Join Dean and Dan as they talk about the choices procrastination provides.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep041
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: And Mr. Jackson.
Dean: Here we are.
Dan: Yeah, I just got back from Phoenix late last night. I was at Genius Network-
Dean: I saw that, yeah. How was it?
Dan: Well, it was really interesting. My approach to any kind of conference is that I'd be happy if I just got one great thing, and that happened at 10:00 on the first morning, so the rest of it I just sort of coasted for the rest of the conference.
The first day was exercises, and Russell Brunson was there, and he did a presentation, and Dean Graziosi, pardon me, Ethan, was there and he did a presentation on coaching. Then the next day we had Ray Kurzweil, zoomed in talking about artificial intelligence. Then Molly Bloom, who a movie was made on her.
Dean: Yes, that was fantastic.
Dan: She was there, and she talked about the various stages of her life, including being a convicted felon, and what that was all about. Then we had Scott Hoffman who's a book agent. So lots of food for thought, and it was actually Dean Graziosi showing how he is hiring right now, and it fits in marvelously well with who, not how, so anyway.
Dean: I saw that you did a little presentation on that too.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, and about four or five people came up to me and said that it had instantly clarified what was bogging them down. So it's always useful to be useful.
Dean: It's always useful to be useful, that's true. Oh that's so good. Well, welcome back, so are you in Chicago now, or Toronto?
Dan: No, I'm in Toronto. I flew back last night. Enough of that sun, enough of that heat, let's get back to reality.
Dean: Yeah, is it still snowing up there?
Dan: Well, we had a huge windstorm here on Friday that took out half the power of the city, so my internet is still down.
Dean: Oh my goodness.
Dan: I don't know how the internet goes down. What is it, a tower goes down? I'm not quite sure how the internet goes down as the result of a windstorm.
Dean: Well, you're probably the least affected person in the entire Toronto GTA, by that outcome.
Dan: Well, I was just doing a little review of my recent contact lists on my cell phone. I had a minute before we got together this morning, and since July of 2016 when we stated the Joy of Procrastination series, you account for half of my calls.
Dean: Half of all the cell phone minutes used. I love it, that's the perfect thing.
Dan: Oh no, you account for 95% of the cell phone messages.
Dean: Oh, you're talking about the volume of calls, oh yeah.
Dan: I'm talking about the public of calls. No, you're 95% of the total minutes. Compared to the others, you're expensive.
Dean: That's funny, I love that, reassuredly expensive.
Dan: Yeah, and the others, a third of them are from past, but they're basically little calls, reminder here and there. And then it's Rogers, the cable company, my phone company trying to sell me something, you know, so just little notices that I can always expand my expenditures with them. But not compelling; I would say not compelling sales messages.
Dean: Well there you go.
Dan: Yeah, we'll you're right to say that the internet going down. Although I do miss it, I mean I'm ... to write the best. To balance things here I do a couple hours on the internet every day, so last night I wasn't able to do that but Babs and I went for brunch to a restaurant that has Wi-Fi so I caught up on things this morning.
Dean: Interesting. So since the last time we spoke, I spoke at Dan Kennedy's super conference in Orlando. Do you remember there was a series of books called "Guerrilla Marketing", with Jay Conrad Levinson?
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: He's passed on, and they had a summit here in Orlando this past weekend, so I went and shared. This was the funniest thing Dan, I collected an award for Joe Polish being inducted into the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame, along with people like Seth Goden, and others who have famously won the induction.
The thing was, Joe's being inducted into the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame for his amazing work with Dean Jackson on the "I Love Marketing" podcast, and other accomplishments in marketing. It's so funny to hear that Joe is getting inducted into the hall of fame for his amazing work with me. It was kind of funny.
Dan: I was trying to think of another situation like that. Yeah, that would be like Paul McCartney being awarded a prize for John Lennon, for his teamwork with Paul McCartney.
Dean: That's brilliant. That's exactly the feeling I had. And I was going to collect the award to accept his induction.
Dan: I love it.
Dean: It struck me so funny the way it was written on the announcement. That it was just so funny to me, I love it.
Dan: So when you receive the award, was the presenter aware of your... obviously you know Joe Polish, but were they aware of your relationship with Dean Jackson?
Dean: Yes, exactly. Oh man, that's so funny. I smile just to see the way they put the announcement about it, "For his amazing work with Dean Jackson".
Dan: That's very conventional. There’s a dimensions to it. Yeah, lots of dimensions to it.
