Join Dean and Dan as they cross the procrastination frontier.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep074
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Yeah. Is it windy?
Dean: It's beautiful and sunny and quite delightful.
Dan: Oh actually, yeah.
Dean: You have to be there, we're now raving about it in the news.
Dan: Oh boy. If you've watch the news, you see the big red buzzsaw of death marching towards Florida.
Dean: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan: Well, we've had a good turn of events. No, not yet, but the predicted track is going to be to the edge of Florida. So, not for us. So that's good.
Dean: That's a very interesting concept, predicted track, because that's probably the cause of more disappointment and hardship and heartbreak than almost any two words in the English language, the predicted track.
Dan: The predicted track. That's pretty funny, actually.
Dean: Yeah. Yeah. I'm leery of those predicted tracks. Well, I guess rely on them, I call my kissing number because seeing Kissimmee number and it's a predictable track.
Dan: You see? There we go.
Dean: There are some things. There are some things. Nut I was thinking about it this week because I came across quite an interesting article, which I will send you after the call here, and it's 12 principles about prediction and how you could make prediction. And I think it comes from the Wall Street's calls for how you can make predictions about investments and everything like that. And when you hear predictions, how do you handle them? And when you see this article, which I'm sorry, my Internet's not working right now. We came back from the cottage and the whole world fell apart. We'd got it from two companies and neither company's WiFi is working, although my phone WiFi is working just fine to get to you.
So, anyway, but this whole thing of having a wisdom about prediction, I think that would be a winning skill.
Dan: Yeah. I got to thinking about this prediction interview with Elon Musk about the safety of the autonomous driving, and the sensors and things are processing at a thousand frames per second, or a thousand bits per second. I don't know what is it, but a thousand things. And I thought about what it really is, all of that high frequency, fast processing stuff. What that's really saying is that it's actually in real time processing something so much slower than what we have. And if you put it in perspective that at a 1000th of a second speed or processing rate, that means that each second is the equivalent of about 15 minutes, a thousand seconds in real time if you think about that. And I see-
Dean: I've been thinking about my friend Glen and I were laughing about doing a dramatization of that, a video of that, with these people, literally in a car approaching an intersection and really looking, "Is it okay?" And then they get 15 minutes to go out and measure and debate whether it's okay to keep going and then move one second further and take 15 more minutes to debate what, "I think we're going to hit them." "No, no, no, no. We're definitely not going to hit them." That level of caution, totally dipping your toes in the water. You get enough time to see whether you're actually going to intersect if you stay on the predicted path.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, I come back to I think that there's a model that they're using for all this technology. And the model is that we humans are actually computers. In other words, that the reason why they can say things like, "Well, in the future, humans will be replaced here, humans will be replaced here, humans will be replaced," because after all, humans are just computers, and we can prove that these computers are much faster than humans, for example. This computer can know all the possible moves on a chess board, and no human can do that. Obviously the computer's better than humans and Go and Jeopardy and all the interesting things.
Did you ever see my model that I put up on the board one day? It's called DIKW, DIK. So I have DIK, and then I have a straight line coming down and then there's a gap and another straight line and on the other side is W.
Dean: I don't think I've seen that model.
Dan: Yeah. And basically I said that in most of the world right now, the world of news, the world of well, let's just say the news, people are competing furiously to have the latest combinations of the DINK, and D stands for data, I stands for information and K stands for knowledge. And data are like the atoms. And then information is the molecules and K is like an organ made out of molecules or whatever. And basically what the narrative of the world is that whoever wins the DIK combination, the best data, the best information and the best knowledge as fast as possible, always up to date, wins. But there's a missing factor that humans have, which, because the computers can't analyze this one human area, they say, "Well, that doesn't matter." That'd be a stance for wisdom. Wisdom. What humans have done is they've individually taken in a lot of DIK on an individual basis. And after a while, they'll put it all together and they say, "Yeah, but you just have to know, look both ways before crossing. I don't care what the street signs say." So if you're talking about a pedestrian crossing like in London, and you and I both have to remind ourselves we're in London, that the traffic goes in the other direction and they have all sorts of signs printed actually on the pavement.
