Join Dean and Dan as they catch up on their progress over the last 18 months of talking about procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep039
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson.
Dean: Happy Easter.
Dan: Happy Easter to you, and I hope you took time out to think about the course of your life.
Dean: I did.
Dan: And what you've done well and what you haven't done well.
Dean: I got fully into the gap.
Dan: The gap, we haven't talked about the gap. We haven't talked about it yet.
Dean: We have not.
Dan: No, and the gap is really key to procrastination, because when you procrastinate you think you've failed, because the ideal for a lot of people is that they shouldn't procrastinate.
Dean: That's absolutely true. But we have discovered otherwise.
Dan: Yeah. So far I was thinking before I started the podcast today, we've established that procrastination is a very good thing. For two reasons, one is it means you are ambitious. That you have envisioned ahead of yourself something that's much bigger and better than you have right now. Probably in the area of capability. That has immediately tempted you to actually take complete responsibility for bringing around that bigger and better result, and you are immediately faced with the fact that you don't have the necessary capabilities for doing that, and that's why you are procrastinating. Two things, you are procrastinating, because you are ambitious. Number two, you've just discovered that there are other capabilities needed besides your own.
Dean: Dan. I think you are correct. You haven't fully defined what that next capability is. What's the necessary thing? What's really ... I had an interesting experience this week. I look at things where I always have these conversations with myself, and I think about ADD, and I look, what prompted it, was I walking through a ... I have an archive of different things that I've created over the years. I came across this thing that I had created in 1998, 1997. And it was just like really, I was so impressed with the discipline, or the execution that it took to actually make this happen. I was thinking back on it, I said to Lou, "I'd like to hire this young man to do stuff for me here."
I realized how I used to really get stuff done. That's an interesting mind shift. This particular thing that I'm talking about was, it was a project that I worked on. I'll tell you about it because there is probably instructional things we can talk about from it. I was on a flight one time from Toronto to Ottawa. It was a time when they were in the air Canada lounge they would give out legacies, which they still do now. They put up free magazines and publishers will send things for people to take a copy of this. One of the magazines was a Today's Homeowner Magazine.
This was a magazine that for several years was like a ... A really nicely well done books specific, or a magazine about home improvement projects, and all of those kinds of things. It was a very nicely done thing, and I was impressed by the magazine as I was reading it from Toronto to Ottawa. I thought to myself, this would be a really great thing for real estate agents to give to their clients. On the way to Ottawa in my journal ... Actually that reminds me. I'm gonna actually go back to my journal and see the thoughts that I had to make this happen. I thought, this is something that would be a really good gift for realtors to give to their clients in additional to newsletter. If I was to create a newsletter that we could wrap around giving a gift of these to these homeowner magazine.
I called to New York, I called the publisher. I ended up speaking to the ... Got into circulation, and was able to work out an arrangement with the distribution department to allow realtors to buy 100 or more book subscriptions to the magazine, which they would deliver the magazines to the realtor's office. The idea was that we would, I would along with Joe Stumpf, we were building By Referral Only at that time. The idea was that we would create the supplemental newsletter that would go along with the magazine that would make it super easy for people to have a really great after sales service program for their clients. I made all those arrangements, negotiated that opportunity with us, then I put together a whole, what I'm holding in my hand right now is a little booklet or the instructional guide that I put together along with it.
Your By Referral Only Today's Homeowner after sales service kit, which was explaining the whole program to people, and then you open it up, and here is everything you need to get started right now with your By Referral Only to these homeowner after sales service program. It's really well written, well thought out thing with illustrations and sample letters for people to send step by step instructions for how to do it, a template for here's where to get it. Insert that goes along with it, so that in each issue of the magazine they would talk about specific projects that you could do, or highlight specific products that were new on the market. I created this, here is where to get it template, if you like the products and services you see in the magazine, here is where you can get them locally.
