Join Dean and Dan as they talk about their progress and the expected and unexpected benefits of procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep042
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson.
Dean: Here we are.
Dan: Yes, I just got back from two weeks in the UK.
Dean: I hear.
Dan: Beautiful weather. It was sunny and 65 to 70 every single day. It was probably the best stretch of weather. Even the Brits were saying, "Something's wrong."
Dean: They're saying, "Mr. Sullivan is in town."
Dan: Yeah, we had a great time.
Dean: It was almost like staying in Toronto.
Dan: We were there for three days of business, and the rest of it was just wandering around what I consider to be the world's city. You think about cities, and we go to LA, which is a big global city, Chicago, New York, but London, I think, is the world's city.
Dean: I think you're right.
Dan: I think more things go on with London than any other city in the world. We got back on-
Dean: You know what was really funny?
Dan: Sorry, go ahead.
Dean: Just to amplify that, when I'm over there ... I think I told you I have a new home in London at the Four Season in Trinity Square, which is great. That's my headquarters when I'm in the world's city. Just to see what you were saying there, in the Four Seasons there, on the television they have this long list of channels that are Oman TV, and Qatar TV, and Jordan TV, and all these international channels that are like the CNN equivalent kind of thing of that country that made me realize, A, what a world we live in on the big thing. Our filtered view of it is really the Western world. We see CNN or CNN International, which is out of London or whatever. To see all of these country-based channels, I would just stop and watch on a few of these channels just to get the flavor of what that actually looks like and what it is. If you live in Sudan, that's what they're watching, Sudan CNN kind of thing. It made me realize London, just like you said, I've never seen that in any other city. London truly is like that, an international hub, you know?
Dan: Yeah. When I go to New York, I don't watch that much TV, but just to go through the channels, you'll definitely have a couple Chinese stations, you'll have Japanese stations, about seven or eight Spanish of one kind or another, and probably a German, probably a French, but not the smaller countries that you were talking about. What it means to me is that the number of people coming from those countries to London justifies having a hotel like the Four Seasons. Of course, the Four Seasons has hotels in so many of those countries.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: It might be a Four Seasons thing too.
Dean: I've never seen that overwhelming wall of international vista than from there. You think about what's coupling that now with the new Dreamliner airlines are just coming out now, which have a 25,000-kilometer range, which makes any two points in the world a direct flight. In theory, now you'll be able to go from London to Australia direct or from London to anywhere in the world as a direct flight.
Dan: That's a 16,000-mile range, and there's nowhere in the world that you can't get to with a 16,000-mile range.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: One way or the other, going over the pole or whatever, there's nothing in the world.
Dean: All the way round, yeah.
Dan: Possibly Perth, Australia would be the only place you can't get to.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: It's over a million people. Perth, I think, is the furthest away from anything. I know that because of our friend, Kim White.
Dean: Yeah, right.
Dan: ... because he grew up in Perth. He grew up in Perth, and he said that if you're in Perth and you want to go anywhere, you're going to go a long way. Anyway, it's fascinating to me just the busyness, just the normal busyness, because we were out for breakfast this morning here in Toronto. Relatively, the streets are abandoned here compared to any street in London.
Dean: On Sunday morning.
Dan: On Sunday morning, yeah. It's like there's been a plague or something, most of the people have died or something. That's just normal for Toronto people. Take almost any part of London on Sunday morning, and it's just packed. People are out walking. It's quite a place. I like it because I was born on a farm. If you're born on a farm, you dream about the future as the biggest, most packed city that you can think of. By the same token, people who dream about having a farm, I know they weren't born on one.
Dean: That's right. Right on. The burning question I have, Dan, are the people of London procrastinators?
Dan: Oh, sure.
Dean: It's international, so they're over there to-
Dan: It's global. We're talking about a global condition here. I've given a lot of thought to that because we left off our last podcast on a notion that procrastination is the natural way of being for humans.
Dean: Genetically wired in.
Dan: Yeah. I think it's just the fact that our minds are hardwired with this time sense. I remember Shannon Waller has an oldest daughter who is now starting college. I've really observed her through her entire life because Shannon's been with us for, this year she'll be with us for, I'm just trying to think here, 27 years she's been in Coach. She's got the longest continuous connection with us of anybody. I remember there's a sign language that you can teach children. It's different from the sign language that they teach. Children start developing a desire to communicate long before their vocal cords, that they can actually command language. It's somewhere between a year and a half and two years that they start getting this desire to do it. They taught her this sign language. She had about 40 different words that she could actually sign with, and she took right to it. She's got a younger sister who didn't take to it at all, but Madison took to it at all. Just before she started actually talking, she had jumped into where she could talk about something that had happened the day before in the park, and she was conscious that yesterday was different from the day that she was in. You could see it in how she was using sign language to talk about the blue bird that she had seen in the park.
