Ep011: Start With The Truth

Join Dean & Dan as they get back to the Procrastination Priority Scorecard and look at mindset 5: Start with the truth.




Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep011


Dean: Mr. Sullivan.

Dan: Good morning.

Dean: Good morning.

Dan: Good morning or good afternoon. Actually it should be morning but they've taken an hour away from us.

Dean: They took it in the middle of the night.

Dan: Yes. I was thinking if you're sensitive as we are to the sole issue of procrastination, to have an hour taken away from you it's an upfront, it's an insult, it's an attack.

Dean: We're saying you don't imagine how it would be if they took it at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Monday.

Dan: Yeah.

Dean: Instead of two o'clock game under cover of darkness in the middle of the weekend.

Dan: Yes anyway I've survived and it was only at around 10 o'clock that I realized that my watch wasn't correct.

Dean: That's so great. It is amazing. Are you back in Toronto now?

Dan: Yeah. We got back on Friday night.

Dean: Very nice.

Dan: All right. Last time we had a marvelous session but we did commit ourselves to going back to the scorecard. The number five which I think is the one that is where we are right now.

The mindset here is to start with the truth and first of all that's a big topic, the truth. Anyway I was thinking about this morning because I've actually taken the procrastination priority worksheet and turned it into a desktop tool.

Dean: Oh wow.

Dan: Using FileMaker. We have FileMaker programmers on staff and it's over a two-week period of going back and forth. He's very very good at this sort of thing and so I've got a tool. It's a neat tool and I'll send it to you, I'll just send you a link.

Dean: Yeah.

Dan: Filemaker link and it operates just like the other one. I'm going to wait two or three days because there's a few tweaks on it.

Dean: Okay.

Dan: That you will see, it's totally self explanatory. You go on and it operates but when you do the telling the truth column which is our topic for today, you just write down everything that comes to you that could be a procrastination.

I've got room for eight which I think if you do eight, you're not going to do eight but the eight will give you a sufficient amount of scope that you can see which are the three most important ones and then when you write them in and then you just hit their number so they're numbered one to eight.

You just hit the number it automatically takes it to the second column and then it also takes it to the third column. The moment you hit it it takes it to the second column which makes it you're one of your three most important procrastinations and that it automatically takes it to the commitment part of the four C's.

The other thing I've noticed is that why are you procrastinating once you write it down you can hit the button there and it automatically puts it into the courage because why you're procrastinating is the thing that's going to require courage. The further tweak I have is that when you write down a procrastination but then put a measurable goal to it and then you also put a deadline to it, that becomes a commitment.

Commitments are only commitments to the degree that they have a measurable goal and then that they have a deadline and that's what makes it a commitment. We're committing in terms of an achievement and we're committing in terms of a day, a time when it's going to get finished.

The moment I have that I just hit that button then that button takes it into the capability because ... And then you reword it, you reword all these, you fine-tune them. But they're related and the courage one automatically goes into the confidence because courage transformed is confidence. The programming of this tool actually taught me a few things about the connections in our thinking here.

Dean: When you're thinking about it as how does it actually operate as a program instead of think through the logistics of it. And links and what triggers what next.

Dan: Mm-hmm. Anyway it will probably be about Thursday but I'll just fire the link to you and then you can take a look and maybe we can have a one of our future podcasts on the tool-

Dean: I think that will be super, yeah.

Dan: Yeah. It's really interesting. I've been a app maker all my life except I do it in paper form but it's very very easy if it works on paper. You've got a thinking process…

Dean: The way you think about them and the way that you lay them out they completely lend themselves. Especially with that FileMaker, the way that you've always done the tool it's very easy.

Dan: Yeah and it's a good way to test the viability, the possible viability of a digital tool where it does really require higher level of programming.

Dean: Right.

Dan: If you can just do it on FileMaker purse and actually test it out by FileMaker. The skill that I have in my office with these people, they can they can turn one of my thinking exercises around in about two days from a paper version to a digital version.

Dean: That's great.

Dan: I always say, get the fastest easiest digital version you can so that you can see how it actually operates because it has a real natural flow to it.

Dean: It will rate from there.

Dan: Yeah. Anyway so that's progress I've made.

Dean: I love it.

Dan: Yeah, but what about telling the truth. This could get out of hand, it's telling the truth is.

Dean: Even in the very earliest episodes when we first started talking about this, that was the thing. On a macro level to tell the truth that we all are at all times procrastinating something, that Universal. There's no way around that.