See this month's cover letter for special offers, and it had a spot for eight business cards of local providers to put it there. Then the letter for each month would have the realtor's name at the top, and it'll say, dear Dan and Babs, here is your November issue of today's homeowner magazine. Inside the magazine this month you'll find an article on page nine about installing ceiling fans. I talked with Julie, letting them know that she agreed to give you 20% off if you wanna buy any ceiling fan this month. She's got over 50 different styles to choose from.
On page 45 there is a great article about creating a home office, and then the where to get it directory. I've included information from a company called Office Concepts. All these things where I've written all of the stuff for people. I though this is a really complete from beginning to end project that was exhibited really get disciplined execution to get this done. In a way I thought about that that when ... We had a conversation about going 100 times and about how, I'm probably at 10 or 12 or 15 times the amount of money or income that I was making then. But I was doing a lot more back then, compared to now, where I make more money, but I do much less. It struck me. This was something that I'm not sure how I would pull this off today.
Dan: I almost find it scandalous that I know someone who did that amount of work.
Dean: It's so amazing. I was aghast.
Dan: That was another human being, that wasn't the one I'm talking to right now. That's Dean Jackson as cross-dresser.
Dean: Then in that same conversation though, then in the same vein, I'm looking right now, I've got a copy of each month for my email mastery program. We create a field report, and I'm four months into that now, and it's a beautiful 26 page supplement to the email mastery program that has a beautiful New Yorker Magazine like cover, each month with an illustration, and this month is talking about the MOO method that I talked about, the multiplied oral output method. And then other word for word case study emails, and great conceptual articles, which I didn't write a word of. It all came from the moo method here that I say to, I mourned in one breath that I don't know that I'm capable of physically doing what I did then, but in the same vein I kind of looked at I'm holding in my hand something that is similar in outcomes, but that I had nothing to do with, other than talking. That was an awful lot of words. I think there is something there for us to dig into.
Dan: I am reminded of how I was operating, not 20 years ago but 15 years ago. I started creating a sort of quarterly documents which also had CDs, because CDs were still the thing back then. You had sort of stiff cardboard covers on those documents, which might have been 36 pages, 40 pages, something like that on the inside, eight and a half by 11, subtle magazine size. On the inside print cover, and the inside back cover, there were slots, and you could put two CDs in that cover. It was roughly about a little bit more than two hours of audio if I was talking through the contents.
I would write every single word, and there would be illustrations, every page, and I would write ... I would actually do the Rotel illustrations before the computer. I just got to it. I not only would produce one of these recorders, I was producing three of the recorders and I was doing all the work. I was working nights, I was working weekends. As a matter of fact, I'd actually do this work during workshops. Then I set the entrepreneurs to having small group discussions, then I would go to work on it.
Dean: You'd be working on it?
Dan: I was doing two focus days during one focus day. I have to tell you a story here. I was so much in the swing of doing these things, that I was kind of probably maybe doing a fourth one or a fifth one. On a Saturday morning I woke up and Babs wasn't in bed with me. I found it very strange. We have two other guest bedrooms in her house, so I went investigating that for a while. She wasn't-
Dean: You found her.
Dan: I was wondering what happened, and she was sleeping in one of the guest bedrooms. In the bed, in the bedroom. I went and she woke up and she said, "You are out of control. You are completely out of control." She said, "You are putting so much strain on our team, plus there is no to end to it." She said, "You are completely out of control." It really shocked me. It was like, I'd been on a binge, and somebody had just reminded me that I was an alcoholic. I began to realize, it was almost like I was seeing a fork in the road, if I continued the way I was operating it was gonna put my relationship with Babs at risk. I said, starting tomorrow I'll stop what I'm doing. I'll start delegating, I'll start cutting back.