Dean: Really?
Dan: ... before she went to sleep last night. This was a different time dimension. Within about a week after she crossed the line of using sign language to talk about something that had happened yesterday, she started talking. My feeling is that the time sense in language, just from using her as a sample of one, very thorough scientific survey that I'm doing for a quick start, for a quick start, if you have an example of one, you've got enough research.
Dean: That's enough facts.
Dan: That's enough facts. I don't need any more facts. I've got a sample. My feeling was that our overwhelming desire to communicate has a lot to do with our time sense. It just occurred to me when I was thinking about this in London. Here we're right back into the thick of it here with our podcast. By the way, people are listening to this in the UK.
Dean: Yes, I bet. We're global.
Dan: Yeah. My feeling is that probably built right into our brains are two things, the ability to talk, and we pick up on it. In other words, we're imitating other people because the language we use is a function of the conditions that we grow up in. Grammar, and vocabulary, and how we talk about things is really a function of who's talking around us when we start talking. The other thing about this time sense, my feeling is because we have this time sense of being able to see both backwards and forwards in time, my feeling is that procrastination would come right along with that, that we'd be seeing things in the future where we have an emotional tie to that but we're not prepared to act on it.
Dean: It all ties together, doesn't it? When you think about the inherent things we have, we're wired to and the gift that we have as humans is an ability to see something in the future that doesn't exist yet. We have this sense, this gift of being able to consciously allocate future time or have a sense of it. I could do this later as opposed to thinking that everything has to happen in real time, and if we don't do it right now, we can't do anything, tied with our ability to communicate it then, like you're saying, built in, that even in the youngest kids have this ability to differentiate between yesterday was not today. Even if you haven't articulated this sense of tomorrow, I wonder how if at a year and a half, 18 months straight of closing your eyes and then waking up, and there it is again, that maybe you realize that, "Oh, I see what happens. I close my eyes, and then I'm here again. I get to do this again."
Dan: Yeah. I'm not sure it was Madison, but I noticed other kids, they talk about light sleeps and dark sleeps. Light sleeps are naps, but dark sleeps are going to bed at night. In other words...
Dean: Oh, light sleeps.
Dan: ... it gets dark, and then you sleep.
Dean: That's interesting.
Dan: They know that it's much more significant what happens on the other side of a dark sleep than what happens on a light sleep.
Dean: That's the first way at explaining to kids how far something is off. It's three more sleeps. Three more sleeps, and then it'll be Christmas.
Dan: Dark sleeps, three more dark sleeps. Yeah, yeah.
Dean: Three more dark sleeps, that's funny. I often still refer to things as that, so many more sleeps. Two more sleeps till Christmas, that's right.
Dan: I think that this picking up on a reality that's in your head but not in the world around you yet is crucial, and I think you're alone with it. I was trying to think why procrastination doesn't get talked about is because that feeling of seeing something probably uniquely because I think that each of us, what we see in the future is unique to just what our brain is looking for, and that's not really known to people outside of ourselves, what our brain is actually looking for, because we're not really fully in touch with what our brain is actually looking for, and then to be able to visualize something in very clear form.
Just a very test example, I got back on Friday night, this being Sunday. The first thing I did is check my calendar to see if you were in the calendar because I hadn't given any thought to it during the two weeks in London. Yup, there, 12:30, check in with Dean. Then I'm visualizing. I thought about it yesterday. Last night I made sure my cell phone was completely ... I'm getting ready for something that is real in my brain but is not actually real yet until the time arrives, 12:30. I was just thinking about that. That's a neat thing that our brains can do that.
Dean: Yes. I think that part of this is that our brains, after nearly two years of this now, can count on that, that you've established that that is the pattern that I talk with Dean at 12:30 on Sundays when we're around. We've established that our subconscious brain already looks for and expects that to happen. I bring that up because I had some conversations with a guy who was sharing some of these things about the subconscious and how it's always this battle between our conscious brain's desires. We can see something, intellectually know that we want it, emotionally get attached to wanting it, and then writing checks that need to be cashed in the future by our future self, that we're procrastinating writing that in the future.
