Episode 4 of The Joy of Procrastination.
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep004
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Yes, Mr. Jackson.
Dean: How are you today?
Dan: Are you the coordinator? Because the woman who answered the phone call actually said that I'll be quite in touch with the coordinator.
Dean: That's me, yeah. I'm the coordinator. I'll be coordinating our podcast experience today.
Dan: You are actually recording this...
Dean: We are already recording and it's very efficient. That way, we never forget to record and I don't have to push any buttons which is very procrastination-free.
Dan: Yes, or it's procrastinator-friendly.
Dean: That's right. Exactly. That's so funny.
Dan: We talked when you came to your workshop and we had our lunch but then, we were at Joe Polish' Genius Network and from the stage, I did the procrastination priority and you joined me on stage and we ...
Dean: I did.
Dan: ... filled the Q&A. It's got momentum, I'll tell you, it's got momentum.
Dean: Well, I think everybody that we ... oh, the comments that we're getting, of course now, the first two episodes are up live and so, people are commenting. The funny thing is, and I love to see is that they're saying, "Dan Sullivan procrastinates. There's hope for me." It's almost like we've come out of the shadows. I think you're absolutely right that I think people assumed that it's just them that procrastinate. It really is true. We speculated that and of course, you've had the experience of it with presenting to people in the workshops the idea and it being received with unanimous everybody does it.
Dan: Yeah. I mean we're out of the class and all we need now is the supreme court ruling that totally legitimizes us.
Dean: That's so funny.
Dan: Right. We are procrastinators, right.
Dean: That's what's going to happen so we need to -
Dan: I think that's the next thing.
Dean: That's going to happen, so I'll start working on things.
Dan: I'll tell you, yeah, I'm just coming up to the end of my workshop quarter so I have a brand new workshop series every quarter but I only use about seven weeks of the quarter. Actually, and I do, this quarter, I do 14. I have 14 workshops so that's 14 of the days and if I take everybody into account including Genius Network and I take one that I did with a special workshop called the Game Changer and another one with my team meeting, it's just slightly above 1,100 people. Boy, I don't think in my entire time as a coach, coming up with new ideas. This goes back legitimately, easily, 27 years. I don't think I've had a single idea and a single thought process around the idea that has just met with 100% of, not just approval but total enthusiasm and in many times, great gratitude and appreciation because it seems to lift the heavy burden from a lot of people's ... thinking about themselves.
Dean: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I have to tell you that since the last conversation we had, I've been thinking about something that you said in our last conversation and I want to go deeper with it because you mentioned that people, when we think about time, our immediate two thoughts are number one, that we're running out, the clock is ticking and we're running out of time and that all time is equal. I wanted to really get your deeper commentary on that because that's something I've been thinking about and having a lot of conversations about. I wonder if maybe if you could explain that a little more to me because I think there's really something there.
Dan: Yeah. I've given a lot of thought to that not directly going after it the way that you just remembered it but I'm just taking a look at a conversation that I had on Friday, so this was two days ago at my final Chicago workshop for the quarter. Then, I finished up with Toronto this week. I had three workshops this week. Somebody said that they were at Singularity University which has the ... it's the co-creation of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis in Silicon Valley and they pulled together from around the world, experts on exponential technologies. This person went there, I think it was about a three-day thing and came away and he says, "Boy ..." he says "... everything is spinning up so quickly," and he says "You know, I mean the world is moving faster and faster and faster." I just stopped it there and I repeated what he said and we had about 45 in the room and I said, "How many of you are actually experiencing that?" I have to say that without a actually systematic count, I would say there were maybe four or five hands that did not go up.
I said, "Well, that's really funny because I don't experience that at all. I know that's the prevailing narrative and it's repeated endlessly in the news media and that's sort of fictionalized on televisions and in movies." The commercials on television, those were ... actually two types of commercials talk about it. One are the technology commercials. That you need the very latest technology because you have to keep up because the world is going faster and faster. It comes from that side and then, on the other end of the spectrum are the prescription drugs at commercials which you are supposed to take ... while you're buying the latest speed up technology, you're supposed to be taking these drugs to counteract the stress.
Dean: To slow down.
Dan: Yeah. I got a feeling that we've got something of a joint enterprise here going on between the electronics company and the drug companies. It's kind of closed loop system, "Okay, we're finished with them. We'll send them over to you."