That's really, I don't think I've ever told you about that, but that's a fateful decision in life. I was doing so much how, I wasn't even being a who anymore. I'm doing just as much work today I should say, just as much work is getting done today as I was 15 years ago, except I'm not the one doing it. I'm wondering if you telling your story and me telling your story, whether these were sort of like explorations on our part in how you could put something together. It left us with a certain knowledge in our minds about how you could actually put things together into a conclusion after our explorations. Things can get done, but we are not the ones to do it.
Dean: That was my ... Immediately I kind of looked at that, in my mind I was ... I remember the process of it. I remember the gallery of output that I had in those years, like in that period of time. Two things struck me, one was that I was really ... I was doing it ... I was writing every word of it. I was laying it out, I was often ... I was writing it as two space, and I was doing the design of it, and I had learned how to use Pagemaker, and I look at this like I'm actually a pretty competent designer in the layout person on this. I look at this and I would be happy to deliver this today.
That got to ... I think about it now, that when I really ... It was the one thing, because as I was turning to show this to Lou I actually saw where I'm sitting right now, the room where I do our podcast here, on the table where the lamp is here is the addition of the report number four, which is even, this document that I was so proud of here, it's about a 16 page document. And the one that I'm looking at is like a 26 page with that New Yorker cover and packed with amazing content that I literally did not have, I didn't write a word of it. It came from the transcripts, and the content of my email mastery program, which for all what I do in that is I talk.
I have the conversations. I do two falls a month with members brainstorming and helping wordsmith their email campaigns, and they come back and share the results. Over a period of a few weeks we can piece together these complete sequences. When somebody comes and they are talking about this, and I suggest that we try this, and they go test it, and come back and share the results. I got all that compiled as a case study from the beginning to end, and we put those together in the field reports.
That really ... In a way it was like, I was, I want to say the word close, it's like I was mourning my, what appeared like my capability back then. And then it was immediately kind of sued, and almost with a sense of awe that I'm able to produce this without actually having to do the work to do it. To do the how.
Dan: I look at ... I know the mourning feeling that you are talking about here. Really it was me at a more unconscious time of my life. I didn’t really understand the full picture of what it meant to get something done. I was always looking at it from a doing standpoint. I have skills like yours, writing skills, layout skills, talking skills. I see it as a very ... It was kind of like learning how to ride a bicycle with training wheels. That was sort of my training wheel phase. I look back there. Actually the last three books that I created in the last three months. The greatest pride I have is that I didn't change a word in any of the three when they came back from the writer and the editor.
Dean: That's exactly what I felt about when I said with a sense of awe in a way, is that I didn't have to change anything in this document. It looks beautiful, it's valuable in its content, and it's I'll say written beautifully but it's written just as an adaptation of what I actually said. I get it. I was kind of going down this path of comparing those two times in my life, and both in history too, when I look at the difference between 1997, which I think this was 1997. The copyright 1998. I was working on this in 1997 for release in January 98. I was thinking, 20 years, I was thinking about what were the environment and the situation around me being able to do that. If I looked five years ago-
Dan: First of all, I'd like to say it was a different world back then.
Dean: That's my point.
Dan: I remember, because that was the old terminal two, you were applying out, if you were going to Ottawa, you were flying out of terminal two. They had that really nice cocktail lounge where you went. It was very subdued. I don't even go to the lounge anymore, because it's substandard compared to the way it was 20 years ago. It was the print world, it was the final stages of the print world, where you would have those kinds of magazines, and it was just before the internet came in in a major way.
98 is sort of when ... 98 is sort of the real emergence of the internet. You were capturing a form of communication at its final stages. You were catching that right when it was at its top in terms of the kind of product that could be produced. It was classy, it was beautiful, beautifully laid out. You had topnotch skilled people and you were taking advantage of that. If you would have stayed with that you would have been in real trouble.