It was really interesting that our subconscious brain only establishes things in patterns, that repetition is what establishes something as a pattern. That's why when you hear that it takes 21 days to develop a habit, that it's that. If after 21 Sundays we've been here at 12:30, we start to get conditioned for that, that it doesn't really take any conscious effort to remember that that's what's going on. That's imprinted in us. It's funny because I had that same thing. Always around mid-morning on Sunday I'll have this, because I'm not even looking at my watch or doing anything, but mid-morning in my body, my body will go, "Oh, today's Sunday." That'll immediately lead me to thinking, "Okay, are we recording today?" just like you did yesterday. There's something going on there that you get that established.
Dan: Yeah. I went into the calendar, and I clicked on the appointment with you today. I noticed that Anna had said a 12-month calendar out to you of all the Sundays over the next year. She simply said, "Dean, please indicate the ones that don't work for you. Otherwise, it's confirmed." She put, "Just tell me the ones that you can't make, and the rest of them are confirmed." She's already confirmed about 20, 25 dates ahead of time for the next 12 months. It's not only our habit, but it's Anna's habit, too. Anna's making sure because we've agreed that it's going to be on Sunday, it's going to be 12:30. Sundays you can make, they're in, and the ones you can't make, they're not.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: We know that a year out. We know that whole thing a year out. It's interesting how this reality has gotten clear simply because we had lunch and I brought up a topic going on almost two years ago. You said, "Hey, you've been holding out on me. This is interesting." Then we immediately the next day started the process, and we've been totally consistent. I think the reason is because our brains were both looking for a conversation on this topic, and therefore it's become a habit really fast. I have to tell you, it's been very liberating for me over the last two years to talk about a topic that up until now has strictly been private.
Dean: Right, exactly. I think that we may be the only two in the world having this conversation looking at procrastination as a super power to embrace rather than as something to rid yourself of.
Dan: Yeah, totally unique. If it's going to show up, it's going to show up on Google, and I haven't seen it show up on Google. It's always seen as a problem. Even the people who say, "Well, you can utilize it," they still consider it a problem. It's something that there's a bit of a character flaw that you do this. Maybe this is the truly common human condition is procrastination. Where we become unique is what we do with it, but actually we share this simply, I think, because of the way our brains are structured in relationship to language, and time, and everything like that. Where everybody starts is in a state of procrastination, and then you're either more successful or less successful at going from that point forward.
Dean: It's an interesting frame because the thing that makes procrastination in the world be perceived as a bad or shameful thing is in the way that you're thinking about it, the way that you're looking and talking about it, because the reality is we can only do things now. We can only do something in the present moment. There are lots of things just by default that we're intending on doing, and committed to doing, and will do in the future that are not viewed as procrastination. They're saying that, "Okay, we have an intention of doing 25 new podcasts over the next year for this." We're doing this one right now, but that doesn't mean that we're procrastinating the other 24 because we know that they're coming. We've addressed this, and we know that they're coming. It's almost like the shame of it. I think the useful thing that we've discovered about procrastination is its reliability to bring to us the things that we haven't yet locked into reality or into the calendar. I think that's the thing. Once something is decided on and settled, you could argue that procrastination has done its job to bring it up to the front. Even if the action is brainstorm the project and it's put in the calendar on Thursday at 10:00 a.m. for two Jacksonian units of 20 minutes, procrastination has done its job to get it to that point. Interesting.
Dan: Yeah, you've been alerted. You've been alerted to something. My feeling is that the things that appear to you, in other words, first of all, you're intellectually engaged with it but you're emotionally connected to it, that has a lot to do with what's been going on already in your life. In other words, that there's a certain kind of buildup of momentum that you like certain things and you don't like others. That's why I think it's unique. It's common enough that you can have a conversation about it. There's a way that all human brains work, and we have concepts that we buy into. One of my great delights in going to London is Waterstones book store on Piccadilly.
Dean: Love it.
Dan: It's five floors, and it's filled with couches.
Dean: I'll be there in a couple of weeks.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. I went three times during the two weeks. I just hang out, and I walk around. It shows the one superior advantage to books over Kindle, over the electronic ones, because Amazon does a pretty good job of feeling out what I like. They're connecting me all the time to books that are in the vein of things I'm interested in. But when I go into Waterstones, I come across stuff that I didn't even know I was interested in. I read a book, and it's called Seven Types of Atheism. It's a short book
Dean: Seven types. I love that.
