Today, Dean & Dan continue to revisit the Procrastination Priorities looking at the changes in their understanding of mindset 2: 'Always for a Good Reason' over the past year.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep020
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson, it's a profound pleasure to actually hear your voice.
Dean: Yes. Oh, my goodness. Let's have full transparency here, because this is not the appointed time that we were expecting to talk here.
Dan: Yes. I was just thinking, "Well, I don't think he's procrastinating. I don't think the phone call came through."
Dean: No.
Dan: "He's pondering whether he's gonna pick it up or not." That, you were immediately off the hook for, but just trying to think for our listeners to this podcast, I phoned in very faithfully at 12:30, our appointed time, but Mr. Jackson wasn't there. Over to you, Mr. Jackson.
Dean: Here's what happened. I have a beautiful Sunday here. I have nothing else on my calendar. This was my whole thing. I'm reading this morning. First of all, here's I think what contributed to this is that it is allergy season here, and I've taken some allergy medication, but I was reading about 11:00 or so, and then around 11:30 I think I must have dozed off, because I woke up literally, Dan, two hours later. Can you imagine? Pretty much it's like I woke up ... You know when you wake up and you have this startled thing of realizing what's happened? I looked at my clock and it was 1:37, and I'm thinking to myself, "There's no possible way. How could it possibly be 1:37?" Then I got our email. What was it like on your end? I can only imagine the dialing in and sitting there and thinking, "Okay, that's not usual." Usually we try and play a game of dialing in and both connecting at just exactly the right time.
Dan: Yeah. The title, our mindset, we're going through the scorecard for round 2 of the scorecard, and the second mindset that we're working on today is "always for good reasons." You've just provided me and you've provided the listening audience with a good reason. You fell asleep.
Dean: There you go.
Dan: Yeah. No problem. I'm not tightly scheduled, so it doesn't ...
Dean: That's good.
Dan: It doesn't probably matter.
Dean: I should tell you, we've got a very, very old alarm clock, so when Babs and I first met ... By the way, it's the 35th anniversary today of me actually meeting Babs.
Dan: Is that right? Wow.
Dean: Yeah. 1982, the 13th. On this day in 1982, August 13th, I met Babs for the first time, and game changer. Just total game changer in my life. We got together as a couple fairly quickly thereafter. Babs had a Sony 1970-ish, 1970-ish Sony alarm clock, little thing. Little plastic molded solid state. This is when they were first getting into solid state alarm clocks, and we still have it. We've changed many things in our life, but we still have this alarm clock. There's a point where it's just an old alarm clock, but then there's a point where it's epic. It's survived periods when we might have thrown it out and everything. Now it's reached that state where you can't throw it out because it's epic.
Dan: Then you gotta see how long it lasts. Yeah.
Dean: Yes. Then, it's got a little click on it, and it's strange because most alarm clocks, you put it in either the off position or in the on position for the alarm, but this one has a halfway point. Some nights when I'm going to bed, I'll set the alarm, the time, and I'll just forget. I'll just forget to reset the item. I'll get up late. Babs is a light sleeper up until about half way through the night, and then she becomes a deep sleeper. Anyway, it is a jarring feeling when it was 11:30 and you wake up, your eyes closed for a moment, then you wake up and it's 1:30.
Dan: That's exactly right.
Dean: Yeah. Anyway, one thing I should tell you that in the time that I've seen you last, which was just a couple weeks ago, and I don't know if I reflected this in one of our previous calls, but I bring out a book a quarter, one of my little books, and I wrote one on the procrastination priority. We have a team in our company that gets together and there's about 20 of them, and they read the book. Then we have a two-hour discussion of the book where everybody goes around, talks of what they got from the book. This one was spectacular because everybody had, in fact, discovered that they're a procrastinator as we ... One of our points about the procrastination priority is that everyone is a procrastinator and that they've felt that isolation, so they talked about it.
This was a great room for two hours where people could just feel okay about that. Not only okay about that, but that properly looked at, this procrastination is actually a very, very useful thing. One is that it points to what you should really be doing as soon as you can, but the other thing is that you discover all sorts of things about yourself. In the time since that talk, about four or five of the individuals, these are team members that have come up to me and said, "You know, I can't tell you how much of a difference this makes that I now have this insight about something that never could talk about, always felt badly about. Felt guilty, and now I don't."