Dean: Absolutely right. Those were, the one thing that you just said was really, my key observation about it was back then I started thinking about what the circumstances that led to that in the first place, which is very funny because that period of time, 20 years ago, I remember something that Dan Sullivan shared with me back in 1996, or seven when I first discovered Dan Sullivan, that was the idea of flying first class all the time, no matter what. That was a new kind of spot to me at that point. I don't know whether you remember talking to me about something like that.
Dan: I do.
Dean: That was impactful and it sort of right on, that was the very beginning of my decision to fly first class whenever I fly. When I think about that, that's the reason that I was in the lounge in the first place, because of something you said, which is kind of funny and appropriate that we are having a conversation about it 20 years later. The fact that the internet was not around I think that it was much more conducive to engage my mind in deep work, the idea that ... A good portion of my mind gets engaged in Cloud Landia throughout the portion.
Whatever it is, no matter what, whatever the number is, the amount of time, however many jacksonian units I deploy in being in Cloud Landia on a daily basis. It's 100% or 90% more, then it was taking my attention in 1997. My mind was engaged in actually entertaining itself by doing the work itself as a good part of it.
Dan: In fairness to yourself and I think to my previous self of 15 or 20 years ago, you are always trying to maximize what you have available. When I look at myself I'm trying to maximize with the skills that I have what's available to me, in terms of capabilities that will connect me with the world. That was it in 1997, 1998.
You have to be alert to the fact that things can change. When I think of my agency days, I came to Toronto in 1971 to serve as a copywriter with BBL, big global agency with a Toronto office. It was a big deal for me to jump right from college to a job in a major ad agency, and I had men, I knew a person who knew a person. That's how I got the deal. When I look back at how work was done in those days when you looked at the copywriting, when you looked at the layout, when you looked at checking proofs and everything like that. What used to take a week on the part of six or seven people now takes one of my artists three or four hours, because they have the computer software and hardware now to replace the work of six or seven people from 40 years ago, 45 years ago.
That's the biggest thing that you have to be aware of as you are going forward as an entrepreneur is how is the relationship between who and how is switching all the time? We haven't actually talked about this, but the thing is that is what is how for you right now is gonna be a how for somebody else in a period of time. Whatever is a big how for you right now, a year from now can be a how for someone else. What you have to remember is to the who all the time in the situation. You are the who that knows what needs to be done, and you are the who that needs to know why what needs to be done? If you can communicate the why and that what needs to be done, there is always going to be some other who who will do the how.
Dean: I think if you take it back that. If somebody understands the why, they could almost replace you as the who in terms of finding the what. It's really, I've been watching this history of Hollywood kind of documentaries. I saw one about Barry Diller, you start to realize that there is another level, like the mogul level. When you look at it, the guys who have owned the studio kind of thing, the investors are putting a guy like Barry Diller at the head of the studio to make the decisions as to what movies to make. And then every layer down there is who is doing the how, while the guys like Sumner Redstone and Barry Diller before or after he started his big company, that those guys are at the highest level of that, where they are setting a context or they are setting that agenda.
The why is this is a movie studio, and we are going to produce movies for a profit that tap into the right guys, that tap into what the movie audience really wants. The studio head is in charge of finding talent and directors and people who can write and make the movies that will tap into that. It's kind of like, it's ... You can always go all the way up. You can always up level yourself from another who position in a way.
Dan: Yeah. I think that you got to be freed up to have your antennae out and picking up the signs that the landscape is literally changing under your feet. It's not a question ... It's one thing to have really good maps, it's another thing to have maps that are kind of moving. As you look at the maps, streets are being rearranged, and intersections are being rearranged. I was thinking about that before the, Babs and I are big Netflix fans.
Dean: Me too.
Dan: We actually went to a movie, last week was sort of a free week for us, so we went to a movie, and we went to see Isle of Dogs.
Dean: I want to see that.
