I'm not going to stop I'd rather die so so either the world gets easier I'm going to just die and that's at least I figured out where my my edges are um so I just think if anybody feels that that's the pain line where and really it's just asking yourself if you you know tripled your business over the next three months what would break cuz most people they couldn't even absorb opportunity because of the way they built it so saying no to things that should be yeses because there's just no spy capacity for you or the team or whatever yeah that email from a friend that wants to make an intro to the guy that could probably add a zero to your revenue and you it's you don't even know you're doing this you just slow you put you start un you know what I mean then one day after the gym on a Saturday afternoon you're sitting down to do your emails you're feeling good about yourself and you reply two weeks later and the person's like yeah we already went a different direction it's so subtle that most people would even know they're doing it we'll get back to talking to Dan in one minute but first I need to tell you about the way that I've started my day every single morning for the last 3 years and that is with element in a 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drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom okay so what are the principles here someone has realized that they've crossed the pain line they're in that threshold they're saying no to things that they should be saying yes to they don't have time to think maybe they're feeling more stressed and let's get let's get tactical like I just love it I I can go to the extreme so the extreme where I live is I don't do anything that I don't love to do uh that requires my unique skill set or spend time with people I love that's like I when I say I don't do anything I'm talking about I don't put gas in my car I don't pack my bags when I travel I don't like it's obno people if you want to talk about luxury Vibes and beliefs I I'll I'll piss you off you and Bill Perkins would compete with each other yeah no that's why I love Bill's stuff we've messaged each other on Instagram and I I've reached out to him to do something and he's like I'd love to do it but reach out to me closer to the date because I don't schedule because I wrote know where he's going to be he literally said I wrote a book about it so [ __ ] Dan Ban's the same man try I try and schedule that guy in and he's like when when is it and I'm like three weeks and he goes I don't know what I'm doing in three weeks I'm like bro it's three weeks away yeah it's API I call him API it's the software it's an API it's the interface so so what you see with these people is they they say here's my interface and Connect into it but I don't change my process the external world so that's on the extreme on the the entry level is simple stuff like you know not running so many errands like it sounds subtle but like using apps to to to bring stuff to you um like a Postmates and new everything yeah like just understand what your value of your time is Foods through Amazon Prime yeah and it requires a little bit of planning uh I would say you know meal prep could be one if you spend a lot of time on meal prep and you want to have your Fitness on uh cleaning that's a big one right I mean at one time literally so I had a co-founder in one of my companies Ethan and we had just gone through a major like setback and I C him up and I'm like it's Saturday morning we got to get to the office whiteboard the solution like Ste or die and he's like I'll be there around three I got to do laundry as politely as I possibly could I was like you cross in front of six wash and folds on your way to the office and you make 80 grand a year stop like I'm going to shut up now before I say something I can't take back and he's like heard I was like good like but I mean again that's those are kind of the silly things that people they do right you don't think about it and there is this this sort of degree of nobility again something else that will be sort of triggering people in the comments like house you know full of yourself would you need to be to get someone to come and be a chef for you or to do your laundry or to do the gardening or to clean the house like who who am I put gas in your car you're an [ __ ] I'm okay that's cool I understand and it it it really has the you know me 10 years ago 15 years ago sort of curls in disgust at the fact that I don't do those things anymore but on the flip side I know that it's the right call and you know when I was in back in the UK the first person that I got when I moved into a house was a cleaner and she was uh 440 every 2 weeks uh but it meant that I haven't picked up a Hoover in I think eight eight or nine years I haven't hoovered anything maybe I've dropped some glass on the floor uh but um I haven't hoovered anything or eight in eight or nine years I'm like that was 40 every two weeks is not nothing you know 80 PS a month to me back then was like a [ __ ] 80 pounds a month it's like you know like a grand a year that I'm going to spend on this thing but I never had to clean and it was so so revelatory to me and I think that you know this is what I like about the principle it's the same thing with with bills same thing with yours that it works whether you're going to go to the complete sort of disgust mode that you're in or whether you're just sort of the the white belt mentality which is try anything try it's literally it's a gateway drug so talk to me let's say that there is someone who is taking the absolute First Step what would be the first places that you would suggest professionally personally that someone should have a little look at I go into their calendar I literally go into the calendar and I say tell me about your week what what do you do you do where do you go and what are the most common culprits it's everything from like why do you go to that gym that's 30 minutes away well because it's cheaper like it it's really like that level I'm like I'm challenging some weird things that you didn't even consider because I'm just trying to I'm trying to give you back time right so it's everything from travel time it's kind of like I'm a I'm a Six Sigma Lean Like I back in the day I studied Manufacturing cuz I'm a software guy and I wanted to like Toyota production system I don't know why just spoke to me and I just love how like they would have people walk around with pedometers to measure steps and they'd be like why does Bobby walk twice as far as everybody on average during the day well it's because he has a product that's only stored in this room can we bring it closer to Bobby as an example so I think that's the philosophy that people need to look to and also understand what their time's worth because to your point when you say 1,000 pounds a year for somebody that's going to help you out and clean up then you also have to go okay well I'm going to get that time back what am I going to do with it and that's the fill part and that's where I think a lot of people fail because they don't plan ahead of time to say okay if I'm if I'm if I'm willing to go on the journey Dan you say my time is worth something so let's pretend it's worth 100 bucks an hour okay then all right I'm going to pay somebody else $12 an hour to help me out and I get an extra five hours back a week what do I do with that time and that's that's where people I think don't think enough about strategy in their own life to say if I'm here and I want to go there I'm not good enough yet what do I need to do to become the person who creates more value per hour unit of time and that's that's the big thing that's you know so I'm I'm always looking at skill acquisition I'm looking and I also realize at my level the number one thing I could be is the person who has the The Knowing of who can solve the problem so like when we were talking about CBG Brands like you can give me a problem and I actually know the person I've never solved it I don't know how to solve it but I know that guy know so even just saying to yourself what makes somebody valuable like sometimes it's not a skill it's actually just knowing how to solve a problem even if you don't know how to solve it yourself but know where to point somebody and that could be something you can invest in right let's say that we're talking professionally yeah uh where should people focus their hiring plan first typically I I have a framework called the replacement ladder and I design actually Heros I know you've had him on here some of the best content he's ever done is with you so thank you the world thank you guys is you know we talked about it like if we were starting you know and I love what I love about Alex is his background with gym owners they're very you know entry like you know what I mean they're not I'm a software guy so like sometimes they come out of Harvard Stanford he's working with J so it's like what would the order be if we had first principles sequins the one that I think we might have gotten to where we differed is sales and marketing and sequence but we both agreed administrative task right off the bat so anything that's lowlevel running errands paperwork receivables accounting um email calendaring scheduling uh coordinating uh research like just there's there's a lot of stuff it doesn't mean you're not involved it's it's a 10810 it's 10% upfront setting the thing 80% they can go do the thing and the last 10% is where you come in with the information they've gotten to then finish the thing right so so it's not like 100% give it to somebody else but it's it's starting to figure out in your workflows what parts don't require a lot of creative pattern matching thinking that you can give somebody else to do so administrative work usually inbox en calter that's level one and that is a Administrative Assistant personal assistant most people start with a virtual assistant overseas at first 10 hours a week like if we're talking like day one 100% there and I always joke like I would sell everything I own to not lose my assistant and she she is she's a clone to me she's 100% can go to meetings on my behalf like I mean when you get to the level where you have a partner in your life who can decide like she if I was doing anything she can pick stuff for she knows my preferences that's invaluable so where would you go for the 10 hours per week virtual assistant uh there's a thousand versions of it in the Philippines and whatever and it it's actually not necessarily who has the because like really nobody's got to lock on Talent right so really it's you're learning the skill of working with that person and that's why I like going 10 hours $5 an hour just practice most people again 4our Work Week taught me there are certain things I just need to not do and once I set up a system and gave it to somebody and they did it I never had to do it ever again for the rest of my life but that's a skill I had to learn so I like the low stakes you know it's like a tight roope it's like slack lining in the park like you're not going to fall to your big fault yeah I think that's it's a nice way to start obviously Athena is is real yeah Athena is great hot [ __ ] problem with that is that you have to commit to having somebody who's essentially full-time and it's three grand and there are higher price points three grand a month now you get this unbelievable system behind them and they're trained up and all the rest of it but that's it's a big three grand you could literally start with an intern like I remember like early days Lisa who was my first assistant help me with the mail I think I found her through a friend she was like a a mom she had kids she she worked in an office but didn't want to go full-time and she was cool she still to this day 20 years later does my mail it's awesome she's cool and she's changed six times but she just loves picking up my mail she knows she knows my lawyers and my accounts and she brings stuff around Okay so we've got administrative task yeah that's level one calender scheduling email I always say inboxing calendar is where the opportunity is if you really want to go full-time with somebody if you have somebody process every new email that comes to you I'm not saying they have to reply on your behalf although it's fun they at least can start to understand where their to-dos are because it's in your inbox just Downstream from that actually when it comes to email what's the process from there you know you are this complex decision engine no one fully knows whether you're going to say yes or no to a particular thing what is your stepbystep inbox management triage my you're talking my love language right now I will give you the goods so here's the concept is you know in your inbox even if you get a th emails a day 5,000 like there's there's certain things that are just don't require immediate attention right so so what I like to do is you know even before you hire somebody just go start setting up some rules right so like there's in every email tool there's filters and you could set one up for just newsletters and say anything with the unsubscribe link put it in this folder set a task every Friday for 45 minutes to process and that way you go in there you scan through you read the ones you want to read like that could be a beginning start um and then what I do is I have seven folders so the big idea for me is all companies I'm involved in if I have different domains in my Gmail they all go to one spot so I have all mail goes into my primary inbox and then what I have within there is a label in Gmail or a folder and Outlook that is well that's what you're using you're using Gmail Gmail to do all this and Gmail web yeah I've tried front like front app was I went there for a bit but um because it does some cool routing task stuff but we went back uh superum I don't know if it has this feature I'm assuming it does what I love about Gmail is the delegated access so I can give access to my assistant and her assistant because she's that busy um without giving them password to my Gmail CU my Gmail is essentially everything vulnerability yeah you just there's certain things attack vectors you just don't want D yep and um so then the folders are my folder Dan exclamation mark Dan Martell and then that's where my phone goes to when I open up my email on my phone it goes to that folder okay so I never ever and this is the hardest part I remember when I first did it I just kept checking kept checking right again you teach people how to