Dan: That's so great.
Dean: It's really been an amazing thinking tool for me. Even these conversation and then my reflection on them afterwards. My thing on this, since we've been together, I'm back in Florida ... Where are you, by the way, now?
Dan: I'm in Toronto.
Dean: Oh, okay. I thought from your cell here. I have been, since I got back to Florida here, I always observe the types of procrastination that I run into, and one of the pattern of procrastination that I run into is the "I don't have to do any ... I'm not procrastinating on something that is due or something that is overdue. I'm procrastinating out of a abundance of options going forward." That's a different flavor of procrastination, but it's very easy to see it happen that here we are now. I've been home for a week and it's like that, close your eyes and all of a sudden it's two hours later. Same thing here. Close your eyes and all of a sudden it's a week later. Had a great opportunity to new stuff forward but really didn't. That's the one that I think that I end up struggling or ... I wouldn't say struggling, because it's really changed my view on this. Struggling paints it as a negative thing. It's the unhardest opportunity for me that I don't have systematized yet. My converting it into a superpower. Yeah.
Dan: Wow. Should you have done anything over the last week?
Dean: I don't have to do anything. That's what I was saying. It's a difference between should and could. Should have I done anything? That's a guilt thing to come from. I don't owe anybody anything. I don't have to have done anything. I didn't let anybody down or nobody's waiting for something. Could I have done something? Absolutely. Maybe that's the difference. It's not so much the letting other people down, it's the missed opportunity of it, I think.
Dan: It's interesting because what I'm hearing is that there's ... You used the word "missed opportunity." Which opportunity did you miss?
Dean: The opportunity to have picked one thing and move forward on it of the dozen things that I could have done.
Dan: Yeah. What would be a different way of approaching that, because ...
Dean: That's what I'm asking you.
Dan: Yeah. What I'm doing now is, first of all, I've totally had the situation that you're talking about many times in my life. I totally understand what you're talking about, but more and more, I've freed myself. If it's not schedule and there isn't a deadline, then there's really nothing for me to do, then I shouldn't have an expectation that I'm gonna do anything in that time. I think to a certain extent, there's an issue of intentionality here, and that is when you are arriving back home, because you were in Toronto for the month of July, was there something in your mind that says, "Oh, good, the next week is free and I can start in on something really big." Did you actually have that thought when you were arriving ...
Dean: I did.
Dan: At least some part in your mind.
Dean: Yeah. Absolutely.
Dan: Yeah. I wanted to talk about the week and talk about what that thought was when you were arriving back, because you were setting up something which was almost kind of like a goal that you were gonna do something, but you didn't, so you failed to achieve your goal.
Dean: Yeah. My reflection on it has been that there was a lack of a specific "what" to do. I'm in the time of the things. It wasn't like waking up in the same way that, say, in the middle of year. It's very similar. I sort of take an academic year kind of approach. It feels like that's the rhythm that I get into, into that. Coming into the summer here, I've been on a phase of my year where I was focused on traveling and doing events, and then I had just spent nearly a month in Toronto just sort of without any real agenda or expectation. Coming out of that, I wasn't that normally I can wake up and say, "What are my procrastinating today?" Something would jump up that I'm in the middle of something that needs to keep advancing or needs to be addressed or I owe somebody something or somebody's waiting or expecting something. I'm at a period where it's that leading up to the September opportunity where I've got lots of options. I think what I didn't have was the actual specific thing that I'm gonna do.
Dan: Yeah. You had options without intention.
Dean: Yes. That's a good way of putting it. That's exactly right. Even I know that that's sort of my next level, could have been narrowing it down and identifying what are the things that I want to do.
Dan: The statement mindset here of your complete and utter failure in our mindset column here is you always feel increasingly guilty about procrastinating because you know you're being stupid, lazy and incompetent. You have three crises. Where does it sleep?
Dean: Oh man. I prefer to look up at the other end here and expect that there's always a perfectly intelligent reason why I'm procrastinating.