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Everybody talks about drug addiction. They're talking about illegal drug addiction but by far it's drug addiction. It's the stuff that's prescribed or even stuffs that you can buy off the shelf in the drugstore. It's stress, it's high stress. I first said to them, I said, "I'm aware of the narrative but I based my life," personally, long time before I created the coaching company but I think, absolutely, since I started the coaching company on don't go along with the general narratives. Be aware of what the general narrative, in other words, what the big story is out there of which way the world is going and these things are predictable and everything else. I said, "Because my experience from being an entrepreneur that all opportunity lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the general narrative.
I know you subscribe to this too, Dean ...
Dean: Mm-hmm.
Dan: ... is that it's just the opposite. If everybody is saying this, you know that the real breakthrough is directly in the opposite direction. I'm just going to say that because I know you've got a lot to say about that because I know you do the same thing with all your strategies that people are constantly running around chasing their tail in various markets, and you showed them that there's actually only eight things that they really have to think about.
Dean: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think that when you talk about the speeding up or the sense that things are speeding up ... I was just having a conversation yesterday about this but I think what's really changed is more the frequency that we're ... I think that's the right word. We talk about communication like the frequency of the cadence or the delivery of new information to us was, in the last 25 years, if we look at that, that it was really ... a phone call was the most urgent sort of fastest thing and we had, the technology was pagers, that somebody could page you to let you know that they were trying to reach you but other than that, it was physical mail that would arrive and a newspaper. A newspaper would come everyday or the news was on at 6:00 so you would get this daily cadence and what it seems now is the thing that's changed is the frequency that the new information is constantly, we have access to it instantly. There's no delay in it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I think that, maybe it lead a sense that time is moving faster and that those kind of things affect the way that we perceive time but there's a simple solution in a lot of ways and I that's, I think something you've done brilliantly is shield yourself from that frequency. You choose the frequency.
Dan: Yeah. It's really interesting. I mean just a little 30-second insight into that. I've just been following the World Series because a lifetime Cleveland Indian fan and it's not very frequently that the Indians are still playing in late October, it happens. They're going into the World Series with the Chicago Cubs and the Cubs haven't been to the World Series since 1945, the year after I was born and the Indians haven't won a World Series since 1948. I think that it's really interesting. What I noticed is, and I noticed this with everything on TV, the commentary is where the urgency is. What I do is I switch off the sound and I just watch the game. The game, baseball is one of those sports that doesn't speed up. If anything, the games have gotten longer because of various delaying tactics that the managers introduced and everything else.
If you just watch the game without the sound, it doesn't look any different from baseball in the 1950s and it's the same rules. If you designated ...
Dean: All the graphics and infographics and all that.
Dan: Yeah, the infographics. If I don't listen to the commentary, there's nothing particularly different. I'm watching it but I'm noticing, I'm not having any real emotional impact other than I'm happy when, well, it's the Cubs last night, but my team is winning and I feel really, really good about that but I'm not really responding emotionally. If I turn the sound on and I listen to the commentators, all of a sudden, there's this urgent emotion I noticed about it. They're building up the tension of it. I think that this is happening not just in sports area but the news generally, even the weather, even the weather reports. We used to have weather, now, it's climate change. Now, it's sort of polar vortex and the hurricanes get names like there's evil, natural creatures coming to do those. I think with the increase in hyping, the hyping of things, that, I think gives a sense of speeding up. That's not just one thing in your life but everything you've seen attached to advertising and everything else, there's a hype factor to it.
First of all, it really engages your emotions so you're using up emotional energy and I don't think we have non-limited amount of it. Consequently, we can get worn out fairly quickly by being bombarded by this and then, we're asked to process enormous amounts of information which we don't really know is, of any value but we've kind of gathered the process to find out and I think that we're stressed out. I think all those give this perception of time speeding up.
Dean: I want to make sure that I got the essence of what you meant when you were saying that we have this sense that we're running out of time.
Dan: Yeah. Well, here's the thing about it, is a switch over happened just generally on the planet probably in the last two centuries where, before, most people on the planet, some exceptions like some western European countries, Great Britain and United States, where you were born is where you stayed for your entire life. There's society. Society had classes of who is on top. Not many people in the middle, it's mostly the people, five or six dimension, top dimensions might be aristocrats, it might be bureaucrats and everything. They were on top and then, everybody else was low and they were in trades and that, but if you're born into it, you stayed in that your whole life.
There wasn't really a lot new happening on either level. Generally speaking, there was no movement between levels. If you're born low, you have no chance to go high. If you were born high, you could be a failure but you would always be a failure at that level. You don't drop to bottom. Starting about two centuries ago, all of a sudden, the system opened up more that how you were born and who you were born at, which is just the starting point and depending on what kind of brain you were born with and what kind of emotional energy, you could aspire to get to the top. There is a lot of opportunity in some places where you could actually do that. By the same token, people at the top were no longer guaranteed lifetime security at that level. They could drop to the bottom.