I think what you noticed the most especially with your team and with bringing it out to workshops just the immediate sigh of relief that people had when it became okay to tell the truth.

That procrastination is not a deficiency and that it's something that everybody has. Way we framed it in terms of turning it into the raw materials for productivity it makes it safe to tell the truth.

Dan: Yeah. One of the things because I've got a working partnership with Peter Diamandis around technology because of the exponential wisdom podcasts and also the abundance 360 conference that we do.

It's occurred to me as I'm thinking about things technological that perhaps I'm just putting this out as a perhaps, one of the reasons why procrastination really became this secret guilty thing is that previous to technology itself there was this demand that people put on themselves that they be efficient in a machine like way. In other words that there's a lot of praise for people to be very very utterly predictable in delivering certain results and if they stopped, they would be like a machine stopping.

We get very irritated with machines that stop and I'm just wondering being whether the lie there, we're talking about truth here then let's take a look at the lie. The lie is that humans thought that they could get themselves to the same productive and efficient level as a machine.

Dean: Mm-hmm. Maybe that is it, isn't it? And that's true in all of the efficiency studies. I think as we see what's happening coming in the future that anything that productivity of it can be measured is probably not the, that's not where the breakthroughs coming, that's not where the money is. Is in your productivity of doing something.

Dan: Yeah. It's very very interesting. We have one of the things that our particular time in history has available to, it is images. We now have photos and we now have movies that go back more than a century.

I was listening to just a thing that I found on the internet but it was the recorded voices of presidents and the earliest goes back to the 1880s. Benjamin, Harrison he's the first one, it's about 15 seconds. It just struck me that's about 130 years ago that were the first people in history that actually can hear the past. One more we can hear the past with every passing year and we can get very accurate images from the past where people really dimmed before.

For the most part, no one ever knew what they sounded like when for the most part people didn't really know what they look like. You had to be really famous to have a painted image or sculpted image of yourself and that was a real status item to get there. Now everybody can hear themselves and listen to themselves and they can see themselves in motion and they can see themselves in situations that happened 20,25 years ago.

One of the images, the reason I got on this whole topic is that the demand in the 1930s, 1940s of troops, thousand troops operate as if they're a single machine. Then you go in to the large automobile factories, so the steel factories and all the workers were operating within the set of motions that were demanded by the machine they were working with.

Dean: Right.

Dan: And everything like that and I'm wondering whether that left a huge impression on the educational system. You've got to be productive, you got to be disciplined and that two or three generations.

Dean: We're certainly carrying things into a future that are really just unnecessary things. Even daylight savings time what we're talking about right now, that's just an institution that something has continued to just be carried along because it was brought in to give the farmers more daylight.

Less than than 3% of the population now are involved in farming yet we all got that hour stolen from us. I just saw the movie Hidden Figures recently in the last few months. Did you see that movie?

Dan: I haven't, no.

Dean: It's so brilliant, really well done. You would really love it actually but it's about the women who were trying to get the launch John Glenn in the space right there, trying to calculate the orbits. They had entirely that whole rooms full of what they called calculators and these were people, a room full of people doing manual calculations on the launch trajectories and all of the things.

There's so many subtexts going on in this, not only that these were women these were black women, these were women who are doing calculating at the highest level math problems. It's at a time when the big mainframe computer is starting to make its way, they're having one delivered into the NASA.

Can we see this now what we know there were entire rooms of people getting to the point where their productivity was so high that they could calculate very quickly as fast as humanly possible these complex math equations and checking and double-checking with everybody. Now we look at that that's really within our lifetime here, that is just such a crazy idea now that we on our iPhone right now have access to more processing calculating power than that mainframe computer had.

Dan: Yes.

Dean: That hanging on to productivity seems a little bit in a lot of ways like holding on to the past in a way.

Dan: Yeah. I'd like to distinguish here between how something is done and the fact that it does get done. In other words these are two completely different grounds. My probably great improvement in strategic coach, in my role of the strategic coach which is essentially innovating new exercises, new concepts for the workshops and then any marketing use that we can make around those things. Which would include podcast with my favorite people, that would be it.

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Dan: I simply will using one of our more effective in popular tools in strategic coach which is the impact filter. I'll take a lot of time and by a lot I mean a half hour to lay out what the purpose is of a project that I want to put in the hands of someone else.