treat you so if you hire an assistant tell her to manage the Inbox and then you keep checking and replying whenever it's a week or whatever then she's gonna go well if I just wait long enough Chris or Dan's gonna reply you know so that was a hard one um and then what I do after that and these are the the the there's seven the other ones are like Finance anything you know Financial related reporting all my updates I want that in one spot it's easy to find but the big one is uh responded to respond and review okay so what happens is email comes in and this why Richard Branson showed me how to do this where essentially every morning he ran his his everybody that needed anything from him went through Helen his assistant she's still with them now I think it's 16 years she's been with them she travels with them I'm assuming still and they would just have breakfast and essentially she would only bring to him the things that she didn't know how to deal with again she's been there for that long everybody knows her she knows his preferences so 99.2% of the stuff she just moved forward and they routed right this is like the concept of routing is actually financially a very important decision like strategy you know uh what's his name the CEO the previous CEO Eric Schmidt from Google talked about they he said my job as CEO is a route email comes in go like he just needs a sent right person so the review folder is only the things that my assistant doesn't know how to deal with and then we have a daily meeting where she she listen talks to me she like Chris emailed da d da he wants to do this and I don't know should we do it this date or that date I say well in the future this is the principal what would you do see I'm teaching right so I use the review folder to actually teach my thinking behind the cuz if not then you're telling somebody you're doing that in person or video phone I tried to do it over phone cuz I'm always in commute right I don't want to have to be in front of a laptop um and honestly these so is that's coming into your assistant they're making notes they're saying in future when X then y they do a draft email and they put their notes in so they process the email they put the draft for them to read to me over the phone it's a little hack for what it's worth because there's really no note place in Gmail y so they reply and then if I ever see it in there I can actually leave my own notes and we just put our initials before be careful that you don't send that to someone by accident it's never happened but 100% have done something Sim oh yeah and then and then the cool part is is some of the control freaks in the world they were like well I need to know what's being said on my behalf so that's where the responded comes into play so everything my assistants reply on my behalf they tag responded and then if anything comes into my folder so let's say they put something in there but I wanted them to deal with it like a contract that I reviewed I I then label it to respond and that's their to-do list they start with in the morning so we built this cool little mechanism where emails can still flow there's no bottlenecks and over time they get better now the whole Philosophy for me is I believe like if you think about velocity of um opportunity see your inbox is nothing more than strangers request on your time like really that's all it is it's like anybody can guess your email they send a request and then it's just a thing that you have to do if you had an office like on Main Street Austin right 6th Street you wouldn't just allow strangers to walk into your office office and interrupt you yet that's what email essentially is so my whole philosophy is create a create somebody that stands in between they protect your time they interact and then that way if somebody needs something they just get it right away it's like if I'm speaking at an event and they want my head shot I want so so there's actually language that I've created that I think would help anybody that's like o that feels a little and I'm Canadian so like that's that's like that was really hard for me I didn't want to like it felt super douchy so the language is hey this is an Dan's assistant I got to this before he did and I fig and I assumed you wanted the fastest reply and then she replies that language is that coming from assistant atm.com no it's coming from Dan it's my email Dan yeah I don't want to get my well it's not hard to guess yeah and then it's a reply and then it says an so they know it's her so here's another trick all my everything goes through my email because in the future if I'm at if I'm at a counter and they're saying what's your confirmation number I want to search my inbox but if they're doing stuff in their email then I don't have the confirmation unless they forward it so my rule that's why you like delegate access yeah and I put everything in one spot and then um yeah I mean I I joke now that you know inbox zero is cool but even cooler zero inbox so I don't even do email anymore like no I don't I don't send emails for the most part I mean people like it's just the morning uh call that you have while you're y I don't I don't want to do email I just I just gave up on it I i' rather work with Ann she knows everybody I love uh it's a big source of pain in my life very I would love to show you like consider me an ally like whatever you need cuz again I want creators to create more and sometimes and look and I get it cuz like we both have people that like we don't want our assistant to reply because there are relationships we want to maintain all that stuff what I've done is I've just been very strategic on my text messages so like my cell is my essentially my new inbox and and but I'll also if somebody accidentally gets it that that I really don't want to be involved in I screenshot the message and Loop in my assistant in text message and again it teaches people how to treat you the problem is is that like people that respond you know it's like somebody emails you don't reply and then they message you on Facebook and you reply well you just taught them message me on Facebook next time so it's tough it requires a little discipline but I'll tell you man like the ability for me to be F here's where the money maker is while I'm here there's messages that are moving forward opportunities so when I think about the value in an annual like because really all all we're trying to do is pull Revenue forward I'm gonna say on the low end we're talking two months of Revenue in this calendar year and if you're really good at it more like four months if you just think about response times because an doesn't give a crap about my personal emotions to that email she literally is like oh I need to sign this she signs it somebody asks to be on a pod I don't sit there and ho and hum and worry about like am I good enough to be like she just replies yes we'd love to do that you know and I'm just like ah like sometimes dude Tony Robbins that invited me to speak as of then if it was me I would have stared at that email for two weeks worrying and like what do I say how do I say an's been a t she already scheduled it it's done it's like she's like oh damn i' love your and yeah it's scheduled calendars are done good okay uh in other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify every day millions of people use Shopify to power their businesses they're the driving force behind gym Shar and all birds and newtonic plus 10% of all e-commerce in the US from neighborhood shops to Global retail Giants Shopify makes Commerce better and easier for businesses of all sizes you don't want to build a business so that you can start coding websites or learning about how to build online or hosting or Inventory management or any of that and Shopify just allows you to get all of that out the way and get into the business of business which is coming up with products that are cool and communicating it to customers there's no coding or design skills that you need they make it so simple to get your shops set up and to start selling in no time plus they they've got award-winning support that can help you every step of the way right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the show note below or going to shopify.com mowis all lowercase that's shopify.com wisdom now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in really lovely and I think that it's it's good to have spent a good chunk of time on the admin thing given that that's where most people will at least begin at and maybe some people will St and and I I want to say this Chris if anybody's stuck on this cuz I think the admin want such a headyy piece they want to know like what do you I have a document 47 pages okay if anybody wants it just follow me on Instagram that's all I ask and message me EA and I will send them the Google Doc it's my internal doc I just sanitize it it's got preference section it's got travel stuff it's got my five Northstar principles like I think once you see it like once I remember one time I I paid a guy to buy the subway sop the Subway food the sandwich place the standard operating procedure cuz I mean like I want to know I wanted to see the I'm a I'm like what's a McDonald's one look like like wouldn't you be fascinated to know what does a McDonald's franchise what do they get this huge big operation and but it's beautiful because once you see it it's like oh because if you've never created an sop you may even know how to word it how to categorize it I mean for example the subway one I remember they had a diagram of where the store needed to be and it was a right turn Corner near and then I think it was uh within two miles from a university so they had all these details that this is the optimal location M and I would have never even thought of putting a d i mean I'm like I'm writing words they're like no put diagrams like oh yeah that makes sense pictures so so I I if anybody wants that I'll send it to them but Instagram that's pretty cool okay uh level two the level two is delivery so doing the thing just like you were outside freezing your you know it's once you have somebody helping with the administrative task which is like back office then start looking at where in the workflow somebody else can help help you with delivering the thing that you deliver it doesn't mean you don't do it if you if you paint houses like paint the house but maybe there's an account manager maybe you have enough work where you need to start hiring somebody to help you with coordination and other stuff so it kind of usually the admin person can play that part a little bit until it requires somebody it's a little bit more knowledgeable in the you know the domain and I always say for that one it's it's onboarding and support that's what so if you have any aspect of what you do like this pod like having somebody help once you approve the guess schedule Cor d d d so onboarding and support answering questions somebody else takes over that so it's delivery third is marketing and and really the big idea is build a marketing system most people do marketing they don't have a marketing system so a marketing system is somebody else that wakes up every day and looks at traffic and campaigns that's the way I look at it like I mean how many times have I changed something and broken a landing page or broken you know change of color on some CSS file and then the button is the same color as the background and nobody knows how to check I mean it's just stuff like that so having somebody that wakes up every day that moves traffic into your business opportunities leads build that system right when I say like what do you do with your new found time learn marketing read the books build an sop what books uh for that one for marketing I'm gonna go onepage marketing plan by Alan dibs it's an awesome book yellow book so good I'm gonna say uh marketing Seth Goden I mean yeah if you want more tactical honestly Gary ve latest book was super tactical um so yeah I would say like depending on your industry what you're trying to do paid ads versus organic versus you know socials uh just thinking you know as we go from level one where somebody's kind of a bit of an unlock they require maybe quite a lot of training uh but they should over time just accumulate stuff by watching you do it and then you get maybe to level two where you're starting to have sort of some key anciliary uh business operations being assisted with and then you get to three but I imagine that at this stage we're actually going to start to feel the pain of coordination because we now have more people that report to us and that in itself can create dis economies and that can be a source of stress I [ __ ] hell Dan you told me that I was doing this to make my life easier and now I've got all of these people that report to me and now I feel like a prick because I I I I hate the people that report to me because they're now a drawer on my time how can people alleviate the pain of this coordination problem yeah yeah I mean unfortunately these are the skills of the entrepreneurial Journey so like what what you're and it's funny CU my next book's probably going to be on this concept of talent because I think most people don't know how to identify acquire and develop talent but the whole philosophy is there's really five hires if you do it you have freedom in your business right so most people will never most it's it's interesting because I talked to an account once and he showed me the data and most businesses never crack about 3 to 500k the reason why that individual never learns how to delegate like they're literally control freaks to the point where they really everything they have to be involved they could be a surgeon they could be an accountant they could you know but they could never have a team or have anybody else the next level what you're talking about is just like having anybody on the team you know if you don't do it right you don't allow them to do the work you hire them and then do their job for them then you end up you know what I call transactional leadership where you tell them what to do you check they got done and then they then you tell them what to do next the problem with that is that about 12 employees you'll wake up with projects you want to get done and all this stuff and you won't even get to them till about 600 p.m. at night that's what happens it's usually for most companies the number is about 1.4 million a dozen employees and that's the pain line so there is a different way which is understanding how