Consequently, there's kind of like a race, everybody's involved in the same race and the prizes are really scarce. You could have 1,000 people competing for a particular position or a particular payoff and one of them is going to win it and 999 aren't. One of the factors, Dean, that I think that consider that I don't have enough time and the other thing is that things are speeding up, is that in many ways, people feel an intense increase that they are competitors in a race for very scarce payoffs.
Dean: I got you. Yeah, I think that's right on. You always have a view that's really grounded in a broad understanding of history. I noticed that about you, that you would look not only to our modern ... the times that we've experienced but I mean even you have a very great sense of the history of what happened for us to even get here and how that affects what's happening now or how it's different from what we're experiencing now.
Dan: Yeah. Thanks for saying that. The reason is that the famous question, I forget who it was but the person being interviewed was Jeff Bezos, the great creator of Amazon and he was asked this question, he says, "What's going to change ..." somebody, he says "Well, Mr. Bezos, what's going to change over the next 10 years?" He said, "Well, actually ..." he says "... the better question is what isn't going to change over the next 10 years." I don't have to be busy about describing what's changing in the world because virtually, everybody else is doing that, and what I want to do from history to say can I find parallels of what's happening today 200 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago and I said, "Well, it seems to me that human beings aren't changing that much."
If you could speak the language and especially entrepreneurs like if I was an entrepreneur and I could be time-traveled back to the, let's say the main marketplace in Rome 2,000 years ago and I could speak the language and I didn't have any telltale things that would alert to people that I was a time traveler, but the conversations that the entrepreneurs would be talking about I suspect would be fairly similar, related to cash flow, related to markets, related to the availability of skilled people and everything else and new techniques that were ... somebody's got better marketing techniques than others, somebody's got a better location. You would totally understand the conversation and you say "Well, that hasn't changed at all," but it's very, very clear that the conditions and the environment in which it happened have changed unrecognizably.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: I'm picking up voices on your side, Dean, for -
Dean: Yeah. You know, Dan, I've arrived at the ... I got to Breakthrough Blueprint happening here in Florida starting on Monday. I was here to check in to my room and my room wasn't ready yet so I've found a nice spot to sit over here but there'll some people. I wonder -
Dan: I just want to alert the listeners ...
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: ... that you are…
Dean: That's something I'm actually ...
Dan: I just want them to know that this one's legitimate, that you're actually doing this for money.
Dean: That's right. That's right. That works sitting here.
Dan: I didn't want them thinking you're in and out in a sports fair or something like that.
Dean: Oh no, no, this is real. I'm sitting on the famous white couches that I often post pictures of on my Facebook wall where we sit and hatch evil schemes for all the people that are here. Yeah.
Dan: The white touches.
Dean: It's a beautiful Florida day today.
Dan: Anyway, I mean this is in response to the reference about getting historically grounded.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: I'm continually trying to find the sameness of human nature. In other words, reinforcing in my mind the sameness of human nature so I can separate it very sharply that what we're dealing with here is not a change of human nature, what we're dealing with is a change of human circumstance.
Dean: Right. You brought a wonderful context to the Abundance 360 event either two or three years ago now that when we ... I think it was last year, 2015. You opened up the conference and we're all there in Beverly Hills and you brought this wonderful context is I want you to imagine that we're gathered here today, same thing, same level entrepreneurs, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and we're gathered here for the same purpose that we're gathered here today but it's not 2015, it's 1915. It's 100 years ago. That we're here to see and catch a glimpse of what is going to change or what's coming down the pipe here in the next 25 years, and you've proceeded to talk about what we might be talking about that day if it was 1915.
We'd be having a conversation about electricity and how it's making its way around the country and imagining a future when the whole country is wired with electricity and what changes that would bring. What opportunities that would create, and the automobile. We would have ... over the next 25 years, from 1915 to 1940, heard about the telephone and the moving pictures. Maybe not television yet but moving pictures. I mean this whole idea of all the advances. If you take any 25-year period in history and in the last century anyway and look at the things that are happening, it's easy to see when you're looking backwards where the opportunity was. If you have the advantage, yeah.
Dan: Yeah. If you were really being informed like Peter Diamandis says in Abundance 360 that this is where the smart money is. Not that you can pick individual companies and stocks but it will be companies that are taking advantage of these ...