Dan: Yeah. He talks about going back roughly about 2,500 years. It starts with the Greeks, this whole thing of not grounding reality to a thing called God or gods. It's the Greeks, the Romans. It's a Western thing. It doesn't show up because there isn't a corresponding history of thought anywhere in the world except in the West. In the Islamic world, there's no history of how people thought about. In the Oriental world, until you hit Confucius there isn't. It's not seen as progressive in the West. It's seen as that we build on conversations that have happened before. It's not unusual to tune in to a station. I was watching a little video, a YouTube video on an Austrian mathematician called Gödel, who I'm very intrigued by. In the little lecture by a math professor, he makes reference to Aristotle, who lived 2,300 years ago. Aristotle is part of present day thinking. There isn't the corresponding thing anywhere else in the world where you have this feeling of a certain continuity or integration of thinking over long stretches of time. He said that the West is really the only place where the idea of progress actually developed and that there was a direction to human affairs. He said that's not known in other cultures.
I was thinking about that in relationship, because I read about these seven different kinds of denying the existence of God really, basically what the central thought is there. I had read a lot of it because I'm a reader. The one thing is that my feeling is that the intensity of the feeling procrastination probably is much, much greater in a culture that believes in progress because to a certain extent you have this feeling that you're part of this general society that's making progress, but you're lagging. You're falling behind. You're not part of the general flow of things. I wonder if the idea of being a procrastinator or procrastinating being a negative thing actually happens anywhere that doesn't have a general societal sense of progress.
Dean: I think it would have to just by default because procrastination is really a state, or the way we've defined it really is only the guilt or shame of not doing something now that you know you want to do, pushing it off into later, which is almost how it happens. It's almost like the psychic interest on the debt of dipping into the future for a current obligation. I'll do that later. "I'll do that later," is the psychic equivalent of, "Put it on my tab," that you're entering into a time debt the moment you say it. You've committed to it.
Dan: My sense is if you didn't believe in progress in the general sense, that you're part of a society that's making progress, I'm just wondering if you would actually experience that that was a bad thing, putting it off to the future when you're part of a society that puts everything off to the future.
Dean: I guess that's true.
Dan: The famous manana, the famous manana, "Well, I'll do it tomorrow." That's not acceptable in our part of the world, but in other parts of the world the fact that there's a humor attached to it and everything like that indicates that it's probably pretty acceptable to put something off to tomorrow, or put it off to next year, or who cares.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, "I'll do it tomorrow." We think about that, what would be the evidence that you're in a society that doesn't value progress or even have a construct for it?
Dan: Yeah, yeah, because we don't realize that our concepts that we have, which are very intense for us, aren't necessarily universal. They haven't been universal since the beginning of time, and they're not necessarily universal in terms of geography that they're in other parts of the world that just don't respond to the whole notion that you have to get it done. If you're going to feel good about yourself, you have to act on it now. There's probably whole parts of the world where that's a meaningless concept.
Dean: Right, that's the whole thing. I feel like you're describing the fish who said to the other fish, "You ever wonder what it's like outside of this water?" The other one says, "What's water?"
Dan: That's the Gödel, the mathematician. He's got this thing which actually threw the entire world of mathematics into a panic in the 1930s, 1940s, and it's called the incompleteness theorem. Translated into everyday language, it means that you can't be inside of a system and understand the system that you're in. I feel to a certain extent we've cracked a little bit of the code on this, you and I, because we've made a general statement that the starting point for everybody's experience is actually procrastination, that you're visualizing future realities that have no basis in reality. In other words, you're visualizing it. That causes a negative or positive response inside of you. It leads you to the threshold of action or not action, threshold of decision or not decision. We feel this intensely. You and I are saying, "Yeah, that's the natural point." That's where we all start. We start there, and then we get more skillful or we don't become skillful at all in dealing with that experience. My feeling is that we're two fish that discovered water.
Dean: What is all this stuff? We're surround in it, everybody is. Wait, everybody's in this water, but nobody's talking about it.
Dan: Nobody's talking about it. We're not outside of the water. We're not outside of the water. This is why I'm dealing with a great deal of skepticism, this thing of artificial intelligence surpassing humans, because I'm saying that artificial intelligence is just a creation of humanity. They're inside the human experience.
Dean: It's frozen in time.
Dan: They can't get outside. If we can't get outside of humanity, they sure as heck can't, artificial intelligence. I think there's a lot of silliness about this. I think the reason is that people don't fully comprehend Gödel's law. I think that the fact that we're the first two who are actually talking about this topic, and it seems to have infinite dimensions to it, in other words, every Sunday I'm discovering, "Gee, that's another twist on this procrastination thing," I said I have a feeling there's no end to it.
Dean: I don't think so either.
Dan: If we go 25 years and we do 25 a year, I know my math, that's 625 podcasts. I don't feel that we'll be any closer to exhausting the subject of procrastination than we are today. I just feel that this is an infinite realm.