Dan: Yeah. Here's the thing that I've been working on this idea, and I want to see if this is a useful idea in this context. It was occurring to me, and what happens to me when I have a day or time period like you're talking about, I would zero in on some sort of thought. For example, a year ago or 13 months ago, the thought was this whole place where procrastination fits into. First of all, what is the same procrastination that I've been having since I was conscious. That led to the discussion we had. We were often running to this.
I had a similar thing. Maybe Joe said that I have these kind of thoughts because it was about four, five weeks ago, and I was thinking, I think that there's a huge difference between our brain and our mind and that people generally use these terms interchangeably, their brain or their mind. What I'm noticing is I know people with great brains who don't have great minds. What I mean by that is I think of the brain almost like hardware. You've got thinking abilities that you're born with, and I think this is concrete equipment that you can process things really quickly and you have concentration skills and you have memory skills. I would attribute that to the hardware of the brain, but the mind is actually something you do with the brain.
In other words, there's a relationship that you create between your brain and what goes out in the world. That includes other people's thinking. The people that I know who have the greatest minds are the people who use their brain to actually massively include other people's thinking and their thinking. That's the separation that I was making there between that. Why I bring up this, first of all, I'd like to know what you think about that thought, but the second thing is how it relates to this particular mindset with procrastination today, which is "always for good reasons." This is kind of a wild one. I'm just jumping out in the left field here. What's your thought about the distinction between those two things?
Dean: You just put another word on it because I've always been wondering about that. I think I've been reflecting on this whole body/mind/spirit, and I think that ... or body, brain and spirit. I think that distinction actually fits better for me. That makes sense, that the brain is actually the hardware in what you have, and the mind I guess is really the management of it, I think. The direction of it. I've always wondered about that. Who are we having these conversation with internally? I think that's the mind. Hearing you say it now, I like that word better. Our mind.
Dan: Yeah. I think the mind is profoundly social. In other words, it's a connection that we make with the world outside of our brain. Our body really come into it profoundly there. The brain just on itself wouldn't make those connections. You have to have the entire package to make it. I think it's very emotional. If we like this, we don't like that. That's not the brain talking. That's something else that's been created ever since we were children, since we were born. The thing about this is that I think that when we're looking at our thoughts, I think we're taking advantage of the fact that we've been interacting with a lot of other people's thinking. My thinking about marketing has been profoundly affected by your idea of more cheese, less whiskers.
Dean: Right.
Dan: When I write anything now, I say is that the maximum amount of cheese that I can pack into that sentence? Is there any telltale sign of a whisker in there? I used it as the ...
Dean: That's your thought.
Dan: That's not a thought that I had, but I've included your thoughts now in my thinking.
Dean: Right. That's an interesting thing that you, having exposed yourself to that, having taken that in and stored that in your brain, that's now something that your mind can draw on to apply.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I think that's anything. The mind is what we choose, I guess, to direct our attention with regards to what we're going to put into our brain.
Dan: Yeah. I think by the same token, my thoughts of procrastination could actually be a useful tool. I can remember in the instance that I told you when we were having lunch. It was instantaneous. It was instantaneous, but you had taken that thought and you had immediately included it in your thinking.
Dean: Yes. The funniest thing is I do remember absolutely thinking, "How long have you known that and not ... How many lunches like this have we had? Have you really been holding out on me?"
Dan: Holding out. Yeah. That's a whole story in itself. Anyway, I'd like to go back and I'd like to look at ... I think a thought can be created out of just happened to you with this week, the week that you just had. My sense is that perhaps here is that you have an intention in your mind, it's very, very important to take that intention and actually make it formal. If you had gotten back from Toronto a week ago and you had maybe just in your mind, but I use the impact filter for this type of thing, and I would say "By the 13th of August or the 14th of August, I will have really zeroed in on one opportunity and have it really structured out in my mind and that's all I'm really gonna be required to do for the next week." If you had done that in a very formal way when you came back from Toronto, do you think you would have actually done that?