Dean: The reason I was sharing that with you, one of the things that I always love to listen to Dan Kennedy talk, so that was the first event a couple weeks ago. One of the things that he said, talking about the five most important things that entrepreneurs or business owners need to focus on, and the first three were about getting customers, keeping customers, retaining customers. Then the one that was really interesting was prioritizing.
I can't remember the exact words, but it was essentially prioritizing opportunities, and then executing the top priorities. It sought me as something like what we need to talk about here, and that that really is for a 10 quick start, or a couple of 10 quick starts here. There's been no shortage of opportunities, and the prioritizing of that becoming the big thing.
I've always loved this idea that you always bring up about picking the three for the day, and that just feels so relaxing, but it also feels like it's a drop in the bucket of the list of things.
I don't think we've talked about that. How do you manage the idea flow, or the idea overflow to choose just the three?
Dan: I was thinking about that, because I was at a series of dinners. I was in New York for four days, and we had meals out with friends in New York, and then I went to Phoenix and we had some more meals, and in all except one of the cases you had to choose from a menu. Here's how I choose for a menu, I pick up a menu, I look, "Yeah, I'll have that, I'll have that, and I have that," and I put the menu down, and this is before anyone else has looked at the menu. I've already got my three things picked out.
Then it was really quite an extensive process of the other people at the table, "Well what about this", and "What about that?", and "How is that served?", and there were all these questions, and in the least amount of time it was 10 minutes before the other people at the table had made their-
Dean: Made up their mind, yeah.
Dan: ... made up their minds about it. I was finished probably maximum, I was certainly finished in half a minute. I just want a salad, okay there's a salad. I want an entrée; there's an entrée. Do I want a side? Yeah, I'll have a side, and that's it, that's a maximum. There are only three things that can possibly happen.
I was just pondering this because it happened numerous times in a fairly short period of time, over a period of about six or seven days, and I was asked, "Well why do you do that? Why do you do what you do, and why the others do?" So I was just comparing what was going on between my approach and other peoples approach. And this is a partial answer to the question you're asking; one of my priorities is to have decided-
Dean: I'd say you cut out for a little bit there Dan, you started to share what was the big revelation, and then you cut out.
Dan: My biggest priority every day is to have decided.
Dean: Ah, okay. That makes a lot of sense, actually.
Dan: So it's not so much the importance of the three things, I've just decided on three things and now I'm engaged, so I'm not pestered with alternatives what I could have done. I've eliminated the alternatives by having decided.
Dean: There's something deeper about that, because there's so many. When you're weighing options, it's really being terminally planted in mid-air, right? That's the thing, and when you go down, like you look at the way you described, and you've described this several times, you said when you go to Genius Network that you're looking for one idea. And then you've got that at 10:00 AM, and you weren't really weighing that now against is there a better idea kind of thing?
You've got that idea, and I get the sense that what you did was place that one, you locked that in. That that's the idea, and while you're listening in background to all the other things, that main idea was marinating over the two days rather than looking, comparing, and weighing it for more options.
Dan: Yeah, and the interesting thing is in the course of those two days you have little breakout sessions. He's got various thinking tools, and I use three thinking tools to actually just develop my thinking on this one thing, and including a really great conversation with Dean Graziosi himself, and the idea had come, and I zeroed in on how he had done what he did.
Essentially what Dean did is that he's building up again. He had really reduced down to almost a skeleton staff, and now he's developing up again, because he's switched over from his real estate investment educational empire, down to a more of an entrepreneurial focusing program and coaching entrepreneurs online. He's got a book out which is selling terrifically. He's already sold a quarter of a million copies which is fantastic in the non-fiction world, and so I really dealt.
Once I had got that one idea, then the two days were using other speakers and other experiences to actually develop that one idea, so I'm ready to implement this idea. Actually tomorrow morning I go in to the video. It will require a video on my part, but I'm already set, and the person who's going to do it was actually at the workshop. Paul Hamilton usually comes with us, but he was on a cruise, and Linda Gowalda who's my social media manager, she was there, so we already lined up what we're going to do, and I talked to Babs about it, she was there.
So I had really developed this idea, and for me to come away with an exciting new idea, to have really developed it over two days, that's a great payoff for me for the two days.
Dean: Yeah, right. That's great, and so that will become one of your three things for tomorrow.
Dan: Yeah, and the other two are already scheduled, so this was the only part of my schedule tomorrow where there was an opening where something new could happen, so I filled it.