Dean: Yes, I agree. I had an interesting distinction while you were gone. It's been a couple of weeks at least, three weeks, I think, since we spoke. Over that time, I discovered one of the foundational things that I've learned from you is this idea of making something up, making it real, and making it recur, that progression. What I learned about the way my own system works, that I definitely skew on the make it up and make it real with help end of things, and that there's a layer in between the making it real and making it recur. There's a packaging up, or there's something that has to happen to make something ready to recur in a way. When you look at the workshops, when your thing was you made the workshops up, you made the thinking tools, you made the workshops real, in order to make them recur or replace yourself in it, you had to bring in other coaches. There's a preparation of that that requires some transitional tools or transitional development that really enables or instructs the people who are doing the recurring to do that. It just dawned on me that that's the point I'm at organizationally right now is in preparing those things so that other people can take the recur element of things and more forward. That was an interesting distinction for me. It's almost like that making it scale ready is the way I described it.
Dan: What I've done is that I've decided I don't want to know anything about that. What I mean is that I feel that the skill that it requires to go from the make it real stage to the make it recur stage, I'm so not good at that that I don't even want to know what's involved there. I just want to surround myself with people who are actually good at that. They see things that I can't possibly see because I'm really good at making things up that a lot of people can't comprehend. They say, "How do you keep coming up with new stuff?" And I say, "You just come up with something new."
Dean: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: They say, "Well, what are you responding to?" In other words, "How do you think it through to get to the point where you can do that?" I say, "Well, that's not really the way it happens." You just say, "Hey, that's interesting. Let's play with that a little bit." Next week I have to have a brand new quarter for the 10x workshops because it starts the week after next.
Dean: I'm coming, by the way. I'm going to be in-
Dan: Yeah. I said, "Well, probably on Sunday afternoon after I talk to Dean I'll figure out what the main concepts are." Actually, I was thinking about it a little bit because I went yesterday. I just got going, and sure as heck, because I've got deadline and I have to get it all laid out during the next week, the whole thing has to be structured and everything else, and sure enough two things just popped out. I said, "Oh, those are great." It's actually the influence of the game changer workshop. One of them is how you make your money. It's an exercise where you go through and you actually identify how you make your money as an entrepreneur, and then you analyze it from three conditions. One is, could this way of making money go 10 times? In other words, if you stick with it, can you go 10 times? Then the next one is if it grew 10 times, would the activity fascinate and motivate you? That's whether it's actually a unique ability activity for you to do it. Then the third thing is, could you keep it up for 25 years? You just analyze how you make money from those three aspects. I said, "That'll be interesting to talk about."
Dean: That is great.
Dan: You grade yourself. It just popped out. This is my 29th year of every quarter making up something new. Making it up is really hard. If you ask me now, "How do you make this real?" I have enough of an interface with multimedia artists, and I have Romy. I've collected a whole bunch of make it real people around me that I can just do a really rough layout, and then they'll take it into form. To make it recur, which for me involves the other coaches, I don't have really the foggiest idea how to set that up.
Dean: Right, and that's my realization.
Dan: I do have people who are good at that. I do have people who are really good at setting up the whole recurring process. This is really where the teamwork and the collaboration is so crucial in life is that you just to accept that you don't even bother finding out how to do this because it's going to be frustrating, you don't do it well, and it's just going to use up an enormous amount of energy. At the end of it, you're not going to be any better at it than you are right now. Don't even go there. Just look for the person who is good at it.
Dean: Yes, and that was my realization that organizationally that's the gap for us is we're strong. I've surrounded myself with people to go from the make it up to make it real. I've got that. I haven't been involved in the making it recur. Some of the things that we have the processes are set up like that.
Dan: You need a new who.
Dean: What I realized is I do. That's exactly it.
Dan: You need a new who. You need a new who.
Dean: The person who takes the stuff we've made up, made real, to package that to make it recur. You're absolutely right. That's the conclusion that I came to from this.
Dan: The other thing is the whole thing is to not be self-critical that you're not good at that.
Dean: Yeah, oh, I'm beyond that. Absolutely, no, I don't feel bad about that at all. I'm happy to be aware of it now and realizing that just looking at the organization, that that's a role that we need to fill because it is something that we are very good organizationally at going from making it up to making it real. That's my favorite part, and now it's this next level of, not for me, but building the team that can make things recur.
Dan: You know what it's akin to? Can I tell you, it's an ongoing? Every time I go to London, I go deeper into a particular experience in London. I think it's unique to the world. It's their black cabs, the black cabs.
Dean: Yeah, okay. I'm anxious to hear the update.