Dean: Exponential opportunities
Dan: ... and especially combinations of them. One of the things I've learned from Peter, it's never one technology, it's the convergence, he calls it, the convergence catalyst, that it's always ... it's the automobile plus electricity plus the telephone and saying that actually converge. The places that are the most cutting-edge on the planet are where a lot of newest technologies converge and become normal capabilities for people.
I could take it back. I've taken it back, I'm gone much back farther than the 14th century but 1415s had some remarkable ones like waterwheel technology in Europe. Because Europe has a lot of mountains and a lot of rivers and a lot of streams and there were brand new waterwheel and this is a real breakthrough because you're not using human labor, you're not using animal labor, and it's perpetual. A waterwheel will go 24 hours a day from a upstream source. Eye glasses came in which extended craftsman's lives by ... especially where people were doing fine work where they had to look at things, it extended the craftsman's lives. The printing press, obviously, the great one and so forth.
What I'm saying is that the people who were really in the center of the places, because these were northern European places, mostly in Germany and Holland where all these technologies were being experienced on a day by day basis, they would have had the same sort of perception points and speeding up points. There's just not enough time. They were ...
Dean: What's this, another newspaper?
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is that the printing press brought out these news, they were called broadsheets because they just printed the news on two sides of a big sheet and then, they folded it into 16 parts and you would read it like a pamphlet but then, you would just unfold it. These were hot items, printers popped up all over the place and they were spreading the news and everything like that. If you were right there, and you have to understand whether things are the same speed or speeding up has to do with what you're use to or what you were born into. It's not an absolute speeding up, it's just speeding up in relationship to what's you're used to.
Dean: It has to be relative to something, that's exactly right.
Dan: Yeah, it's always relative. It's always relative. The other thing is that certain nervous systems are really made for that and certain nervous systems aren't. I can tell when I need someone whether they're a city person or outside of the city person. Like I was born on a farm. I lived the first 11 years of my life on a farm. I lived in a very small town and periodically, over my life, I've gone back to high school reunions where half the class that I graduated with in 1962, that was my fourth year high school graduation. Yeah, they're more or less still living around there close by and they're living the same pace of life they were and I live in one of the fastest growing major, major wealthy cities in the world.
There's a lot of cities in Africa and Asia that are exploding in size and complexity and everything else but Toronto where we live, and Dean, you know the whole area really, really well, I came here 45 years ago. It was 2 million, now, it's 6 million and it's predicted to be 10 million in 20 years. The city changes in front of your eyes. I feel very comfortable about it. I don't feel any problem and it doesn't seem fast to me, it just seems interesting to me.
Dean: I think that is, in fact, when you have a 25-year framework which is something that I really thank you for bringing to me, is that, it changes everything. It does immediately feel like time slows down and especially when you go and you realize how much of what we're actually is consuming us right now, what's actually going to even be there 25 years from now. You realize what are the things that are going to be even important then. You mentioned Jeff Bezos as ... that's really a .. I've thought about what he said a lot because the way he talked about that was that saying he doesn't know what's going to change in 10 years but he knows what's not going to change is that people are going to want as wide a selection of products that they can get, they're going to want them as cheaply as they can get them and they're going to want them as fast as they can.
Every technology and everything they adopt is only in service of those three things. Warren Buffet is another guy with that 25-year vision. The reason very famously that he doesn't invest in technology is because he can't see who the clear winner is going to be in 25 years. That time frame conversation makes a big difference when you put a scale on it. In the scale of 25 years, the speed and velocity of the day is not as relevant.
Dan: Well, I think the other thing that happens when it's 25 years, it gives you a time to make 25 years from now, actually, the way you want it instead of just being given what's available over that period of time. I think you can sit down and talk to someone ... If you could have your biggest dream and I happen to write some things around us, it'd be measured in money and all sorts of things and I said "Would you be really willing to work for that?" They said, "You know, I would but I don't think I have enough time to actually pull that off." Then I say, "Well, what if I give you 25 years to pull that off?" and they say "25 years. Oh sure. No, I could it before 25 years." Okay. What's really interesting ... so I just added one piece of information.
Dean: Yes. Yeah, you've got more time. You automatically bought some more time.
Dan: Yeah. We've just done that with The 10x Mind Expander where you take last year's income, the company income in this case and I just multiply it by 10 and then, I asked them all sorts of questions. I can tell the tension level in the room starts to go up as I do this because I know they're bouncing this off. They don't even realize they're doing this but they're bouncing that off probably a very, very short frame deadline to get this.
Dean: Yes. Yes.