So the thing about it, one of the things I've become aware, is that for in the circles that I hang out with, which are very similar to the circles that you hang out with, or Joe or everybody, the problem is not enough of it. The problem people are facing which is probably a bit unique in human history is not lots of people, not enough opportunity, we have just the opposite. We've got too much opportunity. When I say too much, you could never stop investigating how much opportunity you actually have. In other words, if you wanted to spend a whole day thinking about all the opportunities that actually had, you'd still be adding to the pages on the list by the time you went to bed.
The big problem is deciding on one, or two, or three, but by the time you get to four you're not in a bonus territory anymore. So my feeling is the cut off between opportunities being a good thing, and opportunities being a bad thing is the difference between three and four.
Dean: Oh, that's interesting. So three seems like the manageable one. Have we talked about Warren Buffet's prioritizing idea?
Dan: I've heard various takes on how he sizes up things, and one of them has to do with the person who's running the company. His first thing is that he evaluates the person, so I think he invests in people before he invests in companies, but then having decided that the person's a good person, then he looks at the company, and are they a blue chip brand? Is it a growth industry? Do they have a dominant position that could get even better in the future?
The other thing which seems is this something people are still going to be buying more of 25 years from now?
Dean: Right, exactly, that's the thing. A sustainable advantage, a durable advantage he calls it. I don't know whether this is urban legend, or whether this is a real scenario that somebody was having a hard time selecting or making choices, and he had make a list of the 25 most important things that they want to get done. The 25 most important things that they want to accomplish, and then from that list he had them narrow it down to eliminate all but the most important five things on that list. And then rewrite the list with just those five things on it, and he was checking with them to say, "Okay, so now what are you going to do about those five priorities?” he said. And the gentleman said, "Well, I'm going to focus on these ones as the primary thing, and then work on these others just as time allows, or when I have less importantly," and he said, "No. This list of 20 things becomes your 'Avoid at all costs' list."
And you're focused only on these five things, and it's those other 20 things that are going to take you away from focusing on these top five. That's an interesting thing, like we sometimes talk about making a "Not to think about list,", or a "Not To-Do" list, and you can appease yourself with putting something on that list for a quarter, or even as you're doing, you're essentially thinking for today.
How do you handle the idea barrage on a daily basis, once you've locked in on what your three are? How many do you think you're selecting from at any given time?
Dan: There are things which are preordained, so Sunday at 12:30 there's a certain number of Sundays going out 12 months that are already handled because I'm talking to you, you know, and I have now six other podcast series, and they're all handled the same way.
Like I got Steve Krein tomorrow, school and then I have somebody else on Tuesday. For tomorrow that's one of the three things that get me to 100% tomorrow. The big thing I should say, that along on focusing just on three things, that if I get three things done I'm at 100% for the day. If I get a fourth thing, something comes up and I get a fourth thing done, I'm above 100%, I'm in bonus territory.
What I've noticed is there's a difference between that approach, and the approach that I'm going to put 10 things down knowing I'm only going to get five done tomorrow. I said so, okay that's good, it's really getting those five things done, but do you actually give yourself credit for getting five things done tomorrow, or do you hold yourself as deficient because you missed five things out of your list of 10? And I noticed that people default to what they didn't get done.
They don't actually put the spotlight on what they did done when they put together a long list, and they do this day, after day, after day, and they've done it every day of their life. It just seems to me like blueprinting your life for failure. You're setting it up every day so you can't win, and I said, "It's your game. You're designing the rules of this game. Why are you designing the game so that you're always losing?" I said I designed the game so that I always win, and if it looks like I'm not winning the three a day game five days in a row, I said I'm going to change the rules.
Here's the thing, just because I'm on this little topic, I think if individuals realize that the entire way they're experiencing their life is a game that they set up for themselves. Nobody else set this game up for you, and I think once you accept total responsibility and ownership for your daily experience, and nobody did this to you. What I mean is, there isn't somebody else whose entire intent was to make your life miserable.
Dean: Right. It's so funny how different people play the game differently. Hang on. Okay. Hello there.
Dan: Yeah, I'm here.
Dean: There we go, I got so excited I flailed my arm and my headset came flying out.
Dan: Yeah, you see, that adds texture.
Dean: It really does.
Dan: A granular texture to the podcast.