Dan: Which is a left ... It's fun, it's really-really fun. It's actually gotten an enormous amount of very negative press because of cultural appropriation. That's the usual ... First of all, it's slightly making fun of Japanese culture, but in a fun way. I think the Japanese, if they had a sense of humor, a Japanese person would find it actually very very funny. What it is about the exiling of dogs out of a city in Japan, because of unpleasant behavior. All the dogs are put in an isle, and a boy whose dog is taken away from him goes and saves all the dogs and comes back, and makes everything good. It was very funny. It's a Pixar type of animation, where you can see all the hair on the dog sort of blowing in the winds and everything beautiful animation that they can do now with one Pixar, made its mark on the world.
Anyway, at time we are watching this series, 16 hours. It's a German program, a German series called Babylon Berlin about Germany in 1929, just before the Nazis came in. It must have been one of the wildest wide open scandalous cities in the world. I'm just sitting there and I'm watching that. They are giving me 16 hours to get a handle on the characters, get a handle on the plot, which there are many, there are lots of different plots going on. I was saying how Hollywood is not capable of that big stage. That Netflix has become a center of creativity in the world. It's taken it away from Hollywood, these are not made in Hollywood, this was made in Germany. It's German language with English subtitles. I said, I'm much more willing to watch this, devote 16 hours of my time, than to take a chance and going for an hour and a half to watching a Hollywood made movie.
Dean: That's what's really ... It's funny how you kind of-
Dan: It shifts.
Dean: It's really, because Netflix, if you think about it as an outlet for creativity, and for people who are able to produce these kinds of things, that they can do things that would otherwise not have an outlet. Just like you are saying there. That would not be something otherwise that would be released anywhere, where would you put something like that?
Dan: Yeah. I saw a series before that, which was 18 hours called The Last Kingdom, which is a slice of English history in the 9th century in the battle between the Vikings who were pagans, and Christian Anglo-Saxons I said, Hollywood, that would be laughed out at the first creative meeting that you called. That was fascinating. It was fascinating to me. They cracked a code where the Hollywood more and more is into cartoons with people's places, or really silly comedy, but they can't take on really meaty stuff. It's impossible for Hollywood to take on meaty stuff, because it can't be more than two hours. In the Netflix model it can be 100 hours as far as subscription goes, and you can follow plots and characters over years. You'll stick to it for years and everything like that.
It's almost like they've cracked the literary code. In other words, Netflix in that Hollywood got so far away from the novels that gave rise to Hollywood in the first place. That they couldn't do it anymore, and so it went back. This new medium with the internet being able to watch it at home, subscription just gives vasts amounts of money and creative license for people to do that. I don't know of a Barry Diller will exist in the future, because I think the model is going away from the studio boss.
Dean: I wonder, it's an interesting model as I was thinking about that all the way down the line kind of thing. I was comparing your role at strategic coach now, versus your role at strategic coach 30 years ago, where ... The wisdom of doing it as a separate thing, as opposed to Dan Sullivan personal coach, where that was I think the first piece of wisdom was creating it as something separate from you.
Dan: Yeah. I think the big thing for me was that I was very conscious if I go back to the 1980s, because that's really where this whole notion of coaching really started to take root in the business world. Before 1980 it was a very marginal activity being a coach to entrepreneurs. One is, there really were not coaches to entrepreneurs. I was holding on to the clips by my fingertips for about seven or eight years just getting monthly money to pay the rent and everything. What I noticed and fortunately I was looking for it. I was looking for some sort of breakthrough on the computer realm, because up until that time you just had main frames and then I was trying to pick up the, what was the name of the company that got quite famous in the 70s?
They had these medium sized computers, Dec. I'm trying to think what the name of it was. There was a period ... They had these sort of, the mainframe filled up a room, but this would just fill up your kitchen. I think it was Dec, DEC or something like that. It was a smaller computer. I was just thinking. Predictions had been made that at some point there would be something that was just on your desk, and it would be an individual computer. Then around 78, 80, 78 I think is album-
Dean: That's when I remember getting my first digital watch and my digital calculator. Those were the big things.