Dan: I can just see their ... I had them wired up. I'd be able to measure their heart rate going up. Yeah, the cortisol ... I mean you could take blood samples, you'd notice the cortisol which is the stress drug going up. Because they're bouncing 10 times off three years or five years, whatsoever, and then, at the end, I say, "Okay. Now, you've done that, you see the logic of how you could do it. Now, I'm going to give you 25 years. How do you feel about it?" You can see the whole, it's like "Whoa."
Dean: Wow.
Dan: It just drops down. I gave them a curve, it's a 25-year curve. I said "You're here at the bottom of the curve. How far of the curve before you hit your 10 times goal?" They put a dot, usually it's not more than halfway up the curve which would be 12 and a half years. Some go 15 years and then, I have them draw an arrow out to the right and put a date down. If we're doing it today, that says 2016, we'll do the end of 2041. That's when you do the 25 years and you put a dot between now and 25 years out and you put a date to it. It'd be something like, it'll be 2028, December 31, 2028. The moment they get that clarity that they've got all the time, then, they relax and all of a sudden, things slow down. Things really, really slow down. They said "Boy, that gives me a lot of time. It gives me a lot of time." You switch from not having enough time to having a lot of time.
Dean: Then, that immediately then triggers the procrastination.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I'm just thinking about what a project is assigned and the deadline is given that it seems like a long time and we relax in that, we've got time to ... we got to ...
Dan: Yeah, we do. We do. Yeah. Then, the word, the procrastination say and I'm positioning procrastination more and more as a good thing ...
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Dan: ... in my workshops. I said, "I want to tell you right now, every time you procrastinated it, you've done it for a very intelligent reason." Okay. That's the good part of procrastination, the bad part is you didn't find out what the reason was.
Dean: Yes. Now, this is our exercises of figuring out why.
Dan: Yeah. Well, Dean, let me ask you the same question about the two things that you brought up, I don't have time of speeding up.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I don't have enough time and all time is the same. We haven't really gone into that all time is the same ...
Dean: Yes.
Dan: ... part of this. Before we go deeper with that conversation, I'd like to ask you the question, how have you dealt with the general narrative? Because you seemed from the outside anyway, and that's we're all good friends stage, we all put on a good show.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: You do seemed to kind of do things that other people would sort of say leisurely. There seems to be a leisurely quality about you and you have a leisurely manner about you. I'm just wondering you weren't always that way and now, that's a result of some conscious strategies that you've actually come up with over the years.
Dean: Well, one of the things that I did that is maybe the most useful and guiding thing that I've done is now, 17 years ago, 1999, I spent some time thinking through, pushing the accelerator pedal, looking forward and asking myself how will I know I'm being successful. That was a change in the way that most success kind of literature or methodologies think about successes like setting aspirations and really referring to it as something in the future. I spent a lot of time with Thomas Leonard who is a great man. He was the founder of Coach University and really, was a pioneer in coaching kind of world. Thomas and I became really good friends and his guidance and as we actually worked on a program tailored called A Perfect Life. One of the things that was part of this is defining success and so, but defining it in present terms. The statement was I know I'm being successful when, not I know I will be successful when.
It helps to stop, detach from any kind of aspirational sense of time and look at really, what is it that I'm looking for, because we really only get to experience our lives today. It's only in the day that ...
Dan: In the present.
Dean: In the present moment. Yeah. When I looked at that, it was different ways of answering the question or finishing the statement, I know I'm being successful when. For me, my top three have been that I know I'm being successful when I can wake up everyday and ask what would I like to do today and that I know I'm being successful when my passive revenue exceeds my lifestyle needs. That sense of, it's like one provides the other in a way for me. That's been something that -
Dan: Some people who are listening to us may not quite get the distinction on passive income because there's ... The whole general public is listening to our podcast and that some people's ... Yeah. Just in case.
Dean: What I mean by that is recurring revenue that's coming in detached from my personal effort in obtaining it everyday and I'm not working ... it's I'm being paid for a work that I've done in the past that's continuing to yield income in the present and -
Dan: Yeah. Free to take investments, free to take interests and also, if you've got a thing going, I mean lots of times I do myself. I have 15 other coaches and there's 114 workshops that are happening that have nothing to do with my efforts but they're working on a daily basis but the money comes rolling in as a result of that.
Dean: That's exactly it. That gives an amazing freedom. That gives an amazing sense of that literally to know that I can wake up and say what would I like to do today. Not that I'm tied into I have to do this today to pay my mortgage at the end of the month or whatever. A lot of times, a lot of people get into a situation where they're forced into doing something today that they have to do because they have to make the money to pay for their other expenses sort of thing.