Dan: I've spent a better part of a whole day once, Babs and I, with a black cab who's the historian of the black cabs. We wanted to get a background, where did this come from. It's 300 or 400 years old. It actually starts in the late 1600s, and it started with buggies and horses. What it is, for the listeners who don't really know this, the black cabs, to actually get a license, which is called a medallion, in London to be a black cab driver requires probably greater work, and greater study, and greater proof of skill than getting an MBA in college. As a matter of fact, it'd be much easier to get an MBA than to get a black cab certificate. What it is is that you have to literally on bicycle, or foot, or moped, you have to actually have experienced all 6,000 streets in London. It has to have registered visually with you where that street is and what the connected is.
Then they're given tests where they're saying, "You're here, and you're going someplace else that's about a 30 or 40-minute drive. You have to tell us, and you have to actually sketch it out here, what the different streets are that are going to connect you to that that's the quickest route and the cheapest route for the customer." In other words, it's going to get them there the fastest at the lowest cost because they're on the meter. They've given about 20 of these, and they have to really succeed with this. They have to also demonstrate that they can't get perturbed or they can't get impatient when they're with the passenger. In other words, when the passenger says, "I want to go to such thing," you have to be able to respond to them immediately and say, "Okay, right. I just want to tell you there's construction on this route right now. You may have gone here before, but we're going to have to go a little bit out of the way to do this." You have to be able to respond to that, and you can't get frustrated.
Anyway, this time I was asking them, I said, "Do you remember the class that you started out with?" because they do it in classes. In other words, you go to school, and you have a classroom, and you start off. "How many people were in your original classroom?" He said, "25, 30." I said, "Do you remember how many of them actually got their medallion?" He said, "Well, we know the statistics. It's about 1 out of 25 who start the process actually get it." I said, "What would you say is the crucial difference of why you got it?" Once you have it, it's for life. You never are retested on this once you go through the three years and you get it. There's a cost to the process, and you have to pay for it.
I said, "So, what's the difference?" He says, "In my brain is a complete map of the city of London, and I can immediately see the map. See, if you don't have that mapping ability where you see the city visually," he said, "Would anybody who doesn't have that ability stick with it?" He said, "No, you wouldn't because you wouldn't get any satisfaction out of it. You just wouldn't be becoming more skillful." He says, "Pretty well," he says, "I know the 60 main routes by heart." It's a big circle. It's called the M25. Their territory is inside the M25. There are 60 main routes, which all eventually get you to Trafalgar Square. Then off that are about, I don't know what the number is, 2,000 or 3,000 streets. They know where these streets are, plus they know 1,000 landmarks. They say, "I can see it." He says, "The moment you give me where you're doing, I can see it in my head what I'm going to do to actually get to where you're going." There are very few straight streets in London, and the same street.
Dean: Yeah, and some of them change direction.
Dan: The same street, it can have five, six different names and everything like that. It's really a remarkable ability. It's unique in the world. I have never come across this. It's the same thing that you're talking about in the move over from make it real. While I have a handle on how to get into making it real, in other words, I've set up all sorts of teamwork, so once I make it up, I have a sense of predictability that if I hand it over to this person, it's going to make it real. But how the person who makes it real moves into the territory of make it recur, I have no comprehension.
Dean: Right, that's it. Me, too.
Dan: It's good to back off on that.
Dean: That's a specialist position that we need.
Dan: For both of us, it's good to back off on that and not demand this of ourselves because, Dean, we could keep at this for 50 years and we wouldn't be any better at making it recur than we are today.
Dean: Oh, yeah. I'm over that. I'm firmly planted in the make it up. I'm absolutely happy to do that. That's funny.
Dan: You're like a born again make it up person.
Dean: Right, that's exactly right. I'm realizing that it's okay to just be that, you know?
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: That's so funny, born again. I meant to ask about the grand experiment with the Impact Filterer.
Dan: Yeah, we're getting great reports back. I have a Zoom call with Ari this week. The first couple people, I got the reports back, and the said it's a dream. What Ari is doing, he's taking it to the idea, he's making the system real. For those of you not really understanding what Dean and I are talking about, the central tool of making progress in Strategic Coach is called the Impact Filter.
Dean: And in life.
Dan: It's a thinking process. What I've been conscious of, that you're progress in Strategic Coach is a happy experience or not happy experience, depending on how good you are with the Impact Filter. We have a suspicion that if people are really good at Impact Filters, they stay inside the program and look forward to more. If they're iffy with the Impact Filter, they're forward participation. It'll pay for itself in terms of renewal if we can solve the problem that a person doesn't have to do the Impact Filter. They just have to phone a 1-800 number 24/7, and an Impact Filter facilitator will answer that call. That person will take them through the entire thinking process on the computer so they can actually see what's actually happening on the computer. It'll be like a Zoom call, actually. It'll be like a Zoom call. Then the person will do the writing to your satisfaction, each of the boxes of the Impact Filter. At the end of 45 minutes, we'll send back a completed Impact Filter PDF.