Dan: Yeah, an Atari Commodore was making an attempt to break into the personal world. I think that's where Jobs no skies all started, it was like mid 70s, between 70 and 80. They didn't have any power, they didn't really have any memory. They didn't have really good printers for them and everything else, but there was enough of a foothold that people would devote themselves and money to get into it. Then the IBM came out with the personal computer. That was the real breakthrough and then apple followed after that with the first mac, first apple and apple to, and everything like that. You were up to the races.
I had a feeling even when I got into the coaching business in the early 70s, 74 to be exact, that the whole future of coaching was gonna depend upon entrepreneur having personal computers. It took a long time, there were seven, eight, nine years before they did. Then I had the insight that you didn't want to sell yourself as a personality, you wanted to sell a process, some sort of thinking process, because if it was just the personality, then you only got paid when you showed up, but if you had a system, then other people could get paid for it. Those insights, the fact that it had to be based on entrepreneurs being empowered with computers, and that what you had to coach was thinking processes. That's really been the basis since the 80s for me.
Dean: I don't know whether ... You've heard me talk about the distinction between the blue men group and Siegfried and Roy
Dan: I have. What was that? I think it was Fortune Magazine or Forge Magazine-
Dean: Forge Magazine, where they had the top entertainers-
Dan: I think they wrote this great article, not be a blue man not Siegfried and Roy, because Siegfried and Roy, the tiger attacked Roy during a show. Actually it turned out that-
Dean: That was me that wrote that concept. I read in the magazine that I was reading the top entertainers, and saw that Siegfried and Roy had just signed a new contract at the Mirage that would finish off their career.
Dan: They had 400 employees in that ... The biggest show in Las Vegas, it was the biggest show anywhere.
Dean: What struck me was the contract was for $35,000,000,000 a year. To afford that they did eight shows a week for 40 weeks. Basically we got three months off and we are working all the time, two shows a night for four nights, a week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then I saw the Blue Man Group was in there at $70,000,000, $69,000,000. That's when I realized that they had a cadre of 34 blue men and conferred shows in Las Vegas, Chicago, Toronto, London, Paris. They had had all these shows all over the place, and the guy that created it didn't perform anymore. They just did things like the Grammy's or they ran the empire themselves.
I wrote in my newsletter about the precariousness of Siegfried and Roy ... Not the danger of it, but just the difference of the fact that they have to do all this stuff that when you only go, when you go to see Siegfried and Roy you are expecting to see Siegfried and Roy. When you go to see the Blue Man, you are going to see blue men. I wrote about that distinction as a difference in my idea of whether you are building your business as a personality business or a system business. I just happened to write that literally three months before Roy was mauled by a tiger. That became, then it was really the whole precariousness of that.
Dan: The interesting thing was, not only was the audience demanding that Siegfried and Roy be there, so were the tigers.
Dean: Exactly. That's right.
Dan: Ladies and gentlemen, we just want to alert you that Mr. Roy isn't here tonight. Somebody who’s got a familiarity with wild cats, could you come up out of the audience? We'd like you to stand in today.
Dean: Just by a round of applause. Who loved that?
Dan: As it turns out, in Roy's explanation anyway, he said that the tiger was worried that there was a mentally deranged person, and was picking up on something strange, and he wasn't attacking Roy, he was saving him. He actually in the best way that the tiger knew how, he just grabbed him and took him off stage. Because his master was ... There was a woman in the front or something, the way that he explains it. The tigers were tamed until their training broke, and they were wild and-
Dean: Chris rock actually said it perfectly, the people say that the tiger went crazy. The tiger didn't go crazy, the tiger went tiger. He said the tiger went crazy the first time it got on the bicycle.
Dan: That's so good. Talk about an upside down world there.
Dean: The tiger didn't go crazy, he went tiger.