to communicate rhythms right so I always like I was on a podcast recently the guy said well why do you hate meetings I said meetings are great if they have a purpose they're not good if they're they're got a second meetings last minute meetings it means we didn't do the Strategic work up front if we don't give a quarter like 90 days of effort to execute admin delivery like you built a thing let's just try it out for a while then you're always you're reactive and it becomes really hard for people on your team to even I mean I used to be the guy where they'd ask me what book I'm reading because they want to get ahead of the Whiplash like literally I remember a guy saying hey man what book are you reading I was like why he goes because we want to get ready for like what you decide you want to do next with the business I was like am I that bad he's like 100% like yeah so so that to me is um it just there's the whole strategies on how do you run a company that most people don't want to do right around strategic planning reporting scorecards just before we go on level four um what about the sort of internals for a business uh the use of slack rules around that async communication stuff like that can you dig into the yeah I just I just literally did leadership training on slack which I think could be one of my best pieces of training I've ever done was is that available it was internal I'll put on the internet just message me on Instagram if people want it uh I'll tell Sam to consider putting it out he's so he doesn't think my stuff as cool as I think it is but um because the thing is slack can just become another inbox and it is for most companies what I love about slack and the problem that it solves is it creates an organizational knowledge and I think that's what makes it more powerful than email and what I teach people in regards to slack is the difference between one to one cuz like even if you start if you're using slack and you're direct messaging me for stuff that should have been put in a channel then that also takes away from the potential it could have had which is the power to create search and Discovery like the reason why I remember Gary ve said this once he said my competitive Advantage is continuity and most people would never understand that if they didn't understand how to operate and lead people but having somebody on your team for seven years is incredibly valuable in regards to the understanding of why decisions were made why we went this direction where things yeah context so Slack's value prop is organizational knowledge but you don't get that if you don't use it or you don't get that if you don't structure it right you don't get that if you don't integrate it right so that's what I was teaching everybody is like there's certain re like there's one-on-one in person and virtual so like even sometimes in the office I'll tell people that meeting should be a zoom meeting they're like but we're all here I know but you're not allowing yourself like sharing like on your like when you're on a zoom meeting or even on your phone on a zoom call it's easy to share when you're in a room and you're like talking about the diagram of the thing it's like I gota get my laptop I got to pull up you just don't do it and you lose the richness of the potential communication so to me I think um slack is a beautiful tool and understanding oneone one to many digital or in person like you don't fire somebody over slack but I have to tell people this right you don't criticize publicly in a channel right praise in public criticize in private all these kind of things but so that would be level three is the Marketing Systems level four is sales and I call it the freedom stage and the reason why it's a freedom stage is at that level if you can actually trust somebody else to take an opportunity to have the conversation to bring them into your world okay what I really I look at the sales call and the followup then for most small business owners they have a thing they've been dreaming of which is a business make some money while they sleep because you have somebody that's waking up every day getting you an opportunity traffic somebody talking to that person somebody onboarding them into your world it still requires you to come back to do the thing potentially paint the house create the logo but while you're on vacation the machine runs and we're talking four hires so see the difference where people make the buyback principle is like we don't hire people to grow our business we hire people to buy back our time if you do it right you'll actually will grow your business because you adding people just to design more logos but when you didn't solve the right problem in the right order means there's not enough customers to keep somebody busy like how many entrepreneurs hire somebody because they're busy and then have to fire them because they're not because they didn't build a marketing system so that's that was like the mental model I was trying to to solve for and then the highest level is leadership and this is where for me you know some people that are further along because that's what's cool about the principle it works when you're starting off and if you're a nine figure CEO most people when you start off you start you build from the bottom up right you wear the 17 hats you take a couple off you hire the first intern you give it to them or your admin but as you actually become successful and you have resources you make profit if you're starting something new you should be starting top down so like when I start new companies I'm hiring the person to run the company as the first hire I'm not hiring an engineer now if that engineer is going to also run the company cool but to me I want to start top down and then that way everything I work through that person so I started my new Media Company one of the first hires was Todd he's my general manager I remember I was sitting in the office we had just built this new built-in shelf for the set and he looks at me and he goes dude looks kind of bare I said yeah he goes well like are you guys going to get that fixed I just stared at him and he goes oh I'm gonna get that fixed and I go Todd I work for you man like I'm the talent you're the guy so anything that you see that should get better just know you own it even even understanding how to communicate ownership and letting people you know Steve Jobs called the drri direct responsible individual right like being clear these are the things that I hired you to do own them ownership looks like this these are the numbers I'm going to hold you accountable to and if there's a deficit I'm going to write it down and in our 101s I'm going to coach you up and that's the difference when I say transactional leadership versus transformational leadership transformational leadership is every time there's an issue I don't address the thing I talk about the principle that that was violated I teach or train or coach against the principal so that I'm developing my people so the bigger my team gets the less time it requires me because I'm not jumping in putting out fires all the time like they say all the time like you don't want to be a firefighter you want to be a fire preventer like I want to and oh by the way there's a difference between a dumpster fire and a kitchen fire and that is a skill that entrepreneurs should learn the difference because if you treat everything like a kitchen fire cuz like this 100% I think Warren Buffett said this he goes 100% chance right now amongst the 2,000 200,000 employees that work for me at one of my companies somebody's doing something that would embarrass me so I I just got to be okay with that right but the cost of doing business at this scale I think and I think at 12 employees there's a cost of doing business at this scale that we just have to reevaluate and at every level there's just like what am I now willing to I know it's a fire but I'm going to let it burn we'll get back to talking to down in 1 minute but first do you sleep too hot on a nighttime does your partner shout at you because you're making them too warm while you're in bed well if so eight sleep is the solution I've been using an eight Sleep mattress for years now and I can't imagine life without it when I'm on the road I hate it I hate every bed that I sleep in that doesn't have an eight sleep on it I used to find myself waking up in the middle of the night because I was too hot because it's like hell here in Austin in the summer and temperature was almost always to blame not anymore the eight sleep pod has been a total Game Changer and they have now launched their newest generation pod the Pod 4 ultra the Pod 4 ultra can cool down each side of the bed to 20° below room temperature keeping you and your partner cool and for people who snore it can detect snoring and automatically lift your head a 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him the words so turning the recording into an sop the person that's I'm delegating to has to do it right the reason why I do that is because then I get to see did they actually understand have you interpreted this correctly yeah so that I remember my you have an sop Department that takes all I don't have the SOP Department whoever I'm giving the task to creates the SOP now I have an sop super meta on how to create anop knew it of course there's a template there's a blueprint right we build a machine that runs a machine yeah um but what's unique is like I'll tell you one that you'll love is your iPad has a control panel and you can actually put in there there's a way to record your screen and audio so for example when I'm doing you know if I'm creating a new architecture for some software and my designer sends it over to me I'll pull it up on my iPad screen record and do the audio pull out my pen and I go through it and I talk through it and what happens is I'm creating a training to train the guy that's going to run the department so like right now if I'm the product manager that's my job but what I'm doing is as I'm done recording I save it in a shared iCloud folder that notifies a person because there's a trigger on zapy or whatever it says hey there's a new video they watch it but I automatically save that to a Dropbox folder so every time I've done that I might have 13 examples but it's me talking why I don't like the the you know really the golden ratio is this this and this like whatever nerdy thing I know about the thing is being captured in audio and then when I hire the person they go through those and they create the SOP if it doesn't exist so I don't that's why I call the camcord method in in net time no extra time so Chris I just want you to do the work and and because like nobody man I see people they're like oh I love this I'm going to go and do an offsite with my team and we're going to create the company way the document that we all follow and it's like that's dumb it will be stale in 3 weeks it will not be relevant nobody will look at it it's a cultural thing so the culture is you cannot do a process unless you have the document open so that is a that's something that you have to teach you have to train people you got be like first time you see somebody that makes a mistake it's like do like I remember you know I was like hey do you have a checklist he's like yep show it to me yeah I didn't look at it cool hey we have a rule if you're doing the thing that has a checklist you look at the checklist are we on the same page yeah I apologize so again CEOs are usually the worst ones culprits of this so it's like you know sometimes you'll contradict yourself but it's at the end of the day there is no other way that is how all great companies are built every company at scale right you can you can be the the crazy genius with a thousand servants or you can build people and the people build the business and that's if you want to create something meaningful even Steve Jobs or every every person that you admire if we went and watched the way they work you would see Gary ve 10810 he has a like most team Gary sits outside his office and they're executing while he's doing his thing and you know like they're listening to it they're writing content they're editing videos he sets up the first 10% they go do 80% but he's still for the most I don't know if he's still doing it but he said and I still post myself does he post the same video on Instagram Tik Tok and YouTube shorts no he might post it on Instagram and then the team goes oh and then they'd finish it off that's the process so it's like I would assume he's spending two three million dos just for team Gary just for him to do like people don't realize his social media is a side hustle like it's not his primary thing for the most part it's like he he's an operator and he's I remember like I've known Gary since early Wine Library like 12 13 years ago and it's like that's how he he's always and the people he's had around him the continuity he's actually an I just want to say like I think Gary's one of the best operators that most people don't give enough credit for because he never talks about as much he's actually an incredible operator he's just out there as the louds New York empathy yeah you know like he literally I've also never met somebody so consistent on messaging like I get bored with my messaging fast like I don't want to talk I feel like we share that same like what are the new Concepts he's said the same thing for as long as he's had a camera in front of his face different ways different formats nfts you know so media get B of it no because he's it's like these are my core principles these are my life philosophies how do people get past the no one can do it as well as me Trump well first off My Philosophy is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome let's just try to buy into that 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome meaning that that hour you didn't have to clean your apartment or your flat that was 80% awesome could you have done it better maybe but you didn't so while they were supporting you on that part of your life you were hanging out with your friends going to the gym or working on that new project so I've just gotten to a place where my expectations are lower on regards to the so does that mean it cost me a little bit more than if I did it myself yes but I also didn't have to do it so even the mental beliefs around like when you hear people say like I don't like doing [ __ ] work like like the Lang the way they look down on certain things I go you shouldn't say