Dean: Well, one of my favorite things is noticing how differently people play the game. Like so if I go out to Phoenix, usually if I'm going for Genius, I'll usually go a few days early and I'll spend some time with Joe. The way that I have learned to enjoy that experience is to have nothing on my agenda for that day. That's my thing. My thing is I'm just going to strap in and enjoy the ride for the day, just to observe. To be completely malleable and see where it ends up, but it's just this one long perpetual motion day that there's no moving towards anything.
There may be a general sense of a couple of things that have to get done, but you never know what's going to happen, and we inevitability will end up recording the podcast, or running into somebody, or adjusting plans even as it's going where everything is to constantly see this incoming barrage and accept or move to adjust to whatever needs to happen. Even to the point of settling on going to dinner at one place, and then in the middle of it changing and getting a reservation for another place on the way to the place that we already had the reservation for. If you weren't flexible or willing to engage at that level, it may seem frustrating.
Dan: Or chaotic.
Dean: Or chaotic. It's definitely chaotic, but overall when you reflect on the day, when you look at the progress, not the gap or where you were headed, 'cause you couldn't see that coming. That you've ended up that there was a lot accomplished during the day, but probably 60 or 70% of it was not even on the radar at the beginning of today.
Dan: Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because that ... Can I ask you a question?
Dean: Sure.
Dan: 'Cause essentially when you get together with Joe, you're no longer in control.
Dean: Right, that's what I mean. That's what I have to say to ... I let go of that, and I'm totally fine with that, but that's the way that it's like .... I just smile, and I enjoy it, and I know that whatever is going to happen is going to happen, absolutely.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Of course, we'll do that, yes. Yes.
Dan: So that's one of your rules. You're switching a button on the control panel, and saying we're going on free form for a couple days, and we'll just go on free form. So that's what I talk about, having your game. That you're in different situations, don't try to apply the same rules to different situations. I find my happiness level has gone way up as I developed a whole different set of rules depending upon situations.
Dean: And maybe that's interesting, because then when I get together with you I know exactly what's going to happen.
Dan: Yeah. I've got you, we're set for 12 months out. Always, we're set for 12 months out, and that's one of the rules that I ... because the only thing that really matters in this podcast structure is what you and I say to each other over a one hour period.
There's nothing to be gained by getting involved in the backstage organization, or spending time with it. So we've minimized absolutely to probably as much as zero as we possibly can, having to be concerned about anything, except just going with the particular conversation that we're having. So that's a rule, that's a rule.
It's really interesting because if you accept the fact that you're the one to say how you want your daily experience to go, and that first of all nobody has any insight into that, or possibly they have no awareness of how if you follow Dean around, I'm talking about you Dean, if they follow you around for a day they have no insight in how you're actually organizing your experience, and how you're organizing the activities of your day. I don't think anybody has any insight into how any other individual actually puts together and organizes their daily experience.
The only question you can ask them is the way that you're organizing your daily experience, is it serving your purposes? Is it making you happy? Do you feel-
Dean: Are you happy?
Dan: That's really it. Are you happy the way you're organizing it, you know? So that's an interesting thing, and we can learn from each other. It's not that each person is so unique that other people can't gain insight from them, but you could- First of all, how you actually think about your day is constantly developing in your mind, so nobody from the outside could possibly keep up with the new dimensions that you're actually adding, because a lot of what you do is just a response in a split second, and you just changed a rule, and that feels good.
That's why I think the whole notion of you know, Ray Kurzweil with his artificial intelligence. It's not too much different. I saw him six years ago, and the only different between what Ray was saying six years ago and what he said on Friday morning was some of the achievements of the artificial intelligence programs. Beating the top chess player, beating the top go player, winning Jeopardy and everything like that, but I had known about those because I had read about them on the internet, so I was doing there.
But it seemed to me that this constant comparison of artificial intelligence with human intelligence is kind of fruitless because my feeling is that the way humans actually approach their daily experience is not really observable, recordable, or imitable. So that an artificial intelligence program, a billion trillion times more powerful than we have today, will be no closer to comprehending how humans actually organize their experience than they are today.
Dean: Wow. I was at a guerrilla marketing event, I met a gentleman who's got an artificial intelligence video creation sort of algorithm that they have, that he's applied to a website for numerology. This experience that it provides is the most engaging thing I've ever seen online, in that you just type in your name, and your date of birth, and everything then, even to the personalized audio track of the video is "Dan", and it's personalized and it's sounds like it's a real just for you video. Not a hint of this is machine generated, and even sharing some of the things.