Dean: Yeah. I think that's exactly what would have been very helpful to me. I think that you hit on something there, formalizing it. In our minds, and being an introvert, often we can have these full on conversations and interactions with our minds, but that's not making anything real. The calendar is real. That was one of the thoughts that I had, is that the calendar is real. The things that are put out on there as synchronous and scheduled are actually a much higher proportion of getting done than things that don't have that sort of anchors to them.
Dan: I must have felt more strongly about that today than you did.
Dean: Yeah. There's the thing. It's like ...
Dan: I caught you at the end of an unintentional week.
Dean: Yes. That was exactly right. If you look at my week, the only thing on my calendar is this call. Oh man. It's so funny. I'll tell you what, there had been other days that I've had a nap and not woken up with a start. Not woken up with that I knew that I had missed something. I think there's something to that. When you look at your calendar, and in my calendar, a lot of the things that happened, they're date certain. When I'm doing my breakthrough blueprint events, they're on the calendar. I know exactly what's happening on those days. Same with you with the workshops.
Dan: Yes. A thought occurred to me. I said that with Dean, you can never retire, and I'm telling you that right now. Dean Jackson, you can never retire because I'm telling you, the day after you retire, the rest of your life is like last week.
Dean: Yes. You're absolutely right. Yeah, which most people would think of as the dream. They couldn't wait to get to that.
Dan: Yeah. People say, and I have these next two weeks ... Well, it's this week and then I'm in Cape Cod for two weeks and then I have a week when I come back, this is really crunch time for me because I have to get everything out of my mind and into a form where the artist and the multimedia people can actually get the September workshop. I have that deadline every 90 days, I have that deadline.
Dean: Right.
Dan: I get scared about it because you always remember the workshops at the very end of the last quarter, which are really refined. By the time to workshop 12, because I do 12 in a quarter. By the time I get to 10, 11, and 12, this is a great workshop, not that it wasn't good at the beginning. I'm gonna sign up for a strategic coach, but I want to be in the 10th, 11th, and 12th workshops. I don't want to catch Dan. I'm not putting that message out.
Dean: That's funny.
Dan: My workshop's always good. There's a sense that I'm seeing incredible amount more about the workshops that I'm doing at the end of the quarter than I do at the beginning. There's lots more ideas have come up about future possibilities. I always get this period. When I talk to people, for example, they'll find out that I'm suddenly free and they say, "Well why are you still putting yourself through that?" I said, "Well, that fear and excitement, and it's not the only thing that I have. I have a quarterly book and then I have a very, very extensive podcast series, all triggered by deadlines to show up and be ready to talk." That fear and excitement, but it's a formal intentionality. What we're probably making a distinction today is the difference between an informal intention and a formal intention. I hadn't seen that distinction before, but your example really brought it up here today. The only ones that really work for me are the formal intentions, which put me on the line to deliver something at a specific time, date and hour. My life really grows and prospers because of formal intention.
Dean: Yeah. Can I read you a couple of things from my journal as I was thinking through this?
Dan: Sure.
Dean: I was thinking about the realities of these things here that ... I started thinking, just putting down some points, that I have an infinite number of things that I want to do. I'm never gonna run out of things that I want to do. I have an infinite ability to continue to develop new things that I want to do just in case I ever did run out of getting all of those things to do. I'm therefore never gonna run out of cool new things that I want to do. Then couple that with the reality that there are 24 hours in each day. That is a physical constraint or a reality.
Dan: Yeah. Physical. That's physics.
Dean: Okay. I can only engage my personal attention on one thing at a time. My attention can only be deployed in realtime.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: It's only applied moment by moment. Some of the things that I want require the stringing together of many units of time. It could be minutes or hours. I think that when I was thinking about units of time, the really only ones that we can control, that we can direct, whether it's minutes hours or today, I can only do something today. When I look at this, I said, "It's impossible to allocate my attention currency in more than hours at a time." It's more likely to be deployed in chunked down unites of minutes. Really getting down to what are those things and that I can only execute today's units.