Dan: Take a survey among tigers and ask them what they think is crazy. It was really interesting, it was very poignant, that tiger was taken to the Las Vegas zoo where they had wild cats. Roy as soon as he was able, went and visited with him every day until he died. The tiger died about five or six years after the incident, but he said it wasn't his fault. The precariousness of the act, which I always thought was really precarious and quite apart from the business model part of it, it's just there. It's a very fine line between them being a tiger, and them being in an act. Yeah, and they got the big box, but the whole is if a tiger ate a blue man you'd never know about it.
Dean: That's exactly right, that's the point. That's exactly it. This whole line of thought Dan has really been, it's been quite a reflection through the weeks here. I was trying to think back on the, and how to harmonize that in a way with things like, speaking of great documentaries. I really love that Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentary. This whole idea of that mastery of something, that, it's a whole different thing, and it's kind of, it was a really interesting complex mix of feelings that this stirred, the whole juxtaposition of what I went through in 1997 to create that that I was very happy with, compared with creating the mastery field report, which I had much less to do with. That loss of sort of ... I've heard you talk about it as art and craft in a way. I was thinking-
Dan: I think as an outside observer watching you that you are much more of an artist and craftsman today. That 1998 you were mastering certain crafts, and you could put one craft together with another craft. If you put together all the sequencing that you talked about earlier in the conversation, you put a whole bunch of crafts together that you have known from marketing. I'm thinking, I went to Rome, I really loved Rome, I've been there four or five times.
The master artist of Rome is sculptured by Bernini, and Bernini did a lot of the Vatican work, a tremendous number of the fountains around Rome are from Bernini. You get a feeling when you hear about Bernini, if you don't do any investigation that this guy never slept. He must have been working 24/7 for 50 years to do this. Then you start digging down, and you find out that Bernini had 10,000 craftsmen who worked for him. He was a conceptualizer of large projects, but he drafted and enrolled great stone carvers and people who were gifted with hydraulics that could bring water into fountains, and everything like that. He was a master salesperson, and he was a colossal enterprise.
He was probably one of the biggest enterprises in Rome. It was kind of like Chihuly the fellow who does glasswork at The Bellagio. If you go to The Bellagio in Las Vegas and look at the lobby ceiling, it's one of the most magnificent pieces of glasswork ever done on the planet. It's his idea, but he lost sight in one eye 20 years ago, and he can't do glass blowing. He started off as a glassman who was a superb glass blower. He lost sight in one eye, and he couldn't do glass blowing, because you have to have both eyes to properly blow glass.
What he does, he attracted glass blowers, but he was the person who got the contracts, and he developed the concepts and he had a way of laying them out in such a way that the artist could match it with glass. He's much of an artist today than he was 20 years ago when he was a master craftsman, just like Bernini and Michael Angelo too.
Dean: I didn't realize that.
Dan: Yeah, they didn't do all the work. They had ear guys and they had nose guys, and they had eye guys, who could, they had fabric guys who could do drawing parts. They would do the rough work, and then the others-
Dean: I think Jeff Koons is like that too.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: The artist, and Damien Hirst, same kind of thing, and even Andy Warhol was maybe one of the earlier of those. Maybe not if you are saying Michael Angelo had that figured out back then.
Dan: Yeah. My feeling is Walt Disney was originally a cartoonist, but that wasn't going to get him anywhere. The filmmakers, many of the filmmakers were the original filmmaker, but then they came the studio heads. My feeling is the trick here is that you are always being faced with the fact that the who, how landscape is changing all the time. That the real power to be in charge of what's happening lies in always taking the next elevator up to the next level of who, and then attracting people who are able to do the house around you. I think procrastination is getting caught between pores.
Dean: That is pretty brilliant actually.
Dan: For a while, I mean you are-
Dean: No, that's pretty profound, it's like straddling, it's like straddling is what it is. That is, it's like, it's straddling the floors.