Even though right now he's preparing, the experience is kind of a hybrid of the back of it is A.I. high end computing in the back, but it's coupled with some human intervention in that the scripting, the reading of all of the videos is human, and they've taken the top 2000 most common first names, and record the real voice, and asked it to. It's many thousands because there's many different inflections of how you have to record that name depending on how you're using it in a sentence. There's different ways of fitting "Dan" into a sentence. When you're going, "So Dan," but it was really riveting. I think that you see how that thing is really going to have an impact. I can just imagine what Ray was sharing.
Dan: Oh yeah, yeah. There's no question, but I'll give you an example that I saw, and it was Dean Jackson emails, and it was on coaching. It was actually Brendon Burchard sent out a series of Dean Jackson emails, so they were incredibly effective because most of them were the nine word, "Hey, I'm going to be in Dallas tomorrow, and I just wondered if you'd like to get together with 14 other people. I have three slots," you know. It was incredibly effective, and that's a real jump in marketing what you've created there. I would say that this numerology thing, it's a jump in marketing but it has no resemblance to human intelligence. It's just a way of getting it.
And that's the other ways of attracting someone's attention, this is a breakthrough. But then within a very short period of time of this coming out, there will be 30 artificial intelligence programs using the same technique to get your attention.
Dean: Yes, I agree. And I wonder about that, like I start to see those types of emails coming around. There's a lot of those being used now, but they're so just fundamental that they're exactly what people would say, but I think about that. Is that going to wear out? Almost like there's no-
Dan: First of all, did you plug your birth date and your name in?
Dean: I did, of course, yeah.
Dan: Yeah, and was engaging for you?
Dean: Yes, very.
Dan: The response that you got. Very engaging. Okay, so you did it on a Sunday, and you listened to it, and then you did it again on Monday. Would it be as engaging on Monday?
Dean: I think it's the first time, I guess. Like when you're hearing the same information. But where I was going with that was-
Dan: But like Siri and Alexa, people have said it's amazing what they do, and I did Siri about five times, and then I quickly decided that Siri's a bit of an idiot.
Dean: Yeah, Siri is.
Dan: Siri has no insight into thought patterns, and Alexa doesn't either. I said here's the thing, I don't talk to people who have intelligence like Siri and Alexa, why would I talk to a machine that has that type of intelligence?
Dean: That's true. And it's really interesting Elon Musk just- there were big headlines that Elon just recently said that Tesla made a mistake with too much automation, that humans really are the killer app kind of thing. That they rely too much on automation.
Dan: Yeah, I mean it's just really, really interesting because I think that they key to humans is just the sheer unpredictability of humans, how humans will actually respond to any experience. So the most that artificial intelligence can actually tell me about me, is what I've done.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: It has no insight into what I'm going to do next.
Dean: Because I was just going to say, you don't even know.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, that's funny.
Dan: This is the thing, the thumb trouble of humanity is not what we've done, it's what we're going to do next by responding to what we've done in entirely new ways. I was sitting there because I know all of Ray's stuff, I've read his books and everything else, and I was thinking: Really what you're doing is creating probably pretty good rules of thumb about how you have to organize things in such a way that humans don't do themselves harm, but we already have lots of systems like that. The traffic control system, that's one of them. If we're going to have people driving around in cars, when they come to an intersection probably we need to have some rules here about how that red, yellow, and green, we have ... yeah we need some things like that.
Mo my feeling is that I think one of the reasons why artificial intelligence is becoming more and more of a necessity is just the sheer number of humans that there are on the planet, and this will grow, and they're more freed up then they have in previous times of interacting with each other in unpredictable ways, and so we've got to create some rules of how large masses of people interact with each other.
I think this is really why the artificial intelligence is one necessary, two why it's useful, but it's going to be the main issue is the giving good systems of governance and peaceful cooperation rather than collisions and warfare, and crime. I think there's a big issue.
Since I was born in 1944 the global population has more than tripled. It was 2.2 billion, now it's 7.5 billion, and they can interact with each other to a degree that wasn't even conceivable. So I think the artificial intelligence isn't about machines becoming smarter than humans, it's creating structures which allow humans to go on doing what they're doing as the population increases, and their ability to interact with each other keeps increasing.
Dean: Yes. And you think about that the population, that's where they even at abundance talk about the three billion more people coming online. They took Cloudlandia, I guess. That's the population. I wonder if we're saying there's 7.2 billion people on the mainland. I wonder what the population of Cloudlandia is right now. Was it 3 billion, or something?