Dean: "Walk this way." Right.
Dan: "Look this way, look this way." But actually, I think you and I are a bit safer in London because in fact, we look both ways. We were trained to look one way and we've just been instructed. And the thing as that, even if a sign says, "Well, this is a one-way street and the cars are only coming this way," I find that in my 75th year, I've learned to even though the sign, which is a buildup of data, information and knowledge, and there's arrows and that's the result of information and knowledge, I've got in the back of my mind situations where that didn't work. And I'm including the contrary situations in my present thinking. So I'm checking both ways.
Now, the DIK would say you don't have to check both ways because we've got the DIK here. But actually my wisdom tells me to check both ways. Do you see what I'm saying there?
Dean: I do see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's a lot to say why Peter, do you mind if I shared about the chess champions? It's not that the machine wins, it's the chess master, powered by the data, information, and knowledge of a machine. That's the winning combination. Yeah. And it's an interesting thing, that that's wisdom is, I think that fits with our idea of uniquely human traits that I think come in there, like creativity. Creativity is ways to think about other things outside of wisdom.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's very funny. I'm going through genetic testing with Mansoor Mohammed. I don't know if you came across him in Joe's workshops. He lives in Toronto and he's got a company called The DNA Company, and he does very in-depth coaching of how upwards of about a hundred different genes that you have, which they can identify through saliva. And it tells you what the saliva says is what Mom gave you and what Dad and relationship to each of those configurations.
And Babs and I have been through two hours now, two hours with him. And I'm finding that really, really fascinating, because he came across a gene the other day, and it's a gene where I don't have a quite enough serotonin, so I'm what's called sub optimum serotonin. And he said that he said that, "In your case, combining with some other genes you have, this means that you have a hard time doing things in a prescribed sequence." And he said that if everybody has been trained to this first, it's five things and you do this first completely then this completely. And he said, "In one of them, you'll do a quick scan of the five and you say, 'I like number four better. I think I'm just going to focus on number four.'"
"I just like this number four better," but if my performance is being graded and judged on my ability to do one completely, two, three, four, five, each in sequence and each completely, I'm in real trouble. I'm in real trouble because-
Dean: I may have that same insufficiency.
Dan: Oh no, believe me, you do. And now he said, "You have," he says, "now that I'm getting to know you, you've probably found a way around this, and what you do is you do a quick scan of all five, not necessarily in order. You do all five, and you say to yourself, 'What's a new thing I could know from these five things, where after I know it, these five things become irrelevant?'"
Dean: Wow. And what would be an example of that?
Dan: Well, he said it would be creativity. You're looking at what everybody else is looking at, but they're looking at them as specifics and they'd been taught how to deal with each of these specifics. And for me, knowing how to deal with each of the specifics is not very interesting, because other people know how to do that. And I say, "Okay, if I put these five together, not in sequence or not even related to each other. Is there something new that emerges from these five that is entirely new and much more interesting than any one of the five together? And so my sense is that creativity, and he says that creativity, he's studying that, that it's actually a genetic makeup. You're predisposed to do this. And he said all these creativity courses where they teach you to think out of the box and everything, he says that's for people who have a full dose of serotonin. And it's very, very hard for them not to think in sequence. It's very hard for them not to think in sequence.
So they try to create all these games, and the books of creativity games and workshops where you go. And they do random, it's a forced randomness to force your brain to make connections. But he said, actually, just having sub optimum serotonin will probably cause it.
Dean: Will naturally induce that anyway. Right.
Dan: Wow. Yeah. And you don't know how to do it. It's just that you're always up against it, that you just can't do things in sequence. If you do something one way one day, your willingness and your ability to do it the same way the next day is much harder. It's much harder than the next day. And that's the story of my life.
Dean: Me too.
Dan: I always do show up at the phone calls on time, though.