I'll write down this is the purpose, this is the importance, this is the ideal outcome and that lays out why it's really important. I'm putting words on the sheet of paper, I'm putting words when it's in digital form. I'm putting words here because the only reason I'm creating this message is because this is really important to me. What I've trained my team to do is if you just hear Dan talking, you can enjoy it or not enjoy it or ignore it or not ignore it.

Dean: Just smile and nod, just take it in.

Dan: Smile and nod and everything else but if you get it in this impact filter form it's 100%, I'm a 100% committed to it. I'm a 100% serious about it and you would do well to treat it a 100%.

I put down benchmark what it looks like when it's finished and then I'll send that, but I don't tell the person that I'm handing this over to how to do it.

Dean: Right, you're clear on what it is.

Dan: The reason I'm handing it over to another person is that they have skills of execution that I don't have.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: So what am I going to tell them how to get something done? It makes no sense to tell. But I know what I want and I know what it looks like when it's finished.

How it gets done and then frequently they'll come back to me and say, well we've got three or four things going here. Could you tell me this new one is this higher in rank than the others? Does it come first? Which is very legitimate question.

A totally legitimate question and then I'll sit there and I'll say, no we can bump this one to the next quarter. We don't have to do this one now but this new one, this goes to the top of the line. That's all they wanted to know is where in the importance is of the project.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: As long as I stay on my side of the line and when I say my side of the line, my side of the line is to communicate exactly what it is that I want. And then stay on my side line and not fool around with them and how they're going to do it because they've got skills to follow through and they have technical skills and everything that I don't have. I've got no opinion about how they're going to get things done and then they come back to me and it's finished. I don't need to know how they did it, I just need to know that they did it.

Dean: Yeah right. That's amazing right? You number them all right?

Dan: They're historically numbered. If I take them all into account because I have five of these in everyone of the breakthrough booklets which is our quarterly workshop tool. I've been doing that for about six years so that would be 20 a year times 6 there's 120 there. Then there's some others that come up as one offs, let's take it right up to about 200 and then the ones that are numbered I'm right around a thousand right now. I've done about 1,200 views in the last five years.

Dean: Wow.

Dan: And they've all happened. I can't say that they've all happened because some of them have been written out just to think them through to decide whether I really want to use resources and the company do this or did I just want to think it through.

But if I think it through completely then I don't bother myself and I say, really good idea, not now, maybe a year from now I'll come back and look at it again and we'll take it from there. That's not procrastinating. I've actually thought it true and I've actually taken it through the

Procrastination is really a function of not giving yourself clarity about where this particular project stands in your own thinking.

Dean: Yes. So you've done 1200 in the last five years, that's crazy. If we're telling the truth Dan, I  don't think I've done 12 and that's an issue. I see it. I sit here and I hear you talk about it and I hear you do it and I've seen them. No, no that's not sure I wouldn't I've done 12 because I always partially do when we're in our workshops. But outside of that I would say there's maybe been 12. I procrastinate that maybe.

Dan: A lot of this stuff I designed for myself. When I went to the Amen clinic and got diagnosed as ADD. The psychiatrist's that I met with there when all the testing was done and she absolutely confirmed that I'm ADD. She said, what happened Dean as they give you this really long questionnaire before they'll even accept you into the clinic. Attention deficit or ADHD or ADD. I had heard about it but I was interested in going there to get an insight into a large percentage of the clients who were in strategic coach, who are very very clearly ADD. You can see they're highly distractible and I answered all the questions and when I got finished, the questionnaire which you have to do online and send in.

I said if I was on the other end and I was getting this free questionnaire and I would say the wisest person coming his life seems really simple, his life seems orderly. He doesn't talk about being overwhelmed. He doesn't talk about being out of control and so goes in but she goes through this testing with some of it with brain scans. They give you concentration test, they give you memory tests and everything else. My scores from all those exercises showed that I was clearly in the red zone as far as ADD.

Then in the final two hours, you meet with the person who goes overall your tests and then coordinate, sit back with the questionnaire that you've done. She said, this is probably the biggest spread I've ever seen between what was indicated by the questionnaire and what the test did. She says good and she said, this shows person who's really very clear, very focused, very organized, doesn't seem to suffer from anything distracting.

Your task early show that you do so can you give me some insight into that. So I told her what I did for a living and she said, well you're selling your therapy I'll tell you that right now. She says you're selling your therapy. She said all these tools you have in the program you design them for yourself.