Not that I can't allocate them in advance or set up what I'm going to do with them, but I look at it that looking at these things, it seems like where I would really benefit is having a mechanism, and I think that you're right, I think an impact filter would really be a long way of this, of knowing the Dean only list of these units. If we take my idea of what do I want, I really gotta get clear on defining an actionable "what," what I want. I think that that's really what the impact filter would do for me. Knowing the things that only I can do and knowing that they're accepting and knowing and embracing that a lot of it, if there's any possibility that any of it could be done by somebody else, to really communicate that intention to the person who can do it.
Dan: Yeah. There's a lot of interesting thoughts in that in what you ... One of the things that I take probably causes people a lot of trouble around in the front end procrastination and then afterwards regret, so there's two things here, is to think that the possibilities that they're pulling to our mind, and I could do this and I could do that, that there's any reality to that. There is not reality to that. Those are just thoughts because they haven't been attached to time. The only thing that gives reality to a thought is when you introduce it into the formal time system. You allot a time for doing something with that thought. I think that lot of people's angst, their internal angst about what they did not do and what they failed to do, what they weren't able to achieve, they're dealing with unreality. There is no reality to it because you actually haven't formalized any of those things in time. The only thing that you're really accountable are things that you actually put into the timeframe, and oftentimes that involved other people.
Dean: Most of the time. Yeah. I think that's really the most successful times. If I look back at the things that ... that's been the big embracing thing for me this year, has been embracing the reality that the things that get done are the things that involve other people.
Dan: Yeah. As we've talked about, especially over the last five or six podcasts, that's been the huge, huge shift in how I see my role inside the company and how I perform in the company. The thing that makes it real is a discussion.
Dean: Yeah. When you first mentioned that, I would say that part of my guarding of my time and my space has been to allow me the time to be able to go off on my own and create something, but that's really the least reliable way of anything getting done.
Dan: Now you just changed the best times of where you go off on somebody and then you create something. In other words, let me ask you this question, since we started talking. Is this the best thinking of your week?
Dean: It really is. Absolutely.
Dan: Yeah, because we're engaged.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Yeah. We're in a discussion. I was looking at the second mindset statement here, you don't know why you let things stop you from ... This is not well-written here. You don't know why you let things stop you from completing things, but you wish you had a strategy for getting past these obstacles. There's a whole thing that we're talking about, you can have all sorts of thoughts in the world. For several, I would say it's at least four years, have a rule inside the company, because I like talking, but depending on your Kolbe profile, talking plans in different ways. For the two of us we could talk for a solid week, and it wouldn't really necessarily end up on a list of something to do. We're just talking.
What's beautiful about the podcast is that our thinking gets recorded and turned into a product and then hundreds and maybe thousands of other people get the benefit of what our thinking is. This is a real treat given who we are. Your wonderful dial talk and done is a tremendous advance for me and for you. Both. The strategy that you need is that a thought has no reality until it's formalized in a time commitment. That's a strategy. You have to get your thoughts into a time commitment. A surefire way of doing it for me is with the time commitment is with someone else.
Dean: The time commitment to have an appointment. Yeah. A conversation.
Dan: Yeah. I'm noticing more and more where I would also have that desire, but I'm just gonna think about it this afternoon, somebody else say something, have you given any thought to ...
Dean: I love that.
Dan: Have you given any thought? "Well, I got two or three hours this afternoon. I'll think about it." The chances of that happening are pretty close to zero.
Dean: Right.
Dan: What I've done, I said, "Can you put us in for a lunch this week?" People are really clear, lunch is usually a time. We'll have so and so, and we'll have so and so, and it'll be the four of us. I'll put together this afternoon an impact filter that gets sent to everybody who's gonna have lunch with me explaining my thoughts. Okay. Now, the lunch is in the schedule. The person comes back, says, "Yeah, everybody can make it." Now it's a reality, and there is something I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna use my thinking process called the impact filter, and I'm gonna get that done. I'm gonna send it to everybody so they can read it before they come to lunch. They'll have contacts in their mind before they actually sit down.
I've made the thought real in two ways, is that we have now a chance for a discussion with other people, which makes my thought real, but the other thing is that to make that lunch the best possible reality, there's another reality that has to be created, is that I have to set aside time. Now, this afternoon I will actually sit down and write the impact filter because I said, "Before bedtime tonight, everybody will receive my impact filter in PDF form." That makes me feel real good, but if I didn't get that discussion target and that discussion commitment, the chances of me doing the impact filter this afternoon wouldn't be very good.