Dean: Yes, me too. But there's no predictability. There's no predicted track record.
Dan: No. And there's a big creativity reward.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: I'll put up with a minimum of sequencing to get to the reward.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: A little bit of whiskers, but a lot of cheese.
Dean: That's right. I am holding in my hand, my copy, which was delivered to me, of the Free Zone Frontier book, achieving competition-free growth and profit by one Dan Sullivan.
Dan: Yes. With cartoons. With a cartoonist.
Dean: With cartoons by Hamish MacDonald. Yes. This is really great. This is one of my favorite.
Dan: Oh, good, good. Have you gotten a little bit into it?
Dean: I have, yes, of course. When that package arrived, Dan, just so you know, at my home, when that package arrives, there's nothing more important that I'm doing than this.
Dan: Oh, thank you.
Dean: It can be dropped and immediately go into reading these books. So.
Dan: You were part of the group that actually created this idea, because this actually emerged, I would say, six months ago, or somebody said it, or we were going through something and I remember, I just had that diagram where I talked about how America got created, how the Front Tooth got moved from the Atlantic to Pacific, and so I said that this was a frontier and that for 270 years, the dominant narrative in America was where the frontier was. And so you had an establishment that had created order and peace order, you hope, in what was already established, but the real interesting stuff and the brightest and most capable, most adventurous people were very interested in the frontier in some way. They were personally profiting from the frontier in some way, in a thousand different ways.
So the thing about frontier, I said, fascinating and motivating, which is a phrase that you and I have been talking about for six, seven years, that as an entrepreneur you want to get your activities, as you get older, you want to just narrow them down so that your day is filled up with activities that are fascinating and motivating, because then you'll be cheating tiredness. You'll be cheating exhaustion. You'll be cheating getting older. You'll be cheating getting younger because the two words, fascinating and motivating are not what you associate with someone getting older, right?
Dean: You're absolutely right. I look at these, and you start to see it everywhere now. The way I look at these books is I look at them, I read the chapter titles, so I get a chance to see the overall thing. I read the intro, the paragraph, then I really look at the cartoons to get a sense of what the whole thing is about. And then I'll go back and read the chapters sequentially.
Dan: The text. Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, read the text about them. And it's a funny thing, but right before we started our call here, I was watching on television a show that I had recorded called Cash Pad. And it's a new show sponsored by Airbnb, by the way, talking about the new modern content marketing. They've actually got a show that's packaged as a show. And it's a young couple from Dallas who, they partner with property owners who have unutilized elements of their property. The one today is this guy had a house, but out in the back he had a 2,600 square foot warehouse, like a metal, old 1940s building that had the vaulted ceilings. It was really interesting looking building, but he wasn't doing anything with it.
And what this couple does is they go to homeowners like that who have out buildings or unused space, and they partner with them and they bring and renovate this space, they turn it into a really great a unique or short term...
Dan: A unique place.
Dean: Yeah, a unique place, and with the express purpose of putting it on Airbnb as a rental place, a short-term rental. And so they're building a portfolio of all of these unique spaces all over, but they come to you, Dan, and say, "We're going to come in, we'll take this space, we're going to put up the $70,000 to renovate the space here, and we're going to give you $700 a month or a guaranteed income for it, and we'll take everything above that 700 for a period of time to recapture and get a return on our investment." And literally they're getting something for free that was otherwise under optimized or unused.
Dan: This free zone.
Dean: It's a free zone. There's the free zone.
Dan: It's a free zone, yeah. It's totally a free zone, and they're both equally committed to a jump for both of them. The homeowner, he's not using, it's useless right now, he's not getting any value from it, and the other hand down the road when they've gotten their return from it, it's still a 100% his.
Dean: Yes, exactly. That's exactly right.
Dan: It's 100% his, and they just agree on the amount of money that they're going to get out of it for it to be yep almost as if they had sold it to him, that they had crated a brand new capability and they had sold it to him.