Dean: And it works.

Dan: The reason I do 1200 impact filters is because I need them. My feeling is that you've got tricks, you get a lot done and you're successful. My feeling is that you've got your own tricks. That's why when I put my tools out I don't how to magically take for granted that what I find really useful for myself is going to be useful for someone else.

Dean: Right. I think you're right. I think you've hit on it there that you have really figured out that the thing that gives you a lot of leeway in this is recurring income.

And I figured out the same thing, that the only reason that I get to survive and be this way is that early on I figured that out. That it would be frustrating for me to be in a situation where I had to continually earn this month's money with this month's productivity in a way.

To be able to figure out that there are things that if I can get myself to focus on that they've got long runways of recurring revenue which gives you the freedom to be more that covers up a lot of those stuck.

Dan: I know some of your history is the class over playing for you where you realized that because I don't think any of us just getting into the work world, a lot of high score that really grabs how much they got it at 10 or 11 years old but I have a feeling there's a time when you think that earning money is as a result of time and effort.

Dean: I think that that's reduced start and that I was really able to relieve myself of that spot very early on. The first and only job that I've had was at the bowling alley with my friend Neil, we were 14 years old working as a pin chaser at the bowling alley.

We were getting paid two dollars and 50 cents an hour for that which was the minimum wage at the time. I remember going for the whole day, working for eight hours on a Saturday and making $20. I felt, wow that's really something. Then I realized that I had a paper route before that and even after but one of the things that gives the opportunity would sell these coupon books that the newspaper had that we could sell door to door.

I realized that I could make $15 or $20 an hour selling the coupon books door to door instead of putting in that time. That was my entry into the results economy, realizing that I'm good at this and I can do much better and nobody has expectations of me. I'm doing this on my own thing. That was the entry into the entrepreneurial world.

That's been the system and adventure all the way from then and that's why when being a real estate agent was the thing that there's a lot of ADD people I think, that are attracted to real estate or sales jobs in general where you're not micromanaged. There's no homework, there's no that, so you get to thrive or not on your own efforts. I looked through that and that became then my laboratory. When I started out as a real estate agent, I was making cold calls and I would make a 100 cold calls a day. That was a productivity type of thing right.

I would procrastinate that and I would have to create these games to get myself to show up at the appointed hour and do the work. I was good at it and it worked but it was like a hamster wheel because when I was not making the calls it was not working. And that would be the thing, I figured out the roller coaster elements. I would make all the cold calls, I would get a lot of business, I would make a lot of money and then I would take a little time off and go through that cycle.

I was really getting confronted with all of the realities and that was when I first got involved in marketing, when I realized that I could put words on a postcard and mail a postcard and get people to call me. That completely changed my life because now that added some consistency that didn't depend on my productivity.

Dan: Yes.

Dean: That's it.

Dan: That's a really interesting statement you just made there that you're guaranteeing consistency without it requiring to be productivity on your part.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: That's really the essence because to be held accountable for productivity in a highly visible way, in other words people can check, is deeply depressing to me.

Dean: Right. I agree 100% and to be paid on that output or paid on that really it was just-

Dan: I'll be productive for my own purposes but that someone else should be scrutinizing me or observing me do that. I find that an obnoxious feeling.

Dean: Right, I agree.

Dan: We're talking about telling the truth. I think it's important for people to tell the truth about that sort of thing. Often times and I can remember earlier childhood that I would say well I don't like doing that and they said, well you're going to. Part of growing up is to get over the feeling of not liking something and doing it anyway. There's got to be a bypass, there's gotta be a hidden tunnel here around here.

Dean: Yeah, me too exactly.

Dan: I wonder what's really behind the closet there. I'm going to go into the closet and see if there's another ... We're talking about priority me at 70s' Are you 50 yet?

Dean: I just turned 50 yeah.

Dan: Yeah, you're just 50 but we see it with greater insight from a backward distance when look at it but I think both of us are really really describing our emotional state and our psychological state and emotional state. We didn't stuff it down. We said no no no, there's something about the way that I want to do this that's more important than how I'm being told to do it.

Dean: Yes.

Dan: Talking about the truth, we're talking about the truth about procrastination but the deeper truth is why procrastination is going off as an alarm bell. That's how I'm more and more seeing it is that when you're procrastinating, an alarm bell is going off. It's like there's dials and one of the dials just went into red and you're saying, okay I'm procrastinating so what's happening here.