We just tested with Game Changers. I had 10 Game Changers who signed up. That was interesting. We just sent an email out, and we had them in six hours. We had the 10 people who wanted to do it. We had their names, and we just passed it on to Ari, part of the make it real process. He's been having each of them go through the process, and then he's creating the system so that it works for everybody. We'll go first, Game Changers, and then Game Changers plus 10, and then Game Changers, plus 10x, and then the signature level, the three levels of the program. We wanted to make sure that there is real quality of satisfaction in service with this. Ari knows how to do this. I don't know how to do it.
Dean: There's the thing, right?
Dan: It recurs all the time. It's a virtual company that he has, so I was thinking this could be 24/7. This could be 24/7, somebody in the office.
Dean: I was listening to that, that you told this number, sent out the bat signal, and there's an Impact Filterer waiting to respond for you. That's great.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. We're not there yet, but I can see in not too long a period of time. We're over eight time zones, coaches, for the most part. Then we have people who live in Australia, and Singapore, and Indian, and everything else. He probably would have a virtual company where people could answer. This is where Cloudlandia really works really well.
Dean: That's exactly right. I love that.
Dan: This is where Cloudlandia is totally in service of the mainland.
Dean: Yes, you're absolutely right. Very funny, wow.
Dan: I was thinking of Elon Musk because Elon's been going through headwinds the last month or so. He's not being able to solve the third series. I think it's called the R series.
Dean: I don't know.
Dan: A little car. I just read an article why it's the last thing-
Dean: Or the E, yeah.
Dan: It's not an Elon Musk problem. It's not a production problem. This type of car, which is a small sedan, is just not selling anywhere in the world right now. He's bringing out a little sedan that costs $70,000 ... They said it's 35, but actually when you eliminate the electric subsidies, which are mostly disappearing around the world, and then there's other things, it's one of the more expensive small sedans for the general market. The other thing is that people in mainland just aren't buying them. It's a great Cloudlandia idea, but people in mainland just aren't really buying this type of car right now. They're going for crossovers, and SUVs, and more expanded cars. I was saying there's a collision between a car. The car business is really a mainland industry. It's not a Cloudlandia.
Dean: Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
Dan: Yeah, physical. I was just noticing that he made his money on PayPal, which was purely a Cloudlandia idea. I'm just noticing that he's doing all sorts of things like his other company, the boring company, going underneath Los Angeles.
Dean: Yeah, right.
Dan: A neighborhood group got together and said, "We really don't want all that commotion going on underneath us," and they're going to hold it up. They're going to have their lawyers protest against this. Neighborhood groups are mainland realities.
Dean: Yes, that's it.
Dan: They're not Cloudlandia.
Dean: Right. Not like CAD software seeing theoretically how you could bore beneath the city, and the rates of how long it would take, and all this stuff.
Dan: In the States there's this weird thing that unless it's not specified by a jurisdiction, it would be the state of California, that generally speaking if you own an acre on the top, you own the acre underneath.
Dean: I wonder about that. You know how they have in Ontario riparian rights or whatever for waterfront, but I wonder if eminent domain kicks in 50 feet under the surface or whatever.
Dan: Here's the thing about it. Ultimately a homeowner could lose, but they could actually get politicians involved with this saying there hasn't been environmental studies. Plus, it's in a quake zone in Los Angeles. We're going around underground in a quake zone, and people say there's been no long-term environmental impact on this. That's where it's at least 10 years of delay on the project right there.
Dean: I think you're probably right.
Dan: It's like drones. The FAA in the United States said that you can't get above 500 feet with a drone. They've instituted this. I think it's 500 feet. What some local community is saying is that, "Yeah, they can't go above, but if you're over our neighborhood, it can't be below 400 feet." The drone can't deliver anything unless they're dropping it.
Dean: Right, right.
Dan: The whole notion of Amazon-
Dean: It can only pass through. Right, exactly.
Dan: Yeah, you can pass through between 400 and 500 feet. A local community group can just say, "We have the air space," and everything like that. These are mainland obstacles. These are not Cloudlandia obstacles.
Dean: Right, exactly.
Dan: I think it's one of great distinction that's come out of the conversation for me, this difference where people project visions of things, but the vision is all a Cloudlandia vision. Once you get into the mainland realities, things slow down.