Dean: That's very helpful. Do you have a way of documenting your wants now?
Dan: The impact filter is my want vehicle now.
Dean: It is? You just go right to that before there's nothing ...
Dan: I just go right to that, and less and less I'm ... It's very, very interesting, big change since we start doing the procrastination podcast. I used to, for every ten impact filters I would do, I would do maybe 15, 20 a month about something. It's a half-hour each, so 20 of them is 10 hours out of a month. That's not very much time. What I've notice as they complete. Seven out of ten would be just me thinking for myself. Now seven out of ten are things that get sent on to other people.
Dean: I see. Yes.
Dan: I haven't noticed until we're having this discussion, I think I knew it, but I didn't know it in the way that I know it now.
Dean: Right. That makes a lot of sense actually. Also, it's because you've decided to loop in as the insurance or the assurance is somebody else who also is gonna be involved in this, because there's no way ... We're both at a stage where nothing that we're doing is 100% just on us. There's always other people. Why not come in in the beginning of this. That makes ...
Dan: If we just talk about what we're doing here, I could have a journal that's called "Notes for my next Discussion with Dean," that usually happens when you come in for your workshop. Then we all have lunch. That's a regular quarterly feature. The chances of me writing anything in that journal are zero.
Dean: Right. Right.
Dan: Did you make your note for Dean today?
Dean: That's so funny.
Dan: That wouldn't happened.
Dean: That is funny.
Dan: It's really, really interesting. I thought when we first started doing this, that I had taken the light and the shine of all the corners that relate to procrastination. We turned the lights on. There's more and more hallways and trapdoors and crevasses and everything like that. There's more rooms in this house than I thought there were.
Dean: Time warps, black holes.
Dan: Yeah. I think it's the thing about ... Part of this, I should share this with you, because ... How much older am I than you?
Dean: You're 22 years older than me. I'm 51. I just turned 51.
Dan: I'm 22 years older. What I'm noticing is, because I'm looking for strategies, and I'm doing this around the physical, fitness and health way. I've got a lot of different things that I do there. The big thing is, how do you increase the number of years without feeling old? This is something I've been pondering. I think a lot of my reports to you over the last year really have to do that conversation is the key to me. I'm never old when I'm having a conversation.
Dean: That's the thing. I guess your mind ... Maybe there's an interesting distinction, that your mind doesn't really ...
Dan: My mind keeps getting better. My thinking ability, I haven't screwed it up too much with alcohol and other things over the course of my lifetime. I like alcohol, but I haven't really done damage to myself. I think my actual hardware is as good today as it ever was. I've got a good memory.
Dean: The brain.
Dan: I don't think it's any better. I don't think it's any better. I think it was good to start with and it hasn't gotten worse. My mind has gotten incredibly bigger, and I would say in the last year, my mind has gotten incredibly better than it ever was before, and I think yours has too, because just from your reports.
Dean: Yes. Absolutely. I think that that is age- It does get better. I've had this conversation with some other people too. You're at 22 years older than me here. In your mind, do you feel any different than what you felt 25 years ago or even 30 or 40 years ago? Honestly, sometimes I keep waiting. When I turned 51, I keep thinking, "When does the switch get flipped that I start to feel like an adult?" I don't know. There's still ...
Dan: Yeah. It's a great question because I have a really good situational memory. People say, do you have a photograph ... because I do remember a lot of things, and people say, "Do you have a photographic memory?" I say, "No, I don't have photographic memory, but I do have the situational memory." I sat down one afternoon, I was just writing out. It was situations that have happened growing up on the farm. Within about an hour, I was able to write down 100 situations that I remember very clearly.
We moved from the farm when I was 11 years old, so this happened roughly somewhere between four years old and seven. Then if I really started to dig, I could probably come up another 100. I remember the situations, I think, because I remember how I felt when I was in those situations. It's not so much I can describe the furniture. It's not so much that, but I have this intense memory of how I felt when I was in those situations. The me that I was feeling when I was seven years old doesn't feel any different than the me who's feeling at 73. It's the same person. I can immediately put myself back into that situation and feel it, check it out, and then I can feel how I'm feeling this afternoon when my buddy, who said he would never miss a call ...