Dan: Well, they have to use something like ... the simplest is to use cell phones. Because they can keep them. I think it's over 3 billion have cell phones that they're using to work. That would include me at the very bottom of the spectrum, how I use it and others who are checking into 100 times a day, they're interacting 200 times a day. But my feeling is that artificial intelligence is a technology that's necessary not to get ahead of humans, but to actually catch up with humans.
Dean: What do you mean by that?
Dan: Well it's that humanity is always infinitely ahead of technology in terms of what we want, and what we're striving for. I think all artificial intelligence is to serve some kind of marketing.
Dean: Yeah. And it can help in that direction. I think when you said looking, I think that what it really does is it can be helpful when looking backward helps. When you can predict the future by looking backwards. I think in telephony aided customer service or interactions where plus or minus a very small percentage of outliers, the interactions are always the same. Where somebody's calling about, "I'd like to check on my bank balance." "Okay, tell me what's your bank account number," any of those kind of things. That's been around for a while, but historically I think where there's a known universe of information that can be gathered.
That's why my thing that I use Alexa for more than anything is, we were watching a show the other day called "The Blacklist" on Netflix-
Dan: Yes, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: Have you seen that show? It was really well done.
Dan: Yeah, but I'm always in a particular series, and "The Blacklist" hasn't gotten up enough that it will be the next series.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: But your liking of it enters into my thinking.
Dean: Oh yeah, loved it. So Alan Alda was in the show, and I was thinking, "Boy he looks great." Like, he's been around for so long, I wonder how old he is.
Dan: He must be 80. He must be 80.
Dean: 84, yeah.
Dan: He looks great now.
Dean: So I just call out to Alexa, "Alexa, how old's Alan Alda?" "Alan Alda is 84 years old." I mean it's that access to facts and knowledge, that's where it's really nailed down. Where you're accessing anything that's known, and you just want to know the answer. I think that's pretty crazy, to think that you really have access to all of that just from the ether. Because I'm sitting in the living room, and Alexa's in the kitchen, and I just call out, and here comes the answer.
If I used some of these skills that you have, I could conceivably say to Alexa, "Can you email Dan Sullivan and tell him I'm going to be on the phone at 12:30," or whatever. Even though we don't need to do that, but I get the things from Anna as reminders. But that kind of thing can all be done by voice, and I think there's a role in helpful place for that.
I wonder if we'll ever be able to say, "Alexa, what are the top three things I should be doing today? What am I procrastinating today?" I wonder if Alexa will ever be able to tell us what we procrastinate.
Dan: This is my whole point, because my sense is that in the way that we can't enter in the predicting other people's creativity. If we can't do it, then there's no other external factor that's ever going to be able to do it, because it's being created. It's being created. But here's some insight I got, is that what artificial intelligence is going to do is going to condense human beings more and more over the coming decades to stop trying to be machines.
Because if you try to be a machine; in other words in your behavior and your approach to life, and more and more you're going to be in competition with super machines. I have to tell you, it's not going to be a winning experience. Who's the top tennis player in the world right now, men's top tennis player in the world right now? Do you have any sense, I know you follow that a little bit.
Dean: Yeah, I'm not sure whether it'd be-
Dan: It's a handful-
Dean: ... Federer, or Djokovich.
Dan: Okay, let's say Federer, and you choose as your first experience of playing a game of tennis against Roger Federer, it's not going to be a pleasant experience for you.
Dean: Right. That's true.
Dan: The only person who's going to be unhappier with the experience is Roger Federer.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, it's so funny, I mean you look at that-
Dan: Yeah. Go ahead.
Dean: There was one thing, you're talking about the machines, and what's interesting there I heard a conversation about somebody had a school that trains tradesmen, like in electricians, and plumbers, and HVAC people. That their biggest thing right now is getting millennials to choose those professions. Just the shift is that if they're Cloudlandia focused, this is my interpretation of it. If they're Cloudlandia focused on it, they're going to school, they're taking on student loans, they're coming out with $100,000 in debt, and a tough job market, competitive job market. And he's saying that for them that they can get paid to train and come out with a potentially six figure job in four years, compared to going to the traditional college route right now. But it's not seen as sexy or jobs of the future.
Dan: Cool. I think it's the coolness factor. I'm really struck, because if you read about the lives of people who work at Facebook, or they work at Google, their existence is pretty much that of college students living in dorms.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: It's almost like it's perpetual adolescence if you go to work for ... In Cloudlandia, it's like you have a sense that you're on the inside because you're working for one of the coolest organizations in the world, and everything else, but if you actually look at your mainland existence, your mainland existence isn't much different than when you were a college student living on a budget in a dorm, and you have about as much freedom over the daily activities, and you have as much of a future ahead of you as a college student does halfway through their college existence, except this college existence just goes on forever.