Dean: Just thinking about Elon, that he recently just said that he made a mistake, too much automation and not enough humans in what they were doing.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, he's a real because his projects tend to be way out. Two things. They tend to be very visionary, but the other thing is that it's hard to see why I would be interested in going 700 miles an hour underground. I am trying to think why would I want to do that. First of all, if it's even possible. It feels like a real barf experience to me.
Dean: No, exactly. Meanwhile, you've figured it out. As long as I've known you, you've had your whole self-driving car situation handled.
Dan: 16th year. 16th year of driverless Dan.
Dean: In your Bennington bubble.
Dan: In my Bennington bubble. They are 15 minutes early. The cars are always clean. I used to not be able to read while I was in motion, but for some reason in my later years I've overcome that, and I can read my Kindle. The guy says, "You know it's going to be an extra 10, 15 minutes." I say, "I don't care."
Dean: I don't care. Yeah, whatever.
Dan: That means I get a few more pages. I get a few more pages in before we get there. Haven't driven in the city in Toronto for 16 years. I haven't driven at all.
Dean: I may have told you that I've thought about you, I've experimented with taking a limo from Winter Haven to the airport because normally I'd been driving. I liked that. It does change the whole dynamic of it.
Dan: The other thing is they haven't really explored the enjoyment of driving. I'm not one of them. My nervous system isn't geared in that direction, but I talk to people about driving. I talk to people who have commutes, they have 45 minutes, an hour commute. I said, "What's that experience like?" They said, "You know, it's my thinking time for the day. We're generally going so slow that you don't have to have that."
Dean: I'll tell you, there's a difference in the level of thinking when you're not driving. I could be sitting there with my remarkable tablet, truly engaged in the thinking process of it.
Dan: You can't do that if you're the driver. You can't do that.
Dean: Right, that's exactly it.
Dan: The thing that's being said is this terrible waste of time with commuting. I ask people who are commuter, I say, "Do you consider it a terrible waste of time?" And they said, "No, it's actually pretty nice time. I turn my phone off during the trip so nobody can reach me," those who do that. They have a control over their day that they don't experience when they're not commuting. I said, "You know, I don't know if they're going to want to give that up. I don't know if people are going to want to give that up."
Dean: I agree.
Dan: There's an autonomy and independence. Even though from the outside it looks like an incredibly boring, frustrating activity, I've talked to enough people who don't experience that way of saying if you think that everybody's just going to give this up because you think it's a bad experience, I think you've got some news.
Dean: I think you're right.
Dan: Anyway, very enjoyable. A takeaway for you today.
Dean: This idea that I really cannot embrace somebody else, even just a who for my filling in that making it recur gap, having, again, the thought that I don't have to be the one to do that, because I did find that part of my thing, I realized that the transition is in really embracing all the recurring things. All the things that I have are definitely scale-ready, ready to recur, but they're not fully prepared to turn over to somebody who's ready to do it. I need somebody to do that. That's my realization in the last little bit here. It's confirmed today.
Dan: The thing about this ability, or what I would say, this awareness to realize that you don't have an ability in this area and there's no way for you to develop an ability in this area, and therefore it lies in somebody else's ability. I think it's what makes human beings such a magical species, because we figured out that we don't have to be the ones who are good at this. We can just find the person who's good at this, good in the sense that they love doing what they're good at as much as we love doing what we're good at. Not just that they're capable of doing it, but they actually are passionate about the activity in the same way that we're passionate about our activity. I think that's the crucial thing of thing for the successful make it up, make it real, make it recur is that each stage along the line, the person not only has to be good at it, but they have to be as in love with that activity and keep getting better at it.
Dean: As we are at making it up, yes.
Dan: As we are at making it up. That's come to me. I've been pretty good about that probably for the last 10 or 15 years, but I can remember when I used to beat myself up for not being good at all three things.
Dean: I had a little sense of that. That was where I was thinking, that I had a little sense of that guilt of shame of that it somehow reflects on me.
Dan: Yeah, but here's, Dean, the sharp distinction between us historically is at the time when you weren't applying yourself, I was trying to apply myself.
Dean: Right. Oh, that's so funny. I love it. That's so great, yeah.
Dan: I was in pain when you had already given up on that.
Dean: I love it. That's the best. Oh, man.
Dan: That's my takeaway.
Dean: That's worth it right there.
Dan: Okay. Okay.
Dean: I love it. Dan, I'm excited.
Dan: Yeah, I'll see you soon. I'll see you soon.
Dean: I was just going to say, I haven't been to Jacques at all this year yet since I bypassed Toronto. Okay, I will talk to you soon.
Dan: Okay.
Dean: Thanks, bye.
Dan: Okay, bye.