You have to go a little bit deeper and for me you've just put your finger on as where I am being observed and being told I have to be productive on a consistent basis and I'm being observed all along the way in that. That's not okay.

Dean: The people at the bowling alley were surprisingly uninterested in Neil and I socializing with our friends that were in the arcade while we were at the bowling alley there. They were that interested in us going in and being host and visiting with our friends, that wasn't what they were interested in.

Dan: The other thing is it's a bit of a dangerous activity if I remember the bowling alleys before the automatic pin-starters came.

Dean: They were automatic. When something goes wrong, we would have to go back there but most of the time we're manning the counter and the snack bar and handing out shoes and running to the back to untangle the string. If the pins got tangled up, that's what we were doing but it was still a job. It was literally a legitimate J-O-B with somebody with peak looking out over us this grumpy old man who was the owner of the bowling alley.

Dan: What you're saying here is that Pete really wasn't interested in your transformative growth as a person?

Dean: Right. That's exactly it. We had to spray all these shoes and put them all in the right slots and do all the things and unfreeze the buns for the hot dog, all of that. There's a lot of stuff that had to be done in just the right way.

Dan: Sure. By somebody. This is a week where I just read on Monday, this is the following Sunday when we're having this presentation, but a fast food restaurant in one of the western states is now got a robot that-

Dean: I saw that too.

Dan: Apparently, the early reports are that the robot is probably okay with this activity.

Dean: Yes exactly. As if so.

Dan: Does not find it boring, showed no signs of fatigue, didn't slack off. This is why it's important for human beings to tell the truth about this because if they don't, you do not want to be in competition with that robot.

Dean: That's right. Let's go through the columns here so let's start with the truth. In column one, you feel that you have so much that you should be doing that it's overwhelming to think about it all.

Dan: Yeah. You do yours in the morning, your procrastination thing. I do mine in the evening because I like to have it handled before I go to sleep. I have to tell you at the end of the evening I go through about a 5 or 10-minute period saying geez, I got so much here, I got so much to do, where do I start? I'm very very aware that this visits me every evening.

I have these feelings to come, one feelings every evening but I said yeah, but as soon as you write them down and you can see them all together then you will immediately know which one is number one, which is number two, and which is number three and that's all that matters. I said oh, okay and I do it and why I do it. It's very very interesting that if I went to bed without actually identifying the three for tomorrow, I would be in serious trouble waking up in the morning.

Dean: Wow, that's interesting. That's something that makes a lot of sense. I'm the one who likes to experiment with things and experiment with different approaches and mindsets for things. This idea of coming into the day with it already a perfect plan for the day is something that I've always been resistant to.

Dan: Here again I want to leave a lot of latitude and slag is that you've got years and years of having things that really work in the way that you want them to work. All we're pointing out is two people can have two different approaches to this.

Dean: I think you're right. I wake up in the morning and it's so reliable. It knows, procrastination knows what it's got for me. Never misses a day.

Dan: I've been doing this now in three quarters in a row in strategic coach and somebody came in. And when was it? It was Friday because this is Sunday so it's Friday in Chicago. He came in and he didn't say it to me, he said it to one of my team members. He said, we're not going to do that procrastination thing again are we? We've already done it twice. Two previous quarters, and he came up to me about an hour after we did he says, I have to tell you. He says, I was out of control and he says that exercise just got my back in control. It doesn't in about 15 minutes. He had gone through and picked the three items and then he had thought them through and gave himself commitments and identified what the new capability was and that was at the end of 15 minutes. Then was in a group where they talked about it, each person talked about it for five or six minutes and he came up to me and he said, that was my overwhelm talking at the beginning of the day. He was overwhelmed.

I think of this telling the truth and the other thing Dean, everything should be able to be solved once and never be a problem again. This involves a changing world so you're changing, you're changing in relationship, to a changing world and my sense is that this is just natural. You would be challenged to do this every single day just because of the passing of time.

Dean: It's interesting. We look at it that part of this kicking this 25-year framework and anchoring it with what's not going to change. One of the things that's not going to change is our brain and the way that we deal with these things.

Dan: It's like whiskers.

Dean: Yes. Standard issue right?

Dan: Yeah. I wanted so I never have to shave again, well that's not how whiskers work.

Dean: That's Warren Buffett's big secret.