that because first off there are people that play at the things you work at like Sandy on my finance team loves spreadsheets like she she' be happy all day long if she could just sit there and reconcile bank accounts like and she does so there are people that if you hire into to support you will love doing it and your your um your judgment against the type of work it is is actually stopping you from getting other people to do it right it's like people that are like I could never ask my engineer to go get lunch for everybody it's like no you can well no I got to do that I'm the leader I got to go get lunch for him okay you could or you could not instead you go work on the architecture diagram that's going to help them all and they'll probably be a lot happier with you doing that than going to get them lunch just saying they're like yeah probably that's like to me I'm always thinking about where should I be spending my time that's gon to create the most value for the team and I gota sometimes you got to talk to them and let them know because like you said if I didn't stand outside in the pouring rain what would story would they have told themselves and rightfully so if you just stopped going to work and that was the case then of course but if you said hey team I just want you to know you probably haven't seen me around lately because I've actually been working on this big opportunity it's going to help and this is the bigger idea help your dreams come true by buying this other thing or starting this other thing like leadership 101 is having a vision big enough for everybody on your team's dreams and goals of to sit inside of that's like leadership 101 if you know everybody's fiveyear dreams and goals and you wake up every day to build a business to learn to let go to be okay with it and they know this and they believe it they'll literally give you permission to pull back because they just trust it's like Chris gets up every day to try to make this Vision I want to have my own agency someday and he's tell me if I help edit the Pod that someday you know he'll vouch for me and send clients it's like so I need him to not be doing this thing so that I can he can go do the thing to help us build the the bigger thing and I think that's like a big part of it learning to let go doing the work dude you know how much of it is all childhood stuff it's old roads lead back to Childhood trauma dude everything I actually have this thing I teach about like goals and current and you know essentially there's limiting beliefs and negative beliefs right like really everything comes down like why did you not achieve that goal I either have negative beliefs around achievement rich people are evil or I have limiting beliefs in my skill and then people go well how do I overcome that and then I go back you're looking in the wrong direction yeah I mean trauma is a book we're meant to read not just put on a shelf and it's in that space of doing that work and that's why I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate personal development program correct it's the coolest thing in the world James Clear talks about uh building a business being a personal growth vehicle masquerading as a capitalist Pursuit totally totally it's it's it's I remember when I finally occurred to me that my work was literally becoming a better version of myself every day mhm I was like well there's just so few there's so few places I guess your relationship is is one of them to of your intimate relationship is one there's so few places that you go to that push you beyond your acceptable limits you know your morning walk isn't that your Saturday afternoon pickle ball game isn't that all of these things that this is the one of the problems that I had with CrossFit back in the day even as an avid EXC crossfitter with the injuries to prove it yeah you and I both uh I never liked the get comfortable being uncomfortable thing because the discomfort in CrossFit was always done through choice so yes Fran is an ugly workout 2159 of thrusters aluminum taste thrusters and pull-ups yeah I I it was not fun but you chose to do that what would be real discomfort would be me telling you that you need to sit on the couch for a week and not train like that's actual discomfort there's so few areas that you get to where the things that you you have to or get to do are sort of forced onto you that there's real pressure coming in from the outside that's interesting so what you're saying is the frames of things you do that are hard that you get that you decided to do is a different type of hard than the things that happened to you that you didn't decide to do of course you and your triathlons or your IR man's or whatever is it [ __ ] hard but I chose let's be serious it's a hard that you chose to do yeah you know it obviously fits even the person that's £450 but but you know L of a child I literally about to say loss of a parent you know like you you've got this thing and it was a shock and [ __ ] the funeral is next week and I have to hold family together okay like that I'm not advising losing a parent as a personal growth strategy but you know that's real discomfort and I think that we get a little taste of that when there are other people that are thoroughly invested that we can't get away from you know even friendships don't necessarily push the limits in the same way because you can ah [ __ ] them [ __ ] them they're out of my life it doesn't matter this is your fiance or your husband you know that a little same level hard correct so trying to fire an invest yeah you have to hold on and with business like unless you're going to what close the business down you're not you and that's why it is a personal growth vehicle because it pulls you it is Progressive overload on a treadmill rather than Road running yeah right it is moving at a pace and you have to keep up and if you don't things will start flying off on the sides and eventually it'll spit you out the back yeah uh so yeah I think I think that's an important insight to remember which is the part when we go back especially I love you say progressive overload it's like the volume has to go up which means I now have to maintain a level of volume to make forward progress which is why people are scared to make forward progress because because that's a new bomb it's a new yeah I mean you know there's better and worse ways to to think about this for instance we we did a video uh about a year ago with Chris Bumstead talking about 10 exercises every guy needs to blah blah blah you only had 10 EXC for the rest of your life what would you do they did did a million plays in 24 hours and you have this sort of odd sense of elation and fear and wistfulness at the same time and it's silly because it's about plays but it's a nice microcosm for bigger sort of more existentially connected things uh and the other thing is that when I talk about plays on the show it's not something that we focus on tremendously but it is very well metric and dashboard so so unpack that so what you what did you find fascinating about that so the fact is million plays in 24 hours the video oh we did Tim Kennedy last week Trump how did Mike Dr mikee do compared because I saw his answer his [ __ ] his Crush but not not his answer is actually better answer I I may well look hey who who Am who am I to say that that uh Dr Mike with his Jewish forkin is better than Chris Chris bum stud laugh so hard when he he did Liz uh what his name liver King that one was so funny he's built different man Mike Mike's built different in fact Mike is the other half of the new thing that I'm launching later this so jealous any more opportunity to to do more stuff with him uh we we set a new bar uh this could be anybody that runs a business that that has a great training session that gets in there and just gravi at 70% of what it is usually you go oh my God I feel super humid the sleep was dialed the creatine was dialed the caffeine was dialed whatever you did and then you have this odd sense of illation and and fear or wistfulness at the same time with that great PR session with that new uh record-breaking video because you go oh my God yes that's a new record and immed imately after that you think oh [ __ ] that's the new bar that's now the new standard in order for me to get our best performing video ever it needs to be 1.1 million within 24 hours needs to be 1.2 million in order for me to get my next PR I need to PR a PR I only just PR today in a workout or you stressing yourself out pick your pursuit of choice and um you know there's this that Framing and you know it's a really lovely little sort of microcosm of the uh Peril of success the Peril of pushing yourself to a new level because that then becomes the bar that you measure yourself against i' I've posited an ideal I've achieved an ideal and now if I want to grow I need to beat the thing that previously was a dream now has being achievable and I need to go what you're telling me I need to go even further than that to do the to do the next thing again it's like a reverse honic adaptation where it's like goal adaptation um and yeah it's just it's it's interesting it's one of those things that um you know I sort of play with with with regards to the show and I think [ __ ] about with metric is one useful way to teach yourself this lesson but at least what I've learned is that after a while you realize that uh there are other more important metrics hiding behind those so uh George one of my friends who is a great writer uh talks about uh after you reach a certain number of followers on Twitter you realize that it's not about how many retweets you get it's about who retweets and you know he doesn't look at the number of plays or the the the number of uh exposures that something's got he checks to see if Paul grahe or Elon Musk retweeted it because that's what he's bothered about yeah he's bothered about that he's you know and what you really learn from that is that you're talking about sort of depth you're talking about resonance about sort of the quality of the work it's the the concept of um what is it qualitative versus quantitative so like if you if you Quant everything my buddy Sean say this he said if we split test everything we'll end up to porn so there needs to be art correct right taste yeah taste you know curation but that to me is you know back to I think you said a few times just like we're here to create and express ourselves and we need the data to give us a feedback loop but the real big wins like have you ever heard of the the local Maxima problem so in software it's like we talk about all the time because we could be on to something that actually has product Market fit but it's only going to have an impact to a certain size of a total addressable market and to go on the Journey of trying to make this thing you know appeal to a larger group of people we have to kind of work backwards and it's scary I mean that's the hard thing about building Innovation is sometimes and I think even Elon talked about this for his like neural net when they were building self-driving like he woke up one day and looked at it and he said we have to rebuild this whole thing and most people would not have ripped it all out to rebuild it but he just he could see we're at the local maximum there two great examples of that uh three actually one from my personal life so uh Tiger Woods gets to a good level of maturity within his game but his original swing had a lot of inefficiencies in it so he had sort of uh unnecessary movement as he was pulling back and he learned from a coach look you're really good but you're not going to be world class unless we get rid of this which meant that he needed to get worse before he could then re build things from getting better and the rebuilding was even harder because he had to deprogram the habits that he'd spent you know a decade or a couple of decades building up so that was the first one for me an equivalent in my life with this here is I worked on vocal Precision for a long time in terms of articulation in terms of my Cadence and a lot of other things but it's very difficult to think about how you're saying something while allowing the thing to come out naturally so the show got worse my my elucidation got worse you saw it yeah yeah oh yeah yeah I could feel it um and thankfully I sort of was able to carry it through and you know did you notice it or did somebody say something the audience never knows and this is the thing no that's the thing that's why I asked well this is Alex's thing about but I'll know right that's Alex's standard that he holds himself to dot dot dot but I'll know and um I understand why that's useful the problem being that there's certain times that you need to sacrifice particular areas in order to be able to move forward and I'm sure that he'd sort of accept that as a little caveat um but yeah nobody else knows this is the this is the beautiful thing about anyone that's that's concerned about uh too much scrutiny from people outside no one knows the sentence that you could have said or the paragraph that you could have written thing you forgot to say correct no one knows how beautifully you could have delivered X or Y or Zed only you know so there is a lot of responsibility on you but there is also a degree of relinquishing that you can have from this sort of concern about skepticism and scrutiny from people that are outside of yourself and that's I find that I find that quite nice so yeah it's uh it's interesting to think about sort of okay I need go back yes I need to take a few steps back and then I'm going to allow myself to move forward and uh it's it's a difficult thing to to be prepared to let let go of it requires trust in yourself yeah yeah and you know Will Smith said in his Memoir that gaining Fame was amazing having Fame was a mixed bag and losing Fame was the worst thing ever that basically on the way up it's fantastic at the top it's like and then on the way down it's brutal and if you know Tiger Woods is Tiger's falling off his game he can't hit you know his going back and so on and so forth meanwhile he knows that he's just sort of on the other side of his local Maxima heading up to a bigger false Peak on the other side uh but yeah it's uh it's an interesting challenge I think again back to entrepreneurship being this ultimate personal development program I I think just like I don't know what the quot is but it's a boat the bird doesn't land on the branch cuz it trusts the branch won't break it lands on the branch because