Dean: Imagine that they had, as a vendor, you've made this thing of the difference between a collaborator and a vendor, it'd be a very uphill situation.
Dan: Well, and it would take a long time. We had a case on one of our recent Zoom calls with our Free Zone Frontier people, and David Berg from Phoenix, was saying that he had been talking about teaming up with another person in Phoenix who had a really great capability, and they'd been talking about it for a year and they hadn't really come to an agreement on this deal. And I said, "Is it a great capability?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Well, and if he brought his capability to you, you have the use of this capability, right?" And he said, "Yeah, I do." And I said, "Why don't you give him all the money?" And he said, "What?" "Just give him all the money. You probably haven't come to an agreement for a year because you're trying to figure out what's fair, what part of the money says and what parts the money is yours." And I said, "Why don't you just give him all the money, tell him, 'Come on in, all the money we make, that's your money. But I have your capabilities.'" And I said, "If you had tried to hire someone and brought that person or that capability in, first of all, you wouldn't have found him, because the fact that you could hire him meant that is capability wasn't that good." You know what I mean?
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: "He doesn't want to be an employee. He wants to operate with his capability. So you get that capability any time you want to, but he gets the money." And it almost violates the laws of entrepreneurial gravity. "What do you mean? Well, he can't get all the money." And I said, "Well, why can't he get all the money?" "Well, that's not fair." I says, "Yeah, but for the past year you've been deprived of his capability because you can't reach a deal over money. So you've been screwed over the last year. You wanted this capability, but your desire for fairness actually screwed you from getting this capability. And it would go on into the future. You'll just never get the capability."
Dean: I'm trying to understand, because in the little ways, I think, I mean, I can understand how people would think that in a situation. Can you give an example of a capability that you're without, talking about David's particular situation, but an example of that, just to bring some clarity to it?
Dan: Yeah. Well, I have two of them. One, I talk about EOS. So this is Gino Wickman's creation, which is a complete coaching program for the teams of entrepreneurs. They've put a structure in which is called The Entrepreneurial Operating System. And so, he's developed this over 18 years, and it's got around 250 coaches around the world. And they each handle anywhere from 10 to 15 companies. And it's not the entrepreneur they're handling, it's the structure. What they're essentially doing is creating a self managing company. And so, we've been short of that ever since we've been in business. We don't have a program that will actually go right into somebody's company and actually create the structure for them.
And then Gino talked to me, and he was going along and building it and he was very shy about bringing it forward because he was worried that I would see it as competition. I didn't see it as competition, because I'm only interested in the entrepreneur. I'm not interested in The entrepreneur's company. But we will endeavor to do as much as we possibly can to give them good tips and good suggestions on how to find good people, use this test and here's a good thinking process you can have, but we do not want any part of going into their company and actually coaching in their company. I mean, I just really have no interest that I would do that or that anyone in our company would do that.
So about two and a half years ago, we were talking and I said, "You know, Gino, we have to do a mutual podcast where I interview you about EOS and send the podcast to all my clients who are the entrepreneurs, and you do a podcast and you send it to all the companies and their entrepreneur that you're already coaching, it was about 2000 companies. And also to your coaches, also to your coaches, because your coaches, they're running companies."
And right off the bat we started getting an exchange. People who were taking his coaching program, who were entrepreneurs would come and join Strategic Coach. So they were now doing two programs. And the same thing for our people. Our people who were Strategic Coach clients would now sign up and get EOS as their operating system inside their company. And not once in the last two and a half years have we talked about money. We haven't talked about money. So I said, "Your money is your money and our money's our money, same way as it was before. It's just that I've got a solution now. Somebody said, 'Well, how do I get my team on board?' I said, 'Call this number. They'll put you in touch with a EOS coach. He'll come out and he'll walk you through how everything that you're learning in the Strategic Coach will now be in the hands of your team members.'"
And so there, if I had said, "Okay, now we're going not create a EOS type program to compete with Gino," well, that's not very much fun.