Dan: Yeah. Warren Buffett as they told him 20 years ago, why don't you invest in high tech and he said, I don't know if the stuff's gonna last and he had just gotten into Gillete, he had taken a major position in Gillete. He said yeah, I have a pretty good feel that 25 years from now there's going to be more men and they're all going to be probably shaving so he says I'll invest in something that's going to stick around.

Dean: We go to bed at night they're going to wake up with whiskers.

Dan: The second column, your biggest breakthroughs have always been triggered by courage but you now wish you could see future ones without being so challenged. I don't know if you've heard people say this but I enjoy afterwards being courageous but I don't like the fact that the future is going to require me to be courageous too.

Dean: I think you're right and I think we've all been in that situation where you realize that you wish that you could solve it all right now. Even Stephen Covey used to talk about that, the laws of the farm right. You can't just plant the seeds once and that's it, you've got to continually till the field and continually tend to the crops and all of that stuff. When you do it continually, it continually works.

Dan: There is a laziness and I've read an article once. They said that if you look at almost all the greatest leaders both military leaders and political leaders, they were known in their lives as being really quite lazy.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and I think what they were lazy about was involving themselves in the type of repetitive type activity that you're talking about. In other words, they knew that their greatest use didn't come from filling up all their time and being busy all their time. They're really keen from certain crucial decisions in certain situations that produce extraordinary outcomes.

But you have to deal with yourself. You go back to your grade school, your report cards, my report cards, our mutual report cards. My teachers could tell that what they wanted to teach me I wasn't taking it seriously. And yours, you weren't getting the lesson of working hard and being really busy and being concentrated. You were doing a bad job of doing any improvement in that area.

Dean: I'm already deemed able to achieve excellent results with what seemed like little effort, imagine if he applied himself. I think beyond excellent, it's the saying if I'm already getting excellent results what would be the point. It's almost like I bought into the 80% approach early on like that. The incremental value of the extra strike me as not worth it right.

Dan: It was like your teachers were a member in the old days I knew IBM sales people. Used to be late 70s and 80s and if you did really well, they'd cut your sales territory in half.

Dean: Right.

Dan: What your teachers were doing, they were trying to cut your sales territory in half.

Dean: Yeah. Well, he got 100% but he didn't look like it was hard.

Dan: Now for Dean, it's now 200%. See what I mean? There's this weird notion-

Dean: Their interpretation, the measurement wasn't based on the result. It was the effort that they're calling into question.

Dan: They were worried about your character and soul Dean.

Dean: Oh man.

Dan: hey had images of you being in Las Vegas or something.

The third one is a very interesting one is that you don't let anyone know that you have failed them. You just don't do that so this whole notion of talking about procrastination as an open subject, why would I ever do that.

I just see my credibility going down, I can see things being whispered but that depends on the kind of world you're in. Like sharks cannot afford even small cuts. Shark conference, you can't have any blood in the water because things get out of hand. Things don't get out of hand, they get out of fin very very quickly. So the thing here is that what I'm noticing if I've had one really really positive impact with this in strategic coach is the open discussion of procrastination.

Dean: Right.

Dan: I've noticed a real relaxation coming into the workshop rooms over the last half year as this has become an open discussable topic. I was really struck this quarter and that was the beginning of the quarter so I've done both four workshops so far.

I have yet to have someone come in the room and say, I had a bad quarter. My feeling is that in terms of good and bad experiences that they had, there wasn't any difference over the last half year but what was really different is how they were judging themselves. Especially about this particular issue of procrastination.

Dean: I always find the discussions that we have about it are always ... It's almost like this sense of relief getting it out there.

Dan: Our buddy Joe, Joe polish, his lifetime dedication and his commitment to the whole issue of addictions of the different kinds of addictions. He talks about the tremendous power of the AAA groups and actually at Canyon Ranch, they have one every evening at Canyon Ranch. Babs has never been to one and Joe came down spent three or four days with us.

Anyone who's listening Joe's very open about this, we're not telling tales out of school here but Babs went and it's not an issue that Babs has but she came back and she said, I really like that meaning. She said, I would go just to be in the meeting. She said is really interesting because she said everybody's telling the truth and it feels good. She says it really feels good to be in a setting where everybody's telling the truth.

Dean: Yeah, that's great. That's the transformation right, that's called for you. Always tell the truth about your fears in order to trigger new commitments and courage.

Dan: Yes, which in turn produce higher levels of capability and confidence.