Dan: Right. That's good. That's second one. What's the third one?
Dean: That's the second one. My third one is that I'm working on projects I'm excited about and doing my very best work. The point of it is not to be idle or to get to a point where I'm just laying back fishing or golfing everyday or whatever, it's about that I'm working on projects that I'm excited about. I'm able to, in having that conversation over a wonderful lunch with my dear friend, Dan, have a conversation that turns into an exciting conversation about procrastination and to be able to say let's create a podcast around that and allows us to do our very best work.
I think that even in having these conversations, we're challenging each other to different levels of thinking about something and that is stimulating and exciting. You'd never want for that to end. If everything you're doing is you're working on projects that excite you and you're doing your very best work, it's something that that is perpetually true. That's been true and exciting and motivating or in your words, for 17 years and that statement holds equally true today. I can anticipate that that would be equally 17 or 70 years from today.
Dan: Yeah, and the interesting thing about this and I'm just going to introduce the word, control here and my sense is that things don't speed up for you if you're being these three things, that you don't have any sense of running out of time and the other thing is that time is not equal to each other. It's an up and down and it's multi-color and it's still the wrap around the sound, I mean there's not a stayness about what develops out of you living according to those three frameworks. I think anyone listening to this podcast would feel themselves relaxed just picturing you being able to do this and then, of course, being able to picture themselves do it.
Dean: Right. That's the thing is when you look at that ... I've been thinking a lot about the inter-relation between money and time and our sense of them. That's why I was really curious about what you meant about that not all time is created equal.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's not equal overtime, in other words, how I was able to operate 25 years ago and how I'm able to operate let's just take a day, a workshop day today compared to 25 years ago. Just the same amount of time, that's from nine to five and the structure of the workshop is the same, so there's no difference there but how much strategic coach and personally me, I'm getting paid for it, well, it's exponentially higher. The other thing is the team I have around me that have organized everything so all I have to do is do the coaching and be 100% attentive. That's actually different.
Dean: I laugh sometimes because I sit in the workshop and I see all the team around the perimeter of the room there and it struck me. I'm thinking about you starting out that there probably was a time where there were ... right now, there's probably as many staff in the peripheral that were actually in the workshops that you first started.
Dan: Oh yeah. Yeah. My average workshop now, I have minimum of eight people team members and they're all there for different reason. They each have a different area of alertness and they're paying attention to different things. My very first workshop, and I felt tremendous about my very first workshop because I had six people who were actually writing checks, whereas Friday, I had 18 members and I had 45 check writers and the other thing is that the check is incredibly bigger and the quality of the entrepreneur writing the check is radically better than it was 25 years ago.
I mean four things, but each of these is the multiplier. Each multiplies the other so it's not just ... if you multiply five times five times five times five, it's 700 times. It's not five times, five times were ... That's what I mean about quality being different but I would say that if I took your three concepts and you wake up in the bed in the morning and say, "What am I going to do today with a smile on your face?" the second thing is that your passive income is greater than your lifestyle requirements. The other thing is that everything you're working on are things that you love to do and you're doing your very best at them. You started that 19 years and I'm sure you had a day or days or weeks or months back then when you are operating within that framework and it was wonderful. It was better than anything you ever had before.
From working with Thomas Leonard, you know that you had clearly made a transformation, but you, Dean Jackson, in 2016, operating within those three things. It's exponentially greater quality. The time is an exponentially greater time experience than it was 19 years ago.
Dean: Yes, you are absolutely right. I think that that's where ... without having that stint of how important time freedom is to me in a overall definition of success for me, I would may have fallen into a trap that I see a lot of my contemporaries and my friends fall into. That they get into a situation where the money is going up and up and up and their involvement and their stress and their time commitment and their effort continues to go up and up and up and their actual freedom is less and less and less. That's sad, without I think having that view, without having that guide post or that understanding of the map of the territory of how will I know when I get there being successful. Is this compromising my true definition of the success that I want to live in my life.
Dan: Yeah. The thing I'd like to do here is use your three principles and I'd like to take it back to the procrastination, what stops people. My feeling is, let's go back to maybe you a year before you came up with these principles. Anyone out there today and they're being faced with a necessity of taking changes and I just very quickly state their situation in regard to your three principles. They wake up in the morning, first of all, after a not great night sleep, maybe too little sleep and fresh sense of stress and pressure when they went to bed. Certainly, an equal sense of stress, getting up in the morning and their first thought is God, all the things that I have to do today.
Dean: Yeah. Well, first of all, they wake up with an alarm clock to get to ...