Dan: You know the one you just left isn't the feature anymore, but you haven't arrived at the next on yet, you are kind of suspended between floors. I think to know that that's happening is more useful than not knowing what's happening.
Dean: Even visually when you think about that, that's really ... That's something
Dan: This is the reason why you have to have reflect time. One of my statements that I communicate to my entrepreneurial workshops all the time is that tightly scheduled entrepreneurs cannot transform themselves. If every amount of your time is tied up with the present level of how things get done, you'll never transform yourself into the next level of being the who who plays a bigger game.
Dean: You are right. You are absolutely right.
Dan: You have to give the impression to the outside world that you are not fully applying yourselves.
Dean: I know. That's my magic formula. You are absolutely right.
Dan: I do about, what do I do? I do about 12 workshops a quarter, and people say to me, "Would you have time to do 25?" I say, "I'd have time to do 30." And they say, "Why aren't you doing them given what you are doing?" I say, "Because that would be a trap.
Dean: I like that a lot. That's absolutely true. I think I sense that ... Dan, you are just so right on with that. Trapped between levels, between, it's like think about that. It's like, because it almost is a little bit ... I think I've shared with you before that often I'll look at it with kind of awe, and say, I really don't functionally do much in my organization here. Aside from the talking, yet, it's continuing, it's growing. We are doing our best work.
Dan: And you are always coming up with breakthroughs.
Dean: I feel like I kind of like this idea of ... I guess when I think about from the news, a couple of projects that I think about that I want to be that guy that created that Today's Homeowner program is what I need for here. My thought was, how can I make that? Even just today in having the conversation, it's still forming, is how can I get that outcome without me having to go back three levels to be the one that actually does that? I admire that work for what it was, and it was a great part of the learning process that got me here, but now I need to be able to executive produce that kind of outcome. You think about it, I can find somebody, there is a who who can do that, because in that situation I was a who.
When I look at it there it's like I was doing that stuff as my collaboration with Joe Stumpf. He was 10 years older than me, but found somebody like me. That somebody like me 10 years earlier, that could be that kind of thing for me.
Dan: There is talent all over the place. This is a topic, because we are at the end of our hour here, but I get my haircuts, most Saturdays, I get the trimmed, I've always liked having short hair. I get trimmed. I go to a hairdresser, it's a man by the name of Kim Dou, who actually was an escapee from Vietnam after the communist took over the south. And actually he was caught, his first two attempts when he was working and 15 years old, but wasn't harmed or anything. They just caught him and took him back. Then on his final trip he actually made it away. He just wanted to get out when he was 15. He came to Canada, and went into the hair trade school. Then got a position, and then about I guess five or six years ago started his own salon.
I've been with him over that period. Great guy, and tough guy too to have been through what he was through. He's got this young woman on weekends who is a trainee at sort of the school who is now studying, work study programs, when they hit about 15 or 16 years old. She's just so smart, and she's kind of really present. She's got a great sense of humor, and she's learning really really quickly. I said, "You know, smart people are being born all the time," she's got ... I could tell. I was just watching her sometimes, and she's very present. She's very alert, she's very curious. I said, "It'd be interesting to see what she's going to be doing 10 years from now," because she's just trying this out. It's just a chance to earn money and get out into the marketplace. I said, "There is young people who are 40, 50 years from now, who are going to be much better hours than we ever were when we were at our best. It's not our role to compete with them.
Dean: It's not our role to compete with them. What a way to end? That's a good ending for this one.
Dan: Yeah. And next Sunday I'll see you in Chicago house.
Dean: That is exactly right. I'm really looking forward to that.
Dan: I think Elanora is going to send you exact directions on how to get there, so during the week you'll get through the exact directions on how to get there.
Dean: I'd love it. Perfect. And I'll get from her the official hotel and stuff. Cool. Okay.
Dan: All right.
Dean: I'm very excited, have a great week and I will see you next week.
Dan: All right.
Dean: Bye.
Dan: Okay then. Bye.