it trusts that it can fly so like it does require people always ask you like you know how how did you know or how did you do it it's like I don't know if I can tell you because there was a point where I started to trust myself right because I'm not going to move forward if I don't trust so it's like how many times did I fail that I overcome the failure because there was a number of them what number was it that I finally said okay I'm going to trust that I know how to solve problem but the difference is that the trust thing is is kind of like my my conception around motivation that most people over complicate motivation and they presume that it's this necessary step in between not doing a thing and doing a thing where you decide that you're going to do the thing but like the only thing that's doing the thing is doing the thing there is no deciding to do the thing there is simply just doing it yeah Sam Harris and jocker willink talk about uh how there's no such thing as faking courage you know if you do something in spite of being terrified of doing it that is what courage is right that's bravery and I think that the equivalent exists with motivation that there is no such thing as faking motivation if you do the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing that was motivation and if you didn't do the thing no matter how much you wanted to do it then that wasn't motivation so we add this sort of unnecessary middle step and the trust in myself thing is a huge part that you kind of just add so do you get rid of the word motivation for me it's not something that I use very much at all you don't ever say like I just don't feel motivated no you just say I'm not going to do it no and that's not I haven't gone you know like full like Goggins meets hosi meets some lingu neural linguistic programming to get it out of me I just learned that insight about two years ago I just really think that most of motivation is [ __ ] that you you've got this it is and it might be something which is I love this idea I'm writing it writing about it at the moment it's taking forever this idea of something which is literally true but functionally useless say more so porcupines can throw their quills no they can't porcupines can't throw their quills fascinating they're not [ __ ] dark throwers but if you believe the porcupines can throw their quills you'll stay a bit further away so even though it's literally false functionally it's true oh good that's good pigs are uniquely morally dirty animals that you should never eat not true they're you know morally I think they probably hold the exact same worth yeah exactly as a ton of other animals but they do their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load especially in a lot of the countries that said that you shouldn't eat them so literally false functionally true something which is uh literally true but functionally false would be an equivalent of H well it's suppose another one would be always treat the gun like it's loaded right like never point the gun at something even if you've checked the chamber a million times you know that there's absolutely nothing in it just do not point the gun at somebody that you intend that you don't intend to kill uh but my point being that there are lots of things that you can do where it's good to believe them like what's the how do you use that in your life uh I think the the line and this is kind of a through line from what we were talking about before that mark grobes quote where he said uh there's so many people working so hard and achieving so little if you focus on inputs you don't actually know whether the outcomes are going to increase but if you focus on outcomes what is the thing that I meant to achieve you're uh egalitarian you're nonprejudiced about all of the different routes that you can take in order to get there right you don't mind about how I actually go through these things I get there on the other side and it comes back to what you were saying about having self trust after a particular amount of time I built up enough trust that I could then you know have faith that I was going to be able to do the thing I I it describes the sensation that you go through the Sensation that you go through as you're uh becoming more experienced and having more faith that you can do the thing is more enjoyable because there's less of that sort of tight uncertainty as you're doing it that's why like but the outcome's the same the outcome is the same yes the input and the experience are different because as you go into it you go yeah I'm going to crush this keynote like I've done this 50 times before and it's a you know it's a a keynote that I've delivered specifically this one to a similar crowd I've got lots of as Alex would say undeniable proof a stack of undeniable proof that I can do the things I say I can do but the thing still gets done on the other side without the are you saying without the emotional shrapnel that you might have brought of course dude this is like my people are like well how do you deal with that I go the just you just you're literally doing it to yourself mhm yeah you are the the sort of Taskmaster that's whipping yourself you're the guy with the keys you're telling yourself a story I mean some people do it where they L they they they can't even get work done until they put themselves in a position where they have to but they did it to themselves or they they tell themselves a story about doing the work that just you could tell yourself the opposite story and the again the work still gets done the thing still happens just one is a lot more pleasurable so that's why I like your philosophy of like motivation [ __ ] because it's either I did or I didn't do so I don't have to make a big thing out of it it's like I just didn't do it just be honest with it it's like I didn't have motivation what is you know it's a neat it's a neat concept going onto the finding and recruiting process what do you find these people how do you test first higher Etc yeah this is like the people side again that's why I think Talent is such an important thing the core philosophies that I have that's different than everybody else when it comes to Talent is first off I have to give them a test on the front end to see if they even can do basic stuff so I I every role at any company unless I'm going outbound I'm trying to pull somebody from another company which I do director level and above I'm always stealing from an existing company they have to submit a video and they got to answer some questions and if they can't do that Chris there's like the my recruiting team ahead of people they just archive like there's no conversation if they what is the test it's a video they have to submit a 60-second video answering certain questions okay and if they go three or four minutes they didn't read the instructions the last thing I want is that person on my team right or you find out they don't even know how to record a video and send it to you like we don't we don't have an upload button we we say record a video and and paste the link I mean I live in a digital world like if you can't figure that out drive [ __ ] it we just have bigger issues right like the other day it's funny I was uh one of my companies and I was watching one of the new sales guys in SDR and I asked uh the guy who ran the I said have you seen that guy type he's like no he goes I was like do you not test typing skills yeah it was just an oversight you know so I think like having an initial kind of filter is a really great idea gets rid of a lot of the noise ppon [ __ ] test yeah it's just a it's a signal to noise ratio the next level is uh Profile assessment and I like a lot of them for an assistant I like col it's a great one you want to and the thing with an assistant is don't hire somebody that maps to you you want to find the opposite so it's like like a key if you're a high researcher you want to find somebody that's low if you're a low follow-through you want to find somebody high like it sounds obvious but I know some people hire their friends to be their assistant that's not a winning strategy so um the other one we use is profile XT we use a bunch of different ones I let companies decide but the big idea is just the default cognitive pattern that that person inherently like people have certain ways they act and certain ways people act will be better for a role than others so different leadership styles different and and what what are you using to assess those profile XT is one of them profile but what's neat is like if we're hiring a VP of sales we can actually profile the other people on the team the other vice presidents and it'll tell us if a candidate is because of the way they are if they're going to cause conflicts it doesn't say don't hire them it just gives you a data point how accurate do you find those to be well the th uh very accurate in regards to like how they're going to work together but really it's the maturity of the person to be self-aware that they're going to work with to solve that but it tells you how to solve it this person's usually going to act like this in a meeting so you're going to have to act like this but if you're self-aware you'll adjust right if you talk a lot and somebody doesn't talk you hopefully should shut up and you know let them talk but the thing that it does that I'm like 100% stickler for is cognitive tests so just pure ability to solve problems so like the funny part is I think I'm one of the lowest cognitive scores on my team so like when they say higher people than man it's like I've got data to back the ID in the room Yeah by Design I think I was in the hot when I did test that one's still profile XT it's got both the Cog plus the uh the profile fit so that's number two and then the third is test project you know Seth Goden said this to me years ago he said I can't work with you till I work with you we were talking about a new startup and he said you know how do you hire people and when he said that it was just like off the cuff can't I'm like what do you mean he goes I haven't hired any body for a decade where I didn't start off by working on a project on some kind of thing just to see if we gel on collaborating communication style so what we've gotten really good in our companies is just how to hire people setting up a test project so for an assistant it might be like hey here's a person's profile on social media I need it's his birthday what should we get him just see and you give everybody this is the key is you give everybody the same test project and they present it and then you can you can map it what most some people do they're like all right they ask this person to do this they do this and it's like if you're hiring a designer you don't want them to do you want to say like redesign our homepage and then see which one did it right it's like I was hiring a CEO once and I was like just the the test project for a CEO for everybody listening is to build the 90day plan it's like you're going to hit the ground what are you going to do in the first 90 days talk to everybody you need to on the team figure out what you're going to be dealing with and then present a plan that's actually the test project so there's like three candidates first guy goes up starts reading a PowerPoint slide I don't know about you Chris but big no I can't it's like I can read faster than you can read to me so let's stop that next person's plan was just not even it's like they didn't talk to anybody it's like what company did you make that for third guy pulls up a diagram and I could tell by the quality of the diagram the quality of thinking it was almost like you had me at hello so like to me test projects is non-negotiable every we don't skip it and that's what makes it very different so it doesn't matter if it's admin delivery like just give them the thing you want them to do it's like my buddy Brian hired somebody to help with marketing and they fired him because their ideas for Tik Tok videos weren't good and I said well did you make that part of the test project he's like a shoot I should have done so but I mean that's just like where are you looking for these candidates are you using a head hunters uh we use I think we use indeed a lot so again director level above we go outbound uh direct uh below that we use indeed what's unique is we do spend money on boosting the post so we'll spend it on LinkedIn Etc um for remote uh roles we'll use um I think it's remote. there's different website again I'm not involved in it but uh it's the idea of spending money on amplifying the opportunity because most people don't and then they just get a bunch of like super low it's just you get them man it's like this person isn't like why did they apply I don't I don't know what their role like it's must be like a select all apply or something it must be way too easy to apply for jobs so but um I mean for an assistant truth is I I think last time we hired somebody on a team it was like 800 applicants we had to sift through like it's it's work we did a two job postings uh one guest Booker one general manager and we had 6,000 for two rols for sure in your world a [ __ ] nightmare yeah so I mean again you don't want to be you want to get you want to do the I do finals like I do I do I do 15minute finals in most of my companies I don't want to you know I trust 15 minute final final interviews yeah I asked three fun questions first one is because I'm pretty public about my childhood and some my trauma so I always say you know what's the you know what are some of the things that you went through as a kid that shaped you as a person I ask a broad question I see where they want to go with this right because like I I don't know I just don't like doing the whole like suit and tie [ __ ] kind of vibe and work so they don't tell me anything well I had a great childhood and I'm really grateful for my parents and nothing bad happened I'm like okay good good to know then the next question I ask is um what are the two toughest things that you've ever gone through in your whole life and how did those shape you as a leader try to give him another like can you knock it out of the park please some of them are beautiful yesterday did an interview and um it was actually quite sad uh the guy that was applying for the job his sister's child unfortunately got run over by a car month prior and I was like still it heart my heart but the fact that he shared that with me I was like dude we're going to create some magic together and someday I actually know