Dean: Right. Yes. I get it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it makes sense because it's complementary, not competitive, and I guess there's the evidence that it's an advancement for both in that everybody wins in that including the clients on both sides.
Dan: Yeah. Not only are we getting clients, so the entrepreneurs are coming into the program, but also we picked up sales people and coaches in the sense of that about 40 of the EOS coaches, which are called implementers, have now joined Strategic Coach. And the moment they are in Coach, they endeavor together all their entrepreneurs into the Strategic Coach, because it just saves them a lot of bother and saves them a lot of time. What they've been lacking is a very specialized coach just for their entrepreneur. They've got an entrepreneur for the whole system, but they had been missing a very specialized, just focus on this one person who's, yeah, entrepreneur. They just do groups. They don't they don't do individuals. So in a certain sense, we solved the problem for them, and the other thing is they stay longer in their system and they stay longer in our system. So we've both solved a lot of really interesting issues, but there was no cash. It was a fist pump. It wasn't even a handshake.
Dean: Yeah. A wink and a nod. That's right.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is you're not investing any more in this than you were investing without it.
Dean: Right. Yeah, I get it. That's great.
Dan: I mean, going back to your Airbnb example, it costs a land owner nothing. It costs him absolutely nothing for the entire adventure, from it just being an unused building at the back of his place, to the point when he's got a completely beautiful, completely renovated marketable space. It cost him zero. It cost him zero. It didn't cost him any work.
Dean: Yeah. And they manage the actual Airbnb space themselves. They actually manage the whole thing. All he does is get get the money.
Dan: Well, he gets the money, but it could go on forever.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: I mean, he owns it, but their management and making money off of it could go on forever. So it's a perfect free zone frontier. And a very special pleasure for me would be that you would bring this example to the next Free Zone Frontier workshop.
Dean: I will do that. I will do that. You know I keep my eyes open.
Dan: Like you brought the rap-
Dean: Old Town Road.
Dan: Yep. Hometown Road the last time. Well, you've got a growing inventory. We'll see what the day calls for.
Dean: Well, I'm excited about this coming into the Alternate group, so it'll be a fun thing.
Dan: So you're coming on the 12th, right?
Dean: I am, yes.
Dan: Yeah. So you're doing your 10 times on the 13th, or on the 10th. I didn't know if you're going to spend time in Chicago because I don't do a 10 times the day before this particular, I will next year, but this year-
Dean: Yeah. I haven't decided which day, which ones.
Dan: Yeah, it's up to you. It's totally up to you. But I'll just put the word down on Tuesday that you're coming to Chicago for that. But you see, I mean, now, you can look at my example with EOS and you could look at the Airbnb example that you got. Now, what is the pushback with a lot of people about, well, I mean, is there any negatives to that?
Dean: No, the only negative thing would be for somebody to go, it would be an uphill battle to try and get that homeowner who was a guy who, really, this $700 a month extra is a blessing for him right now, but he doesn't have money to do the it. But comparing that to, if that young couple were going to him and trying to say, "Look, you've got all this potential here, and for just $70,000, we can turn this into something and you'd have access to all of this money. So we think you should do this."
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but then then it's never going to happen.
Dean: That's exactly right. That's the whole, it's the funny thing. This reminds me so much of Project Cyrus, via Cyrus McCormick may have been one of the first free zone frontiers.
Dan: Free zone frontiers.
Dean: Because he may have been the guy, so I'll tell the story just in case people who are listening haven't heard, that in the 1800s, Cyrus McCormick is the guy who invented the mechanical reaper in the 1830s. And what he invented was a way that mechanized the farming industry and allowed farmers to get much more done with fewer people. It actually was a machine that let one man with a reaper do the work of 14 men. It was revolutionary and actually credited, along with the railroad and the telephone as the three most important developments in the 1800s that paved the way out of the fields and into the factories. It ushered in the Industrial Age.