Dean: Wow. It's such an amazing adventure being an entrepreneur because your whole life becomes a laboratory. You can set it up any way you want, work on any problem or challenge or anything that you want.

If I would look back at my entrepreneurial life, looking back to my third grade deemed with the report card that said that if I could look ahead to my 50 year old self here and realized that I really, stick with that, that's a winning formula. I have gotten through my entire life to this point so far with that. I think that we would be a great life metaphor for me.

Dan: I've been thinking about that very topic myself and a couple of my team members. It was some social setting I don't remember what the social setting was. Because I do a lot of checking out the beginning of my life with the life here now, I've got pretty good memories. I've always had very very good memories of hundreds and hundreds of different situations in my life.

I'm about as close at 72 soon to be 73, I'm about as close at 72 to the Dan Sullivan who is seven years old as I began since I was there. I said, you had it right at seven and maybe entrepreneurs are the people who just have a real solid base when their children ... They said, I'm going to live by these rules not the rules that other people are telling me to live by.

Dean: Right. That is fascinating. Maybe we can have a conversation about this in an upcoming conversation that, I wonder what the impact of our entrepreneurs that we're interacting with, we're sharing and we're making it okay for them to admit that procrastination is a real thing. That the impact that their kids, if we can impact through them, the seven-year-olds that you're starting to see that procrastination dig in

Dan: Kids procrastinate just as much as we do. I talked to the parents and they said, I just can't get him to concentrate on this, I can't get him to focus on that They're late on their tests, they're late on their homework. I said, instead of having the conversation about you've got to do this and you got to do this, once you have a conversation about what's actually happening inside their minds and first of all just give them across that it's a really interesting conversation.

If you have a really great conversation about how they're thinking about this, they'll figure out what they have to do when they need to do it. It's not like you got to hit them with a cattle prod or something like that. First of all, they'll just cut you off and they'll go around you anyways.

It's not going to work but if I had had someone to talk to me about it not in a judgmental way but just to say, how are you looking at this, how is it showing up for you. I think that would be phenomenally nourishing and empowering for a child to have that type of conversation of just how they're thinking about it. Not what's going to happen to you if you don't get it in and everything-

Dean: No no. honestly and fully engaged in. You see it in action the three primary drivers of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy. That's really completely the driving, that's the raw materials there are very very clear.

Dan: I tell them the story how my mother dealt with me, as I go along there was enormous amount of wisdom there and she knew I hated school. I just did not like school and the reason is I was used to wandering a farm all day and now I had to sit in this desk and had to be in this room and everything was controlled by the hourly bell.

She said reading is more important than going to school and she said first grade when you go to school you're going to learn how to read. She said if you can read, you can go anywhere you want with your mind and I said, all right I'll do it.

Dean: That's the spirit. All right.

Dan: I wasn't going to school because you have to go to school, I was going to school because I was going to gain a great new capability and once I have that capability it was going to be better than wandering the farm and everything like that.

Then she told me that listening to the news and reading the news was more important than listening to my teacher because my teacher was only teaching me what she had been taught where I could make up my own mind about things and I would know lots of things that my teacher didn't and that got me. I would know things that my teacher didn't know, that was a huge payoff.

She gave me all these side bonuses but I had to go to school. You have to go to school and everything like that but I remember having conversations with her and I think that she was being good with me. She was remembering her own similar experiences.

Dean: I've been reading Seneca and look at letters from a stoic and you realize even then it's 35 BC the same human drives were ... It's amazing to think that.

Dan: Yeah anyway the hour slipped by very very quickly.

Dean: I enjoyed it. I always do. Everywhere I go Dan, people say how much they are enjoying hearing these conversations.

Dan: Actually one of our coaches he said he loved the total unpredictability of them.

Dean: Right. He told me that too, he came to me and said, he said you never know where it's gonna go. That's funny and that's true, that's what I love about it.

Dan: Anyway, we pretty well got through a whole line here at the scorecard.

Dean: Until next time, keep procrastinating.

Dan: Anna is going to be in touch to route because I have a new thing of just getting as many dates in the calendar as we possibly can.

Dean: I love it. I agree. I'm embracing that myself. okay cool. Thanks Dan.

Dan: I remember in the fall they break the middle of the night they put an hour back in.

Dean: I know like we get it back.

Dan: Yeah. The only question is what were they doing with that hour when it was missing that's what I don't know.

Dean: Okay Dan I'll see you.

Dan: Okay Dean, bye.

Dean: Bye.