Dean: Yes, I think it's becoming even more of a dividing debate as the migration continues.
Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting because our offices are in a section, the Liberty Village thing, is pretty much all Cloudlandia workers. I call them techoprol's, they're proletarian, but they're technoprol's-
Dean: You got there way before that.
Dan: I was there before any of them were down there, but it's interesting because in the morning and evening we're driving in and we're driving out, and I see them, and it's really become very, very populated on the sidewalks both at the beginning of the day, and the end of the day. But if I were to drive maybe four miles to the university of Toronto and I sat there and I watch, there's no difference between the ones who are on the- they look exactly the same. They may be older, they may be older and everything else but they dress the same, they all have backpacks, they all have earphones in their ears. None of them are talking. None of them are talking to each other, they're all plugged into Cloudlandia in one way or another, and I said that it's almost like the high-tech proletarian work life isn't any different than the college life.
If I go back to when I was a college student in the 1960s, there was a radical difference between what students looked like, and what the business community looked like. Radical difference, but now there's no difference. They look kind of shabby, they're not well dressed. There's a shabbiness to them, and they're not well coiffed and everything like that, so it's a really, really interesting thing how Cloudlandia constantly puts a promise out to the future, but it's not here today and you're geared into that because you're on the inside track to this much bigger future. Whereas somebody who goes through the type of training that you're talking about, and they're an electrician, or a plumber, or a skilled carpenter, all the things that we need, their future is today because they're earning big bucks and they're saving money. They probably own their home after a short period of time.
Dean: Yeah, that's the point right? Coming out of the four year, like in the path to a six figure income is clearer as in four years than going down the traditional college route. Their biggest thing is finding people who will choose that app. You don't pay to go to a trade school, it's like these guys are looking to intern people into it. Amazing.
Dan: Yeah. I stay in touch because we have a lot of millennial age team members who work for our coach, and after they're with coach for about six months, they start finding it harder and harder to talk to the peers that they went through- and all of them are college, virtually everybody who works for us has a college degree, but it's really fascinating to talk to them about how their comparing their coach experience with the peers who were out. You know, they've gotten jobs somewhere, and everything like that.
One of the things that I notice a huge difference, that when you're in coach, because the focus of working that strategic coach is that we're really interested in your unique ability to the degree that you keep becoming more and more useful in the company, you're going to have a greater freedom of actually using your unique ability to almost create your own job. Paul Hamilton's an example of that, Shannon Waller, Kathy Davis, so many people. Julia Waller, they've all created their own income, but it's based on them being useful while getting a greater handle on their unique ability. Almost to a person said, "If I'd known this when I was 13 or 14, I could have skipped college all together."
I said, "What's the conversation with people you went to college?" They said they all wish they were back in college." Because they hate the work life.
Dean: College is a very idealized thing. You've got the social environment, you've got basically a 15 or 20 hour work week if you look at it from classes, probably more like 15 hours a week, three or four hours a day of classes maybe four days a week, and then the rest of it is independent study. Lots of procrastination time, and loosely held together with that form of the grades at the end.
And to keep that going seems like a great thing. Was reading really even about how the coworking spaces, which have really become very popular among startups, and Cloudlandia companies, is now really filtering into co-living stasis, where it's almost creating dorms for graduating millennials who don't want to give up that college environment. Even now they're hostels are becoming mainstream now. There's a brand that's coming to make that travel normal now.
Dan: Yeah, when Zuckerberg was testifying in front of congress I was watching him, and I said, you almost have a sense of this is the first time he's worn a suit. Like he was showing up for a job interview, so he's got cleaned up and everything like that. It wouldn't take much to seem as head of the dorm, back at Harvard. It's just that he's bringing in 700 billion dollars a year now, with his dorm, but certain things haven't changed at all. His kind of surprise that his technology can be used for negative purposes, negative activity, comes to him like a complete shock. "Oh my golly," you know.
Dean: "Oh my golly," yeah.
Dan: "You mean our parties are too loud?" You know.
Dean: That certainly wasn't our intention."
Dan: "No, no, no. We're going to have to work on this," take two or three years to work out.
Dean: You take responsibility for it though.