Dean: Yeah. I know. Yeah. That's encouraging, to looking 22 years ahead to know that it's only gonna get better.
Dan: Now that we're going down this path, I'll tell you something that I just saw, and that is because people do say that they feel like they're getting older, and I see it when people pack in their work life, I just can't put up with it. What I feel is they had good brains, good enough brains to start and to build an entrepreneurial company, but their minds, at a certain point, their minds didn't get any bigger. What their experience is for the 15 years, 20 years. I haven't grown at all. My mind hasn't gotten any bigger. I don't think we've relayed our age to our brain. I think we've relayed our age to our mind. If your mind isn't growing, it's not including other people's thoughts. It's not being stimulated and transformed by interaction with other people, then I think you will have a really deep sense that you're getting older and you're getting near the end because there hasn't really been any change. There's no change inside you, but you can observe that there's enormous amounts of change outside of you.
Dean: Yes. That's true. When you look at ... It's really profound when you really think about that. I get excited knowing that. I think we've talked about the perspective, saying I can only know how fast 25 years is going to go in the context of having experienced the last 25 years. I know that the next 25 is going to go just as fast, but I have an encouraging sense that I feel in my mind as youthful as I did 25 years ago, but I also feel my mind has matured and has 25 more years of building my brain.
Dan: I think you do, and I certainly experience for myself is that you have an increasingly more skillful perspective about things.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: What I mean about that, you'll see a new situation and you can process that situation from a stack of different dimensions of how you learn to look at things in the past.
Dean: Yes. That's it. When you say it like that, the 45 years of experience of applying your mind to building your brain around helping entrepreneurs. At the end of that 45 years, you certainly have a bigger perspective and bigger ideas.
Dan: You can evaluate things very quickly. Exciting? Not so much. Somebody will tell you about a new idea. You've got some checkoff points. There's the ten-point excitement checkoff list, and this one's only got three of them.
Dean: That's right. Yeah, right.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. No. You gotta be at least a seven in the checkoff. You gotta be at least a seven because the other three are really hard work. It's a really interesting thing about this. Let's just review a little bit. We've covered a lot of territory ...
Dean: Yeah, we really have.
Dan: ... today. I just wanted to check in with ... We've covered the first two mindsets. You have created a success formula over your entire life that allows you to look completely on top of everything. I'm not sure looking like I'm completely on top of everything is really a goal of mine.
Dean: Right.
Dan: I've never had the experience. First of all, that would kind of like death, being on top of everything.
Dean: The great thing is, probably the great gift is that we can't have the perspective of what it's like to look like something, because we can only see looking out. We're not looking from the outside in. You would definitely have fit in that category of somebody who looks like they ... and everybody does. They look like everything's under control, and that procrastination isn't an issue.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Then we realize we all are.
Dan: That's kind of funny. Nick Nanton, of course you know about, because he interviewed you for it. He did the final videoing with Babs and me this week. He's a cameraman. Very interesting guy that got banned from Egypt who did all of the tomb work for the nature channel, the Egyptian. He was the onsite cameraman for all those. Very interesting to talk to. Anyway, we're having lunch. This is on Thursday past. We were just talking about what kind of impact the documentary will have when it comes out. For those of you who are listening don't know, this was a gift to me from Nick Nanton, who's a great documentary film maker, plus Joe Polish, great friend of Dean and myself, and David Burke, who is a great 10x's client. They gave this to me as a present for my 70th birthday. I was procrastinating for three years.
Dean: Right.
Dan: I actually gave them the go-ahead, but it'll be out in November. Anyway, we were talking about the impact and they asked me, "What impact do you think it'll have?" I said, "The greatest impact will be on me." They said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "I'm gonna watch what everybody says, and then however they say they see me, then I'm gonna try to be that."
Dean: Interesting. That's great. Have you seen any of the footage yet?