somebody that his sister should be working with that I didn't want to offer it on that call but you know I'm waiting till the timing's right I'm G to offer that up but you know that's a great question and then my favorite one is five years from now you're living your most beautiful life I want to know where you're living who you living with what are you making what's your job and and pretend we can't work together so we take that off the table so we can't work together you're you're pitching me on your 10 out of 10 5ye life what does that look like the reason I do that is first I want to see if they have a vision for their life if they do I'm looking if what I need them to do if they would be selfishly motivated to create that if it's what I need them to do so for example Sam who you met out there when I first interviewed him he had a vision someday to own his own creative agency well I needed to build that inside of one of my companies so the cool part is is If he if he wants to do that someday he's going to go learn the skills and I'll pay him to learn it so him he can do it here so someday he can do it out there so alignment was there and then what I like to do is I like to make notes of those so like my assistance assistant Fabiano when I was interviewing her she says she's from Brazil she goes I have a vision someday somehow I'd love to live in Florida okay didn't judge her too hard for that one the capital of Central America I was like okay Florida it is uh and then she wanted to um do pattern design it's like there's actually a name for this that people that design patterns for like different things like this is a I don't know it's not tapestry so I don't know what it's called but I happen to know the be the ex the number one woman in the world that does that I just filed those back in my mind and anytime I have interaction with Fabiana I tell her I'm still looking out for some a home for you in Florida and I can't wait to introduce you to my friend and because of that like I said earlier if I know her dreams and goals and I can tell her that I'm working hard to make those true resources opportunity skill set I just think that creates the alignment and the culture that those people will show up and do the thing like I don't have to bribe them I don't have to you know what my most viral videos recently was giv Sam again out there a GT4 a Porsche GT4 cuz on his phone [ __ ] off dude it's on my Instagram and I'll tell you why he's been with me for six years the guy is solid to solid he started when he was 16 he's 23 now and one of the ways that I do this uh process fiveyear goals I teach it to my teams and then I get them to create a wallpaper of their Vision what they want to create on their phone so that when I go around the office I just tap their phone I don't even have to be that smart right I'm a I'm a assist I'm not again my cognitive score is low so Sam and you can ask him to see it he still has it there he has a white GT4 on the top right corner of his phone and um yeah I just want I just I don't know I just was like he just he absolutely knocked out of the park from last year everything we've done everybody follows me the media stuff there I'm like dude this is the guy he showed up every day so it it it was I remember when we landed I was trying to I was trying to trick him I got to go to the dealership the guys want to sell me this car I don't know if I want to get it he but I need you to come with the camera and I told the team to come he's like all right and we're walking around and the car is there my heart like dude I was so N I have never like it' been a while since I proposed to my wife had I even become close to that nervous and I was just like cuz I didn't want to mess up my words and uh it was we put it on the turntable so it's s in the whole showroom there's a turntable and it was sitting there but we walked in the other corner I was looking in the cars and then you can see in the video he's like is that a GT4 and I was like I don't know is that and I told is that a Porsche he's like yeah and and he walks over I was like isn't that the car on your phone he's like yeah same Speck white and I go and I start I just started telling the guy about Sam I said hey can I tell you about Sam he goes yeah so let me tell you who Sam is this a literally the guy I kept saying I need you to make more money so give it to the team I need you to I need you to you know I need you to be rich bro like help me help you he goes I'm here to learn not earn he would never he would have probably waited another decade before he ever got himself the car he literally had the money to buy instead he bought at home cuz he's at 22 at the top smell good yeah and I'll tell you man I bought myself some cool cars it's hundred times cooler buying somebody else car like it was yeah it was special and um I just think that that was a symbol as well to everybody else like just understand your team's dreams and goals and just if you wake up every day to try to make theirs come true everything gets easier I've heard you say that you run your personal life like a business as well what does that consist of every like the comments when I talk about this they're like hey you should be so fun to be married to I would love you you are so awesome I'm like shut up like I I just for me dude I again I I went through massive pain when I was engaged and she walked away like that was one of the hardest 28 at the time 27 28 and I realized I was good at business like I finally figured out the The rhythms of success of business but I sucked at being in relationships like I literally I remember one time I saw an Elon interview and the interviewer is like do you ever think you'll date again he's like H I know I need to allocate some time to dating do you think 5 hours a week is enough and I was just like okay he's worse than I am but I just I just asked myself like well why am I so good in business but so bad in relationships and I started thinking about like what I do in business that makes it successful it's you know it's a relationship with my team and all this stuff and I just I just got to a place where I applied some of those principles so for example you know every quarter we do an offsite okay and it's two nights three days initially I didn't know what we were going to do my wife fought with me for it when we were we were in dating at the time but I just said like I just think that it's important that we build a rhythm so now we look forward to them they're incredible we pick cool destinations and it's just for us um we do weekly meetings you know every week we have lunch together we have an agenda structure one of the coolest things we ask each other is how have I been for you as a husband and I listen Chris I just sit there and listen talk talk talk talk talk talk talk criticize you did this on Mond like I'm so fascinated by how good her memory is like she can remember you left this cup on this table half on the corner and then my only response is thank you and then she asked me the same question and I usually say you are incredible there's nothing wrong with you like dude this is like natural selection like I mean what what I'm not going to criticize but uh but but even on those meetings we talk about like because I manage the finances I don't want me if anything happens to me I have a great team but I want her to know so any big decisions I review it with her talk about the weekend so like we just figured out where the friction points in our lives were and then we review them in that weekly meeting um we do date nights every week we just you know we have core values as a family Martel core values and those are really cool like our kids are 11 and 12 now but ever since they were young we've we use them because then it's like here's what Martel stand for and when you're punching your brother we're going to go to we love and support each other so you tell me how punch and your brother love and support each other so it's not and it's an identity thing right have you got a family crest like Ben we didn't do the crest no I have a lot of friend Ben and that's how I met Ben he put our family in a presentation he was given on his family stuff and I'm not going to send my kids into the woods at 13 years old to fend for themselves it turns out the world's hard enough if you just let it affect your kids but I do love that he does everything at the extremes um but yeah so I would say core values um we have a scorecard kind of like we measure ourselves on different dimensions of like spirituality and hobbies and we just ask her a community service like are are we living up to the core Valley so we review them but it's just it's gotten to a place where you know I think what happens with some entrepreneurs that are like growth-minded and their Partners not is that the partner starts feeling scared they may never say it this way scared that you're going to depart and wake up one day it's like when I go do like Retreats like spiritual Retreats my wife is always like do you still want to be with me like of like yes I never worry that that's going to be the I don't know maybe I'm just weird but she's she goes and does her I'm like are you going to be with me it's like yeah we're pretty good like so to me it's the fear of the person going on a growth journey and them being such a big Chasm and what this does even the weekly meeting right because a lot of my friends unfortunately you know 50% have been divorced since you know last decade and it's usually because there was a crack that nobody talked about some kind of resentment kind some kind of moment a fight that just never got resolved and it just kept breaking and eventually by the time it gets bad enough it's we're talking Grand Canyon type scale and it's just too far to come back so like even the concept of having practices that are um you know resentment inoculators like how I in my book I talk about how to do clearing conversations which is the same thing you do with your spouse that you do with your team how do you do it I think it's probably one of the most important things in the book that nobody gives because it doesn't make the money but it is it will make them the most money it's essentially if you do something that I've like I've got resentment for or if I do something and I know you have resentment for it because you can see you know those people in the meetings that just keep chirping and you're like they're chirping about it's not even the thing it's [ __ ] it's this other thing they just haven't they don't want to bring that up so they're going to chirp about this so the way it works is you you go to them and you go first and you say hey I want to be the best leader for you and I realize the only way I'm going to be able to do that is that if you're honest if if I get honest fee back on how I've been showing up for you and I'm not perfect unless you think I'm Jesus or Messiah like I'm not like I've got opportunities and I I can't get better if I don't know what they are so Chris can you think about something that's happened in the last six months that you know you were concerned about question didn't understand and and that might have caused you some feelings around it and they go yeah I go do you got that thing they go yeah I say cool would you do me the honor of sharing it with me and I sit back and I listen now the key is is most people people don't want to do that cuz they're like well I know what he's going to say and I don't agree with them that's not the point the whole point is literally taking the venom out it's letting the person well I was in I mean dude the [ __ ] I've heard is fascinating um You didn't say hello to me the other day when you walked in the office thank you and again the the only thing is so you repeat it back so what I heard you say is that when I didn't come in say hi to you you you felt that I was in a mood or I was up with you and he go yeah I said okay appreciate you sharing that with me uh first off thank you always thank you I I would have never known thank you for sharing that and then there's there's a I accept it and here's what I commit to change or I want to is it okay if I share with you why and see most people think well if I go to the why I'm dismissing what they said 90% of the value is them saying it and I will tell you they will say at the end of it I don't even care if you agree with me or you agree to change anything one you hear it heard seen and appreciated I was at the element offsite last the the powder thing correct y so I was with them in Boseman Montana and then Big Sky and they did basically the same thing I think it's called a a discharge um so they allowed it name well I mean it depends on yeah depends on what L you're look um and they I think maybe opened it to the floor and just said okay so basically the same thing you bring up something that's occurred within the last few months you say to it and the person says thank you and and and whatever whatever and uh I remember thinking like God [ __ ] ballsy you know you're allowing all of these people to unload these things but it's taking the tension out of it and you're right it's sort of just getting into it early Neil Strauss who sat in that seat not long ago my favorite quote from last year was unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments just [ __ ] yeah absolute Banger and it's so true it's so true you know because we get mad at people for doing things that we haven't told them that we don't want them to do what a crazy and then we get irritated at the fact that they don't know that we didn't want them to do it and then it grows into this big thing like the way that you slurp your tea at dinner what all of the different what a British uh analogy that is the uh idea that you had about sort of someone that's very high growth and somebody that's lower growth I made me think of one example and one idea that I've got so the example is Aaron Alexander the big bloke that was out side that came to come and greet us when we first started playing pick ball together about two years ago uh I said I'm friends with Zay natil who's the current men's number two and he's got this great coach in town he said that the coach could work with me H and Aaron got nervous and angry about the prospect of me working with a coach when he wasn't working with a coach because the concern in the uh disparity between us because it's only fun when you're at the same sort of a level he also happens to be much better than me so I think he just it's a bit of