But what Cyrus had was a device that was, it was a catch 22. It was expensive, and the farmers couldn't afford it ahead of time, because the farmers were living harvest the harvest. They had to make it through the long winter and plant the seeds and show the fields and do all these things and then get paid in the fall at the harvest. And so Cyrus had the bright idea of saying, "Well, let me let you use the reaper for the season, and you pay me at the harvest." And that was welcome. It was a very, very wonderful development that allowed farmers to embrace the technology advances and to get the benefit of all of this extra profit. Imagine, you've cut out the needs for 14 men. You look at it, now we look at the AI and we're in the same kind of a situation here as we're ushering into whatever's we're calling beyond the Information Age, we're into now the whatever this is that's a very similar thing. Imagine being able to have a device or an AI or something.
Dan: We're into the More Business Age.
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Dan: I say, "Well that's business. It's all business. Just more business."
Dean: Yeah. So he was maybe one of the first free zone frontiersmen.
Dan: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, the whole country, the way the country was set up was a free zone, because the farmer was probably from Europe, because the vast majority of the agricultural population emigrated, and the early days, they would have been Scots, they would have been Irish, but especially Germans. Germans, French. There was no land in Europe. So the land was entirely accounted for, and almost impossible for someone without money to acquire land. And so the whole premise of the moving of the frontier in the United States is that Congress would set aside territories. It started off as territories, and land would be given extraordinarily cheaply, and a lot of it was promissory, so, "We'll give you this much land," and probably they would have the same deal. You didn't have to pay up front, but you paid at the end of the first year's harvest, who did it.
And so my sense is that he was able to come up with this invention and to expand it rapidly right across the United States because the farming culture that he was selling into were all people who had benefited from a free zone frontier mainland, if you will. And it was massive amounts of land. I mean, there wasn't a limitation of land. Today where McCormick's reaper actually benefited the United States stretches from Pennsylvania to Colorado. And it's just wide, wide open. I mean, that's the biggest, largest most productive, most profitable arable section on the planet. I think it represents 30% of the arable land in the world, just that one stretch.
And then the US has three for them. They have the central Valley of California, they have the big, big section in Oregon and Washington and Idaho, and then they have another section post to where you are, the Piedmont Plateau, which comes down from Pennsylvania across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. That's Piedmont. So there's four huge arable land areas in the United States where, The Great Plains is where the reaper would come into play, and then they had the river system, the biggest river system in the world, so they could harvest their grain. And they weren't more than a hundred miles or so from the port in one of the rivers.
So think about this, Dean, somebody comes from Germany as an immigrant, leaves in the fall, gets to America in the late fall, goes through processing and is shown that there's a section of Illinois that they can have. And they don't have to pay for it upfront. They just have to become responsible for it, let's say it's 100 acres, 120, I think it's 160 acres. A section was 160 acres. And can think about it, because they would have to hire labor, but with McCormick's reaper and he hears about McCormick's reaper and he throws up, very, very temporary buildings, but in March of the next year could clear the land and could start clearing the land, actually, in January, February, March, April, and then have a section of wheat, which they could probably process themselves and have a first crop, and he would only be 100 miles from one of the rivers connecting to the Mississippi. So by the next November, he could be shipping wheat from America back to where he came from.
Dean: Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?
Dan: Yeah. And five years later, he would own it cleared and free.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). This really is an exciting frontier when you start thinking about it. Think about this. In the spirit of what the joy of procrastination really is, your procrastination and those thoughts that you have every single day are constantly replenishing source of raw materials for your greatest achievements. Here we are, the free zone is constantly renewing.
Dan: Yeah. And I think that the thing that going back, because I was thinking about the procrastination, the fact of procrastination, I said I have a tendency to procrastinate anywhere where I suspect I'm going to have to compete.
Dean: That's interesting. In what way?
Dan: Well, I'm going to go head to head with my existing capabilities against someone else, and included in my existing capabilities are all sorts of things I actually don't doing. I've been forced in the past, if you go back to marketing days, when you worked for Joe Stump, and go back to real estate days. Well, you were good enough to be good, but in the process of being good enough to be good, there were lots of things that you didn't like doing.