Dan: I said I'm gonna watch it. I haven't seen any footage yet, and I don't. I'm completely okay with seeing it in its final form, because I think NIck's really great at what he does, and it's gonna be a surprise anyway. Might as well have the whole surprise.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Anyway, I said, because I really don't think that much about what I look like to others, I'm gonna listen with great interest and watch with great interest about what people will say about me and what the impact is, and I'm gonna take it as the truth. In other words, I'm not gonna argue with anything that anybody says because that's their perception. I said, "Obviously, that's the reality of the impact that I've made, and I'm gonna take it seriously and I'm gonna learn an enormous amount of how I am in terms of other people." I said, I'll watch it 50 times because I want to be the person consciously that they say that they picked up for me when I wasn't conscious.
Anyway, it's an interesting thing, and I'm perfectly okay with this project right now because it's called the game changer and this is the new jump for me and for Strategic Coach, we're gonna introduce the game changer program, so I'm totally happy. I can live with that for the rest of my life. Game changer's perfectly okay for the rest of my life. It's interesting. The reason I was procrastinating on this, and I've been approached probably about five times in the last 25 years to do a project like this, and I said, "Naw, I don't want to." The reason is that I didn't want to be captured at an earlier stage of my growth and then have to live out of that image that was there 15 years ago or 20 years ago.
Dean: Interesting.
Dan: Now, I totally am. Whatever anybody says, I'm totally okay with it. I would let that frame the rest of my life. I don't have any problem with that at all.
Dean: Right. That's exciting. I can't wait to see it. Nick does great work.
Dan: Oh, yeah. He's a 10 quick start too. All three of us are.
Dean: Yes. There you go, and an Emmy award winner.
Dan: How can a 10 quick start do me wrong?
Dean: That's exactly right. It's a fraternity.
Dan: Yes. It's a fraternity. Yes. Anyway, what were the captures for you today, or the creations, because we were both ...
Dean: There was a big distinction for me in something that I've been thinking about this mind/brain distinction. That's really another layer that clicked in for me. The mind is what is directing the show here for me. We were having that conversation. Your, again, examples of using and just bringing other people into the situation earlier on, knowing that whatever I'm gonna do is gonna happen in realtime. There's very little things that do require just me. I'm hesitant on saying that. I'm trying to think about some specific things that ... Some things do require my alone time, just thinking through something, but I can shorten that process if I can think it through enough to advance it to a conversational level faster with somebody else.
Dan: Yeah. I find it fascinating because I've been a lone person for a major portion of my life. When I think about how I spend my time, I spend an enormous amount of time alone. Even inside of Strategic Coach, going back to the start of the program in 1989, there were days when Dan wouldn't show up at the office because Dan was home alone. That day would never happen today because I'd waste most of the day.
Dean: If I'm completely honest, that's what I find, is that I've sat up, as in the past, my whole strategy has been to guard my time to allow myself that space and that freedom. Then when I have it, I have not been consistently able to use that space. Just counter to that, when I really look at the things that I lock in and schedule, that's where all the results come from.
Dan: Yeah. To me, this 3:00 podcast instead of 12:30 podcast has turned out to be one of our best.
Dean: It really has, man. I was completely rested. A little stuffy nose, but completely rested.
Dan: It was kind of funny because I put in my little email to you. I said, "So, we have a good example about the podcast.
Dean: I can just imagine, though, you thinking, "Now what? What do I do now?"
Dan: No, I knew you'd check in. The thing about this intentionality, this distinction of informal intentions in our mind, have no reality.
Dean: Yeah. That's valuable for me. Informal intentions.
Dan: The only thing that makes an intention formal is that it's in realtime.
Dean: Yeah. I like that.
Dan: Don't hold yourself accountable to informal intentions. They're not real.
Dean: Yup, and it's gone. What now? Now I can start setting up some formal intentions.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's actually a big distinction, actually, that at the very end here, those were informal. If it's only intention, informal intentions and formal intentions ...
Dan: The way to make them 100% formal intentions is have it in the form of a commitment to someone else.
Dean: Yup. You're absolutely right.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I've enjoyed this one, Dan.
Dan: This was a great one. Okay. Good. Thanks, Dean.
Dean: Thanks, Dan.