Dan: I do take responsibility, but it's going to take a lot of time for us to think this through. And I just said it was kind of like suspended adolescence. I just got this feeling of suspended adolescence. I mean that's one hand, and on the other hand I hear he's a real killer, kind of a ruthless killer when it comes to business deals and everything like that. He was probably born with that, so that's not something he developed out in marketplace, he's probably got that and...
But it's really interesting the Cloudlandia does not really require much emotional growth. The mainland really does, because you have to pay the rent, there are all sorts of things you have to do on the mainland. So my feeling is that trying to immerse yourself and get more and more detached from the mainland and trying to see if you can live your entire existence inside Cloudlandia, it really doesn't require as much 360 degree consciousness and emotional growth as the mainland does.
Dean: I think you're right. I think that this is such fertile around here for conversations. I mean, this whole transition is going to be the defining migration of our generation here.
Dan: Yeah, I mean it's a lot. In an earlier age it's the switch from ... and I grew up on a farm, so I made the switch, but I love cities. I love cities, and I've only lived in the city since I left home, but I still have an enormous amount of my sense of how the world works come from the fact that I grew up on a farm.
So it's an interesting thing. We have previous historical transformations like this, but anyway. So if you had to say one thing that you're most intrigued about by our conversation, as we go back out into the mainland, mainland experience. What would you say it is right now? Because we've covered a lot of ground today.
Dean: We really did. I think going back to where your goal for the thing is to get to the place of being decided. Not to explore all the options that we keep exploring. Your goal is to get to decide it, and that makes a difference.
Did I ask you about your Myers-Briggs? Do you know what your Myers-Briggs is?
Dan: Yeah, I did, but I don't know what the letters are, but it means that I'm a-
Dean: Are you an INTJ?
Dan: I'm slightly on the introvert side of the line. I'm not really deep into it-
Dean: Right, me too.
Dan: Left to my own devices, I spend my time alone.
Dean: Yes. Do you remember whether you were a judger or perceiver?
Dan: Perceiver.
Dean: Okay, yeah, me too, but you seem to be able to flex your j, as they say, more.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Because our natural tendency, I'm an INTP as well, and so our natural tendency is to want to explore or keep our options open. And you have trained yourself, it seems like then, to seek out decided, which is a j.
Dan: Well what I've done is a shift like you did. Yours was, if I remember very early in our conversation, the shift was whereas my approach would be that I would get up in the morning and I would say, "What do I most want to do today?" Okay? You shifted it one day that you would get up and say, "What do I want to most do tomorrow?" Okay?
Dean: Right, that's been a big shift.
Dan: Yeah, so I would say that it's not a violation of your Myers-Brigg's profile, it's just that you learned that in order for me to have my options open, I've got to have today handled.
Dean: I like that.
Dan: So my feeling is you just filled another rule into your approach to the future, where I'm just going to move it by 24 hours. I'm just going to move that rule forward, I'm going to have to stay handled.
Dean: That'll be my reflection and meditation this week.
Dan: Yeah, and I think I've done the same thing, that I'm always going to have tomorrow handled, so that the next day is more open.
Dean: Yes. I like that.
Dan: Yeah. Again, what your natural tendency is, but there's also the rules that you have to put in place so that you can actually have your natural tendency always be producing a positive experience. I think there's a difference between what your approach is, and what the rules are that support that approach.
Dean: Yep, I like that.
Dan: Yeah. Wonderful conversation, and the biggest thing that I'm taking away is that you got a prize on behalf of another person's relationship with you
Dean: Oh tell me, what happened?
Dan: No, you gotta reward yourself-
Dean: Oh, that I gotta prize- yes. That's so funny.
Dan: That you accepted a prize on behalf of another person, and the only reason they're getting the prize is because they have a relationship with you.
Dean: It's so funny, I love it.
Dan: That's like a zen co-in, you know.
Dean: It really is, it's the best, yeah. That's what it exactly what it felt like John Lennon accepting the prize for Paul McCartney. That was a great analogy.
Dan: No, no, Paul accepting the prize on behalf of John Lennon because John Lennon had a relationship with Paul McCartney.
Dean: That's true, yes. Exactly right, right.
Dan: I love it, I love it.
Dean: Very funny.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Well, always enjoyable.
Dan: Thankfully Joe is still alive.
Dean: Absolutely, yeah. We got plenty of swimming pools to write.
Dan: Yeah. Okay Dean.
Dean: Thanks Dan. Bye.
Dan: Bye.