Dean: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's a thought. I was trying to think about the harmony of it. What I'm finding now is that it's so easy to do stuff now, where you can do, I think if I look at competition, I interchange that word with "convincing" in my mind here. So what I mean by that is that if we look at the cash pad example, where you're not going to meet any resistance to your proposal, where you've identified this free zone of this excess.
Dan: Well, the property cost them nothing. Property cost them nothing. They got 2,600 square feet of space and it cost them nothing. But the property owner has 2,600 feet of space that they can't do anything with, because they don't have the resources to unlock that, to capitalize on that. Well, first of all, he's got no capability to do it. He certainly doesn't have their capabilities. So they have a model that he lacks, and he doesn't want to acquire the model. He doesn't want to go through and figure out how the model works. That is no interest to him whatsoever.
And the other thing is he doesn't want to plow a lot of money into fixing this up on the possibility that he might be able to do something with it more fixed up. He has no interest in doing that. They, on the other hand, have all sorts of capabilities. One is that if they can get the space for free, they've got the money to fix up the space. And they know exactly what the space has to look to be attractive in the big network that they're also connected to, which is Airbnb. And so both parties are just dealing with 100% known capability. So just putting them together in the unique way, and what they're using is time into the future as actually a much bigger capability in the future for both of them. Both of them have a much bigger capability in the future.
I mean, for them, they may get to the end and they could go on doing what they're doing. He would have no incentive not to keep it going forever, and they would have no incentive not to keep it. Because it's very, very interesting, but now they have a model and they said, "Well, we did one of these. Maybe we could do five of these," with somebody else with five other people, they could do it. So it seems to me nothing but free zone frontier all the way.
Dean: Yes. I love it. I totally understand it now, any unclarity. I mean this is exactly what I was thinking that you were saying it was.
Dan: Well, you got your Cyrus McCormick example already. You already had the Old Town Road. You already had that. So there's three, and they totally check all the boxes. They check all the boxes for free zone frontier, but by it's just connecting capabilities. All you're doing is putting capabilities together.
Dean: And that alone is fascinating, because that's a quick start dream.
Dan: It's very interesting. I went through the Cyrus McCormick model, and actually, Wikipedia has a tremendously good section on that. If you go to Wikipedia, they all tell you that 15 different factors that made it work. They have a checklist of factors.
Dean: Really. Oh, that's so great.
Dan: Yeah. Make it work. And one of the things that made it work as that everybody involved in moving the agricultural frontier west referred people to Cyrus McCormick. So he had this vast marketing system, he had this vast marketing system. The railroads talked about it. The government agents talked about it. Everybody talked about it. They said, "The first thing you have to do is get yourself a McCormick reaper. You get the land, and they got to get them the McCormick reaper and everything like that. So he was taking advantage, he had probably massive, massive social support for what he was feeling.
Dean: Mm-hmm. I love it. I'm so excited.
Dan: Yeah? Well, good.
Dean: I mean it's fascinating and motivating. And identifying these things, identifying them.
Dan: Yeah. And I think it's a new dimension of entrepreneurism. I've looked at going back 45 years, I've read about business courses on entrepreneurism, I've read books and entrepreneurism, and within the first half page, they say, "Well, of course, the big issue here being a great competitor in usually an existing niche," or something like that.
Dean: ...opens up for me, if it comes back to what I discovered in the beginning of when I launched Project Cyrus, that on reflection of that, I think that the question, the free zone frontier question really goes back to that question, which was what would you do if you only get paid if your client gets the result, or if your collaborator gets the results? My insight out of that was that sometimes it's less expensive to get the result for somebody than it is to convince them to give you money to get the results. The Cash Pad example and Cyrus example and any of those, what you've been looking at, the way you were describing the David Berg example, waiting to figure out what's a fair negotiation, any time there's friction, it's because we're not just going ahead and keeping the eye on the prize. If it's a three point thing, it takes you and the collaborator or your free zone partner and the target, the objective. It's just you just start moving everybody towards the objective that everybody would.