Dan: Yeah, potentially, yeah.
Dean: To get their day started so that they can get in the car and commute to where they got to be.
Dan: They're looking forward to a day which is stacked with things that they have to do. The second thing is they have to do that day because their active income is barely paying for their lifestyle.
Dean: Right. There's the thing is like that as a guide post is I realized early on that the trap to avoid falling into was to lead with lifestyle and chase with revenue. My data and then, to ...
Dan: That's a beautiful trait. That's my four seasons principle.
Dean: Right. That one ...
Dan: I don't use the four seasons anymore because one of my more recent experiences with four seasons was where I was told a bold face live by a very, very close friend of mine, and so, I have very negative experience which related to the four seasons. I'm still shaking by that experience, you know what I mean?
Anyway, this is an inside joke, everybody who's listening, it had to do with a surprise birthday party I had when I turned 70 and Dean was the hitman who got me into attending ...
Dean: Won't you come and have dinner? Why don't you and Babs come and have dinner with me at Four Seasons?
Dan: Yeah, we'll come for dinner. Yeah. All of the other people that are here, you want to see the room where I do my ...
Dean: Breakthrough Blueprint.
Dan: Breakthrough Blueprint, yeah. As smooth a liar as I've ever seen in my life, you know what I mean? It shook my confidence, yeah.
The third one, Dean, just to finish off here, the third one is they don't get to work on things that they love doing and they basically, probably minimize the amount of energy they're going to put into it because it's not going to be any different tomorrow or next week or next year or next 20 years. They're always ...
Dean: Right. It's almost like they get to fasten their seat belts and get through it.
Dan: Yeah. You could just see the radical difference in the three things we talked about. There isn't enough time, things are speeding up and everything's equal to everything else and things like that. Having said that, Dean, this saying which is a wonderful formula for a perfect life, you're still procrastinating.
Dean: Yes. Yes. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. I think what I'm seeing and sensing now about the difference in the times is that in order to get things oriented towards that future, if you think about something that's a recurring revenue or a passive revenue, it requires some investment mentality or investment thinking, of investing time today that's not going to have a reward in the moment and it's not going to pay off until the future. We are investing in creating something that is going to have a recurring revenue element to it or building a knowledge product or a course or something that's going to have legs in the future.
That, I was thinking whether you were that ... maybe what you were saying about all time is not created equal or what you actually spend your time on. I was wondering ...
Dan: Yeah, I mean Einstein who was, I think the greatest scientist, physicist who ever lived, for the obvious reasons, obviously, had a genius level mind, in mathematical language had created something that was game-changing and everybody knew it immediately when he did it and then, he actually set up the conditions that people should look for to determine whether he was actually wrong. That's a true scientist. You not only make a prediction but you also say, "If I'm wrong, then, this will happen or this won't happen." He actually gives the measuring stick for determining whether he's right or wrong. That shows to me a complete and total intellectual honest, that you realize that you are making a prediction and it is theoretical until proved, actually proved correctly.
A lot of scientists today, I would say a minority of scientists actually have that intellectual honesty. The thing about Einstein was he was a great simplifier and somebody said, "Well, can you just explain what relativity is?" He says, "Yeah. Let's take 10 minutes," he says because it relates to time, he says, "Let's take 10 minutes." It's the last 10 minutes before you have to go away from the person you love for two years. This here the last 10 minutes together before there's a two-year absence. How long do those 10 minutes take? It was saying ... somebody said "Well, it's just like instant." It almost seems to go back instantly. He says "Right." He says "Okay." He said, "Picture another situation where you're in a situation where you are forced to put your hand on a hot stove for 10 minutes and you can't take it off, how long does the 10 minutes taking you?" "Well, it seems like a lifetime," he says "One 10 minutes, it goes like an instant, the other one feels like a lifetime," he says "That's relativity."
Dean: Yes. Well, I'll tell you something, that I was exposed between our last conversation and now to something that I've never heard of before but it's been fascinating to me. Are you familiar with the simulation theory or the simulation hypothesis?
Dan: No.
Dean: Elon Musk, and you'll find this fascinating. I'll send you a link to the video but somebody asked Elon Musk at a conference just a few months ago about this simulation hypothesis whether he was aware of it. In scientific circles, there's this hypothesis that we're actually living in a simulation and not in base reality. Elon Musk had said that he's thought about it a lot and he's had so many conversations about it but his brother had to make a rule that they would have no such conversations when in a hot tub. His big thinking was ...
Dan: Yeah. That's the point of the hot tub anyway.