an ego boost for him you know what I mean he regularly beats me um the other one is I had this idea that I came up with actually while doing my live tour last year which is personal growth velocity which is what you're referring to so there is a pace that you move imagine that you know you're Falcon 9 or you're uh the Challenger and you're taking off from the Launchpad and you're moving at a particular pace and there's other people that are around you and they're moving at velocities too and there are some people that are ahead of you but if you're moving more quickly you catch up to them and then you sort of strip past them and the goal is to find someone who is moving at roughly the same sort of velocity that you are so that you can keep up together the problem is that a lot of the time we are friends with people who are still sort of on the ground and there's this odd unspoken about tension When you mention things you you you don't feel comfortable talking about what's happening in your life because you know that it's in some way sort of triggering to them it's it kind of puts them into a harsh light in retrospect I did a big chunk of time in my 20s uh not drinking as a club promoter in you know 201617 there was pretty radical I know sobriety low and no alcohol is kind of super popular at the moment but that caused a lot of friction in uh many of the relationships I had because the subtext was oh Chris thinks he's too good for us better than me yeah yeah oh he thinks that because he's not drinking that that it throws my behavior into sharp contrast and that caused me to see a lot of the friendships that I had as drinking Partners rather than General genuine compatriots yeah they were only happy to be Dy were were werey to doing something I didn't want to do but they did than being around me doing something that I did want to do and you know that it just highlighted a bunch of different friendships that really I didn't need to go sober to have this sort of be identified but that personal growth velocity thing I think is really important especially in marriages like so much in in in marriages and finding especially as a guy uh I think there is often a question why are so many of the top podcasters and the top non-fiction authors in the personal development World men and I think that it's the same reason that more men are CEOs that there's this sort of obsessive need to fill a void inside of us that conquer and Mastery is somehow going to give us yeah the problem being that if you're a guy who has this high capacity for personal growth and already has built this into your life it's going to be tough for you to find a female partner that's able to keep up with that pace I think that you're you know for all that how young she is and fund and waste to hip ratio and mate value and your resources with her Youth and all of this [ __ ] [ __ ] it's like dude if you like personal growth it's going to be one of the most important things in your life finding a emotionally balanced pretty girl who is into self-development is you're talking that's the real unicorn the real unicorns super unicor from a wife perspective are finding women that are inter personal growth and you know fortunately we've sort of cultivated the microcosm below this particular uh podcast so you know the moderns have a Target Rich audience the modern wisdom dating pool would actually be fantastic if I could just [ __ ] access to it yeah exactly get the mailing list from the two million people on YouTube um but yeah you know that's that's really why you're struggling and it's because of that you know that devel you feel people pulling away from you and you have this uh I call it personal growth guilt like Survivor guilt you know that you've sort of come back from n this sort of difficult place and you're now in a better place and this person's still there and you feel like oh God maybe maybe I should be spending time fixing trucks and and sheds with my uncle and his you know crazy racist brother I so here this is this is my opinion I think on that is a little controversial in the sense that I believe when we live Our Truth often times we show people where they've been living their lie and that and that's the feeling and you know so I I coach a lot of CEOs that run into this hey how did you deal with your wife and this and this and this this is just person where I've gotten to similar to motivation concept is nobody has to change for me to win that is my I repeat that to myself I what does that mean to you it means that I'm not going to make anybody have to change for me to win I'm not going to require anything from anybody for me to win I do not need the rest of the world to be any certain way for me to win and I just as soon as I started thinking that way and started seeing me react frustrated resentful I'm like oh no I I'm I can be with somebody that chooses not to be on a path of growth and that's okay I can choose to talk to it came from my dad okay like most young men I think when we talk to our our dad you know they have this beautiful way of asking us question that makes us feel incompetent like I even today and my dad you know worked at a job for 32 years and you know never really became like rich but you know he retired he makes me feel like an idiot and I and I remember one day I go so I could either get frustrated every time he does that or just get to a place where it has no bearing kind of the trigger back to the trauma whatever it was just like I got to a place where I had to reprogram and just say to myself like every time he ask me a question that's his way of saying I love you so literally every time he'd say like hey that new business you invested in you know who's the CEO or whatever all I heard was I love you and I and I just it was funny cu the more I did that the less he worried like I grew up and I gave my dad a freaking I'm sure I gave him micro heart attacks this whole like I was a wild and it's like he's chilled out with me and I think it's in response to me right like my wife is a happier more fulfilled loving female expressive because I don't need her to be anything and that was not the case C I mean dude I I had some weird [ __ ] I had to work through in my early relationship with her came from previous relationships of like hey we agreed to this and I thought You' do this and now you're not doing this and blah blah blah and now I got to get a house manager and D like what are we doing and then I was like dude you got to get over yourself so I just got to a place where I don't need anybody's I don't need anybody to act a certain way for me to win how do you avoid that making you too jaded or detached or you know this there's obviously going to be preferences that you would have for how you could connect with your father it's it's such a good question so have you ever ran into Peter cron yeah he's been on the show okay so pet Peter I've I've coached with him twice okay because Peter has a way of explaining things to a software guy in a way that res resonates and uh you know one time I was working with him on something and he goes um how does it make how does it feel making people wrong like what do you mean he goes essentially that thing you just did you're trying to make them wrong and you know Daniel very you know he has this you know British way of saying you know you're very you're very he compliments me and then he punches me in the side of the the neck you know but he goes um it's just a way for you to control he goes so instead of making people wrong how about you allow people to be doesn't take away from your opportunity to express your preferences but expressing your preferences is a completely different language pattern then criticizing people for who they are or choices they make and I was like wow I remember writing down making people wrong and like underlying highlighting and just kind of think about all the ways I've done that in my life to people and that was the beginning of where I kind kind of came to this conclusion and he says it differently but the way I think about it is the World shows me where I'm not free and then through that experience I'm I'm then going to evaluate how do I is it big enough is it worth even addressing or do I just have to like let it be to your point like being too passive or is it something where I'm going to express my preferences and if it continues also choose to no longer engage right remove somebody from a team move on from a friendship I'm still trying to figure it out but I'm telling you like my I'm a happier person once I started adopting nobody has to change for me to win I'm going to win I'm willing to do the work be consistent show up if you want to join the the the GO train jump on if not that's on you you're on your own Journey I'm going to move forward and then what's funny and this is I do my content is whenever I see something that I don't agree with I then share it on social I don't attack them I don't even tell them but they Inspire the content and I think it's the coolest like I think it's a spiritual thing that we should all do where our inspiration from the way we see the world through our lens is actually our learning then we get to share with other people it's a beautiful way to transcend things that have uh hurt you or challenged you in the past which is to say you didn't stop me and I'm going to make sure that you don't stop the these other people too to treat I'm going to take the bad and turn it into a good I had a a post that I wrote a couple of months ago after spending time with a friend which relates exactly to what you're talking about I had a conversation this week with a friend about emotions specifically jealousy frustration and anger about how they hijack even the most cerebral cognitively sophisticated person it's highly annoying you spend all of this time trying to be a rational agentic Beast then a thing happens that disrupts your emotional state and you turn into a pet petulent toddler he explained that when he finds himself getting carried away by jealousy frustration or anger he asks a few questions first out of all of the emotions that you could have chosen why did you choose that one you have this huge library of emotions to tap into why did that one get activated what is it about you your desires your assumptions about the world and your patterns that caused that emotion to rise to the surface so quickly it's not strictly too that you chose it your body and mind just delivered it to you but I love the language and framing for retaking agency over our emotions second and how's that working out for you what has been the outcome of that emotion arising has it made your relationships life quality of Mind better or worse I love this language again because it creates distance between you and your feelings plus it assumes that you chose it giving you a sense of power and third do you want to be right or do you want to be loved often when we feel emotions like jealousy or frustration and anger it's because we feel like a boundary has been crossed someone should have known that we would have felt this way if they did that thing and and they didn't so we need to get them to realize their transgression in our less gracious moments we hope to achieve this through mistreatment passive aggression mean comments are distancing and in our more gracious moments it's done through a calm honest and open explanation of why someone did something that made us feel this way Without accusing the other person of having done it on purpose unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments we assume the best of others we assume that our friend or partner wouldn't ever mean to make us upset that their impact their actions that had on our psyche was done through ignorance not negligence or malice maybe their behavior does warrant the silent treatment maybe we are righteous in our indignation maybe they should have known better you may even be right for reacting this way but do you want to be right or do you want to be loved because your petulance in response to a situation you wish hadn't happened is unlikely to create more love and if your partner or friend is incapable of hearing you gently and frankly explaining why you feel bad then you have a good indicator that your int locky to is a bigger problem than just their behavior D you like encapsulated cool so good it's cool when you arrive at the same sorts of insights and uh the word you said is agency it's agency it's when we when we get to a place where we can be aware that we control the meaning to everything like like my kids fight like Max said I'm this I go dude all right let's talk about I I teach this stuff to my kids and they're young it's if he's sitting there screaming at you saying you have purple eyes are you going to Care well no because you don't why and he's okay perfect so whether he says you have a crush on a girl or not like Let It Go and they're like said you don't control what other people do you control how you respond and what meaning you associate to what's going on and again I like to your point i' I'd rather be lefted M I'm okay not being right I'm I'm I got the point guy literally this morning text messag me I gave him a Emoji he his response was some some sort of a sentence that sounded like you know I I don't know if you realize how insensitive that was I sent you a heartfelt message and you replied with a thumbs up and you know I don't know why people think that's okay but and I'm like dude that's okay if you don't understand that I like I at least replied haven't seen you in years M love you hope you're doing well but like your feeling is what it is like I don't need to be right about it I just I just replied and I gave him that one of those emojis like what do you want me to do you can't do you can't do thumbs up I was passive aggressive 100% it wasg less gracious moment yeah I can't win them all uh I am human and I do enjoy a good like I like the jokin of it um it is what it is but I don't know I just I try to go to a place where I don't need anything from anybody I just I'm just a happier place and then I'm going to create and then if it works and even just the desire to making things work I had to like that this is again it's contradiction like I actually I think I I wake up and I create and I I'm you know like I'm very focused but at the same time if it doesn't happen I'm not going to I'm not going to be sad I'm not going to cry I'm not going to not going to scream at anybody try not to anyways just just try to you know Buddhist is