Dan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean it was very interesting. Do who Reed Tracy is?
Dean: I do.
Dan: Yeah. So Reed was that the last 100.
Dean: 100 K. Mm-hmm.
Dan: 100 K, Joe's 100 K, and I got to the workshop room early, and he was sitting there, he had already been in for the morning and he was going to talk about how Hay House, the publisher, how they approach the marketplace and now they look at their relationship with writers and everything else. And I just went up to him, I said, "Hi, I'm Dan Sullivan." He says, "Oh, Dan. Great to meet you." He says, "I've followed your work for a long time," which I didn't know, because with one exception, we've never gone the publisher route with any of our books. I've done 33 books now, and only one of them did we go the publisher route, and I found it onerous. I found it a very onerous activity. I would say that of San Francisco, and we have sold 140,000 of those books, but it was grueling, 18 months and it was just not my cup of tea. And if you can't come up with the idea and have a finished book out into the world in 90 days, then it's not an interesting idea.
So anyway, I got to know him, and I explained my whole idea of how I collaborate with the world. And so we were in very serious conversation. It's actually Ben Hardy, Ben who has doing well because Ben had a publisher, and it looks there may be just a great, great opportunity to treat each of my small books as a book proposal and just send the small book off to Reed, and Reed says, "Hey, let's go big with this."
And so I showed him a couple of the books because Joe had them in his bookshop and I showed them. And he says, "Boy, these are fascinating." And I says, "If you fold out the back and look at The Mindset Scorecard, you can see all the different aspects that you'd want to reflect in the course of the book. But nobody wants to read all that stuff. So they just want to read about the positive stuff. So I just give them the positive stuff. But if you want to see what the negative stuff looks like, it's over here. And everything like that. And then I says, "And you can find examples for every one of the concepts. Every one of the cartoons, you can find a living example of an entrepreneur who does this or runs into those situations. And so it directs your entire research, because to be a major market book, you got to have this.
And he says, "Well, that's really great." So he and Ben were talking, and he's very excited because they really want to go more and more in to entrepreneurial books. They've been New Age books for 30 years, 35 years. And they want to go into that. But it's very easy for me because I don't want any money from this. My attitude is, well, I don't want any of the money. Why don't we just let all the money grow the books, because I make my money on people reading the book and then signing up for Strategic Coach. And I said that's where I make my money. And Ben and I were sitting down and we figured that if it, could probably in a five year period, there'd be a lot of signups to Strategic Coach.
But it's one of these things that once you begin thinking in these frames, you don't get distracted by other things as business opportunities, because if they don't have this complementary collaborative character to them, they're not interesting. They're just friction. You know right off the bat it's just friction. And I think taking your own procrastination seriously allows you to become very, very alert to any friction in a possible future situation so that you're just not interested.
Dean: Yes. That's so great. Well, these are exciting times. I think this is the '20s. It could be a very exciting time.
Dan: Yeah. Well, thanks for the feedback on the book, because everybody got it this week. I mean, when you got yours, everybody in 10 Times got the bl. I mean it's so great that we had this discussion before the workshop, because it's super.
Dean: Just for the people who might be listening who are not in our 10 Times program, where can we get the book? At the bookstore on strategiccoach.com.
Dan: Yeah. Just go to strategiccoach.com and look up books, knowledge books and there you'll see Free Zone Frontier, Free Zone Frontier-
Dean: There's so many of these.
Dan: And you can download it as an ebook. Just go right there and there's an audio version and there's a video version as well as the written form.
Well, that was a quick hour, I must say.
Dean: It really was. Yeah, it really was, but all was delightful, and we'll see you the week after next, the week after next.
Dan: Yes, yes. Are we skipping a week on podcast?
Dean: Next Sunday I am taken up, so I'll see you next in 2020.
Dan: In Chicago. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great.
Dean: Yeah. Okay, thanks, Dan.
Dan: Bye.
Dean: Bye.