Dean: Exactly. He said that there's basically, if we look at what's happened with video games in the last 40 years, 40 years ago, we had Pong which was computer with the rectangles and a ball and now, 40 years later, we have photo-realistic games that are played simultaneously by millions of players and within 45 years, we'll have virtual reality that is indistinguishable from reality and that if we -
Dan: At least visually, it will be achieved.
Dean: Visually. Right, right, yeah, yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Visually and maybe sound-wise, maybe visually and sound-wise, so that's ...
Dean: Yeah. If we track the progress, if we have any progress at all in artificial intelligence, that we'll be at a point where in our, as a society, we will evolve to the point or advance to the point where we will be able to create simulation games that are played by millions or billions of people and that, if we're on that trajectory, contention is that there's basically a one in billions chance that we're actually living in base reality and science is really ...
Dan: Yeah. Well ... Yeah.
Dean: Science really relates what we're discovering now more than anything, when you look at what's going on with DNA and what's going on with the smaller ... we get all the way down to planks which are the pixel equivalent of cells that we're getting to the point where everything ... we live in a quantized world. That everything is really digital. It's an interesting and fascinating thought.
Dan: Yeah, it is. I read his article, it's when they came out. I'd say that would be the subject of a whole another podcast on this.
Dean: Absolutely.
Dan: The reason I'm saying is that Tim Larkin, you know Tim, Tim is one of a top personal defense experts ...
Dean: Experts, yup.
Dan: Self defense experts and he showed me a video, showed our workshop a video of a subway, that kind of look like New York subway, I'm not sure what it was. It was certainly in the United States. There aren't that many subway systems in the United States and we're ... the security camera which is fixed at one end is panning down the entire subway car and everybody that can be seen is on their iPhone or their cellphones and they're looking at it. From the other end, the door opens and a guy who's not even masked comes out and he's got a gun and he's got a bag and he walks along to person to person and takes their watch or takes their wallet.
Funnily enough, he doesn't take their cellphones. He doesn't take their cellphones and he makes it true about, I would say 14 people that he's robbed and even the ones who have been robbed go back to looking at their cellphone. Okay. Then, he crosses the midway and there's doors there and then, the first guy gets up and he grabs the guy, pushes the gun away and starts pushing him back not with two hands but with one hand. He takes his cellphone and makes sure he puts it in his pocket, he goes at it.
Dean: Unbelievable.
Dan: Yeah. Then he pushes him down and then, the other people joined in and grab the guy and everything. That's the end of it. I said, "You know, you don't want to get too deep into the simulation that you forget that gravity is still gravity and robbers are still robbers."
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Dan: Yeah. The thing is that those people were so into another world that they can't feel what the actual reality. Anyway, this is a fantastic topic for another subject because one of the reasons for procrastination is that you're not actually living in the present.
Dean: Right. Let's pick that up on the next episode.
Dan: Yeah. Gee, this is a marvelous one.
Dean: I think so.
Dan: For two 10 quick starts in the Colby system who are clinically diagnosed as ADD, we did a remarkable job of staying on topic today.
Dean: We really did. I think it was fantastic. I can't tell you -
Dan: We may have to put this up as a standard, highest standard yet where we absolutely stayed on topic because you brought up a topic about something I had done on a previous podcast and we stuck to it. We did a lot of weaving but we kept coming back to the topic, so I think -
Dean: Yeah, and we left people with a cliffhanger.
Dan: Yeah. I'm really proud of us.
Dean: I mean really.
Dan: Yeah, I'm really proud of us. I'm really proud of us.
Dean: I am too. I am too. Well Dan, I always enjoy and look forward to these bright spots ...
Dan: Oh no.
Dean: ... on my calendar when I see them.
Dan: Yeah. I've come up with about three or four new concepts for the feature workshops that had been generated by the procrastination. We could probably get to some of those in our next one. I'm going to have Anna go ahead now and start locking them in three months ahead of time because ...
Dean: That's perfect. I'd love that.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dean: Okay, I will ...
Dan: That's certainly not something you would do, I would procrastinate also in doing that.
Dean: Exactly.
Dan: Anna would do that for me.
Dean: I'm excited about it. Okay, Dan.
Dan: Dean, have a great session ...
Dean: Thank you so ...
Dan: ... and I'm sure you'll bring this up and some of the material of the ...
Dean: Oh, absolutely. This is ...
Dan: ... at least the breaks discussions and the dinner discussions.
Dean: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, that can be in the main event.
Dan: Yeah, actually, so wonderful to talk to you.
Dean: Thanks Dan.