you know mind like waterish but again to your point of the past this is where I'm going back to Peter said okay cuz like I was like okay I can get on board with this don't react nobody needs to change for me to win stop making people wrong but then I felt like life got really boring like I literally there's no Stakes anymore dude I got on a call with him and I was like I'm doing the thing and it's pretty flat like it's it's the emotional Ro like if you're addicted to chaos which a lot of entrepreneurs are okay and I talk about that in my book big time cuz I used to be that person and most people it's normal so they're comfortable in the chaos turns out chaos is really shitty way to be a leader for a team so you got to get over that so if if you go from like chaos is like super normal for me and then you go to like plane and there's no more chaos it's actually a it's a new place to get comfortable and he says oh he goes you forgot the other part of the equation which is you still have to create and I said what do you mean he goes um so the way you create when you disconnect from a behavior is you actually this is so bananas okay I'll tell you a real example so I'm sitting on the couch and my wife wanted to go to CrossFit she's a hardcore crossfitter so she's a better person for all of us when she does CrossFit 55 spine bulging death yeah I don't go to cross any more she loves it and we're happy I don't think she push she's just she just likes to takes over yeah yeah and she's like hey the boys need to be ready by 8 o' because this person's coming to pick him up for a soccer practice yeah no problem like I'm a I'm a man and I I think I know how to handle stuff so anyways uh 30 minutes later she texts me are the boys ready now she writes are the boys ready I hear you are a horrible dad irresponsible and can't tie your own shoelaces so I'm telling this to Peter but I again mind like water I don't respond so what should I done in that situation because like I heard that and he goes well let let me ask a few questions one did she say that no which is a big idea like did she say those words no do you felt that way yes why do you think think she said those things well because she's you know sometimes she gets worried she thinks about the kid I mean My Wife puts Sons block on my kids at 4 in the morning looking at the weather thinking about the rest of the day so like she you know moms do that and she go he said this beautiful thing he goes do you think that's because of who you are or who she is so because of who she is was she that way before you met her yeah probably let it go yeah it's not a you thing it's a zero 0% you think this is who she was before she met you then he said the the cool thing he said what would you have rathered happen instead well I mean I would have rathered a message and said you're the most incredible husband thanks for taking care of kids this morning that would have been cool he goes all right so this is the creation part you forgot I want next time reply to her and tell her how incredible she is for that I go what do you mean he goes and N like tell her what you wish she told you so I replied to her all good k ready I love how much you care about the boys and always making sure things are done on time s safe I feel safe I feel reassured dude I'm talking like Ninja level relationship stuff I've not I've been non-stop doing this anytime I feel away I re I don't respond and instead I take the opposite to create the future that I wanted and it turns out if you express cuz somebody said once they said what you repress get to express so if you you know masculine feminine energy like sometimes the wife starts acting like a man because you start acting like a wife you know what I mean the masculine energy so the idea of expressing and creating a future state that you desire anytime you feel the opposite has been GameChanger for me in all aspects of my work there's two ways that you can get people's behavior to change sort of interpersonally and there's probably a ton of others but there's two big ones you can either criticize the negative or reinforce the positive and the reinforcing of the positive is way more fun dude it's it's more fun it's 10 times more effective but people def I wonder why that is I mean I you know I know this too in my it's easier it's literally lazier it's easier for me to be critical in front of you in a meeting than to make a note write it down and save it for a one1 and come from a place in the one1 to be supporter to be like this is so this happen during the meeting you know what I really love I love it when XY and said this is when you're at your best and this is really what I want you to bring to that I don't think that that's necessarily that's exactly how you do it and just think about how cool that is where you're like oh why is that person doing that thing and it's say hey can I you know and again I don't always do it in public so again praise in public criticize in private but I'll use that like I'm it's they're bright spots right and people have talked about this for years it's way better to identify a good behavior and reinforce it and praise it and celebrate it and then everybody else starts seeing Oh if I do this and I get praise I'll start doing that and then it creates a culture of we're looking for bright spots versus I'm scared to do anything because if if I put my head too high I'm going to get punched in the face MH cuz I saw Bobby yeah he got punched in the face he got punched in the face hard two insights around that do you know Rory southernland do you know who he is feel like a come AC Vice chairman of ogal advertising he's been on the show five or six times the guy is a [ __ ] absolute force of nature he's a big Gruff British man and everything to bit [ __ ] [ __ ] isn't it I know exactly what you're talking about yeah yeah he's got some great stories he he came into a podcast episode with seven Vapes around his neck once which was fantastic because of and I quote range anxiety range anxiet what did he teach you though CU oh I mean he's he's one of the he's got great stories he's one of the greatest advertisers on the planet um so here's here's one Insight in particular um that non uh creative people are always made to dance to the rhythm of non-creative people so Silicon Valley almost all businesses now see pretty much everything as an operational and Logistics solution to be solved as opposed to something that requires something new and creative so his quote is you never get you never get ired for hiring Delight the point being that well we followed the blueprint the yeah the blueprint that didn't work for the last eight times yeah yeah yeah but we followed the blueprint as opposed to potentially succeeding at something that's new because you're not going to lose your job for doing the thing that's always been done even if it's more guaranteed to be unsuccessful but there is a potential that you're going to get punched in the face for trying to do something that's new no potential probably uh proof this is where I think Jeff Bezos at Amazon is probably one of the best innovators in the world because even the fireone most people forget about the fir phone $600 million investment in a phone to try to compete against you know Google and apple and he by Design and I can't imagine what it took he celebrated that that the team got built they tried it in hindsight Alexa came from that and uh the Kindle right which have been category leaders in the home space and Etc so like but his whole thing is that if we don't build a culture where we celebrate failures and everything has to win it would be impossible to your point it's impossible to assume that we're going to be able to innovate because Innovation requires a level of like a massive level of uncertainty because if we just follow the blueprint everybody's gotten we're going to get what they got which is not what we're after so I think that like bezos's leadership strategies is is one of the few that um I study I think Netflix is another one but yeah it's like celebrate people doing the thing you wish more people would do it's kind of like in my buddy Phil Jones said this to me once we were doing something uh and he's a speaker and I want to speak more and he and he said something so simple yet so profound he says take pictures of you doing the thing you want to do more of it's like what do you mean he goes you you want to sell more copies of your book yeah he goes you take pictures of you signing books for people no you might want to do that so that simple concept of take pictures of you doing things you want to do more of is find the thing that people are doing you want more people to do and celebrate it and I just just those simple little mental cues are I think just the coolest but again it's just I got to I got to rewrite some beliefs cuz there's probably some scary stuff around that well what are you saying I don't tell somebody they did something wrong so you can tell them you just tell them differently and again that's where you're not good enough yet that's that's the skill it's like skills to aquirium yeah it's where where is my Gap am I willing to create the space in my calendar to work on it you know am I willing to hire a coach to look at the way I operate I mean some of the cool stuff I do is actually watching CEOs interact on meetings and giving them some feedback because it's there they're so close to it they can't see it and once they hear it they're like oh I didn't re I thought I was leading through transformational leadership I'm like no dude you told everybody what to do on that call so yeah I think I think it's just like one of those things of just creating space to do the work to become better there's a Kevin Kelly quote from his most recent book where says you lead by letting others know what you expect of them which may exceed what they expect of themselves provide them a reputation that they can step up to dude Kevin Kelly's a stu he's a beast let's go beast that was awesome the one thing I wish he'd done in that book that most recent book of his that he did it was you know [ __ ] 300 pages of aphorisms bril I just I you know yeah I just want him I wish that he'd done it over 10 volumes and I'd got like a daily stoic yeah I just I want to hear and you know that's it made it for a very easy episode for me in the whole mosy stylistical thing that we've I guess kind of owned cornered cornered the market a little bit for um but that's my favorite thing okay here's a lovely aphorism and what that that's like a it's a compression fight you remember windzip it's like you're zipping this sort of it it kicks a llama's ass WIS it oh no sorry I'm thinking of uh the MP3 player Oh Winamp do you remember Winamp [ __ ] do remember when kicks the llama's ass remember when it starts it says that what was the one that's got the orange cone what's that oh was it uh s what z v player or something yeah yeah yeah V player anyway um when you've got this you've got this sort of entire idea you know whatever Kevin's whatever life experiences Kevin's gone through to think about you set this sort of expectation of people and it may be Beyond where they're prepared to go or what they think of themselves and you allow them to step up to it and stuff they go okay wow okay so this is you know 500 hours of business meetings where that little sort of insights come about and then yeah it's been synthesized and compressed down but I there is a part of me that wants to go okay but I need the [ __ ] password to unlock this this zipped file so that I can then see it in all of its full resolution yeah you you need this to me the stories are the glue for the concept and sometimes I need more of the painting to be able to see my example yeah aphorisms on their own just aren't enough well you're you're putting the onus on the receiver The Listener the reader to then unpack it themselves correct work out what this means work out what this means could go down the wrong and it could go down the wrong path they could L like how many times have people heard you say something and they're like you know and that meant this to me and you're like oh I meant the opposite yeah correct the best thing the single best thing is when you get to this stage which I'm starting to get to now at least a little bit is where people don't they misattribute quotes I didn't say that are better than the ones that I did say dude that's the coolest thing in the world that people quote you for things you didn't say but it's the the co thing but it's better yeah hosi did that he misquoted something that I came up with made it better and then gave it to me and I was like that's mine now I know that it's technically yours technically was there's an idea called churchillian Drift which is that unattributed quotes over time are more likely to be attributed to Churchill dude all of them are you basically want to you want to accumulate sort of mellian or William sonian drift over time I just want to keep doing this dude I really really appreciate you let's bring this one into land people want to check out all of the [ __ ] that you do resources book everything should they go uh Instagram is my favorite it's where I push to everything else and it's where I mean my whole thing is I want to die empty so it's like I give it away all it's free it's like my best stuff we produce I mean we spend close a million dollars a year just on media just giving it all away yeah Alex was a big inspiration for that um my books on Amazon you can get at bookstores um and it's you know the mission there is to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate and it's going to take me a long time to kind of try to move the needle on that because I think a lot of people they climb these ladders that just suck and then they go and then they just stop that's the worst part craters that could have been great at creating cool new stuff they just decide it's not the way they want to do it um and then my YouTube my YouTube has been a big focus of us just trying to uh to understand the algorithm and we put out some pretty cool bangers lately I like it you're getting them man yeah you're really to yeah it took a year of just testing and iterating but we're starting to get some wind heck yeah dude this is an honor man appreciate it D marel everyone thanks Chris what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my three-hour long conversation with Alex hosi which me and Dan spoke about on this episode and it's available right here go on