Join Dean and Dan as they talk about what’s adjacent to procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep075
Dean: Aha.
Dan: Ah-ha-ha.
Dean: Frontiersmen Sullivan.
Dan: Yes. Yes. We're either frontiersmen, or we're zoners. Right?
Dean: Mm-hmm.
Dan: It's probably one of those languages, depending on who your relationship is with the other person.
Dean: I think you might be right.
Dan: Yep. Yep.
Dean: I'll tell you, I have had a great week. It was a great experience.
Dan: Yep.
Dean: I don't even know where to start, but I'll tell you, my mind is buzzing with free zone frontier thoughts.
Dan: Maybe we can start by letting our listeners know who didn't have the week with us.
Dean: I keep forgetting that this is not just for us. That's so funny. Somebody said that to me, that they said, "I love listening to your podcast," they said, "More like listening in on your conversations." That's really what it comes down to.
I just got back from Chicago. Spent a few days. Did two workshops. Did my Free Zone Frontier workshop with the alternate group. I really liked that smaller environment. It was very nice. It's the first time I'd been to that group, and then got to sit in for half day of the group the day after, and met some new people and got to see some familiar faces.
It was exciting times, because this concept, I think, Dan, as I shared with you in Chicago, the three books of WhoNotHow, the Free Zone Frontier, and the Who Do You Want To Be a Hero To?
Dan: Who Do You Want To Be a Hero To.
Dean: Those three books, Dan, are those the last three in order?
Dan: Yeah. The first one was WhoNotHow, then Who Do You Want To Be a Hero To and then Free Zone Frontier, and they kind of build on each other.
Dean: They really do.
Dan: It's almost like each one of them is kind of a hill you're climbing. You get an idea at the bottom of the hill, and you climb, and at the top, you've got a new concept, and then you notice that there's a playing field at the top of the next hill, then you go to play and it gives you another idea, and then there's another hill. It's a series of terraces, actually, and you're moving up, but you get the benefit of the three climbs when you get to the third one. You don't leave behind what you left, you actually bring the value of it with you.
I mean, I didn't have this word. This is a word that has come to my attention in 2016, 2015, this idea of stacking, that when you have capabilities, you may not have the best particular of that capability, but if you add it to another capability and if you add it to another capability, you get a compounding effect that might.
Where I got that was from Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, and you know, right out of the blue in the summer, late summer of 2015, he has this podcast, which I watch frequently. I don't watch it every day, but I watch it frequently. It's called Coffee Time with Scott Adams.
Dean: Synchronized with the simultaneous flip.
Dan: Yes, the simultaneous flip, it's sip, and the thing about him is he just came out and he predicted. He says, "Based on everybody I see, Hillary Clinton, obviously on the Democratic side, but now 16, 17 individuals competing on the Republican side, it's clearcut to me that Donald Trump is going to win the nomination, and then Donald Trump, up against Hillary Clinton, is also going to win the election," and he says, "it's because he has the most powerful stack of persuasive skills of any of the candidates."
He said, "I have to tell you, I'm a lifetime Democrat." He said, "I am the last,” He said, "Actually, you know, I'm not going to tell you who I'm going to vote for," but he said, "I'm a lifetime Democrat, so I'm not saying this as someone who's biased towards the Republican party."
He said, "If you just realize that in today's world with social media, the Cloud as you will, that the person who has the greatest number of persuasive skills that they've integrated into a stack," that's the word that I've really been impressed with, stack, "if you have one skill, and you were up against someone else who has that skill, they might have a better skill, and you could take any one of the skills you have and you're up against someone else, but they might just rely on that skill, but you stack five or six skills," he said, "the person with the most persuasive skills stack will win in today's 24-hour news cycle."
Dean: Yes.
Dan: My feeling is that in Coach, and this goes back to strategic coach without me knowing this, we're at the end of our 30th year of developing Strategic Coach thinking tools in large numbers, and when I look at these tools, which are just really, really designed for outlier entrepreneurs. This is the only thing that I'm designing these tools for.
An outlier entrepreneur is, first of all, it's someone who's not just an entrepreneur, but they're an outlier. They became an entrepreneur because they were an outlier. They didn't want to work for someone else for the rest of their life, so they went out into their own in the marketplace and took their chances.
What allows them to actually make progress in their entrepreneurial career, even when they're inexperienced, and even where they don't really have a full grasp on the business arena that they've gotten into, nevertheless, they're an outlier, so they have a tendency to actually develop unique skills. They have a nose for the unique, they have a nose for the unusual, they have a nose for the undeveloped, and so they go after that thing.
Well, when you get to the level of workshop participants that were there when you were there on Thursday and Friday, Dean, they're a long way from being an entrepreneur, and a lot of them are a long way since they've started Strategic Coach, and everybody in the room has developed eight particular tools, and so with this idea that in every one of these tools, there's an advantage that you would have that would make you immune to competition from the outside. That would be with any one of the tools, but if you put the eight tools together, then you have a compounding exponential advantage over any potential competitor, so that's my basic thing.
I think when people realize that they say, "I really do, you know, I really do," so I wasn't telling them something that's going to happen, I just reminded them of something that actually has happened.
Dean: Yeah, right. That's amazing, when you think about Scott's prognostication. He was really kind of an outlier in that thinking initially. That was when nobody was really expecting that, too, but then this plays out, and we're seeing it now. You were able to predict and were able to see the entrepreneurs that are succeeding with their stack of skills, there's never been a better opportunity for us than now.
Dan: Mm-hmm, and the other thing is that regardless of what happened, so, people say, "Well, you never know how the economy is going to go. You don't know what kind of technological change." I said, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Whatever happens, they'll use their skills to create an advantage in the marketplace in a way that their competition won't."
I think that's the biggest thing. There's a high degree of predictability, not so much on what their outcomes are going to be, but there is a high degree of predictability on how they're going to handle anything to actually produce a favorable outcome for themselves.
Dean: You know, it was so funny, along the lines of the your eyes only see and your ears only hear what your brain is looking for, is this, I was sharing with you that recently I've discovered some things that Charles Koch had said, one of the Koch brothers. David just recently died, but Charles Koch is the head of now the Koch Industries, I think he's the fifth or sixth richest guy in the world right now, and when he took over his-
Dan: The largest privately-owned company in the world.
Dean: Okay, there we go, perfectly. Just he and his brothers own the company, and when he took over, they were already wealthy, as he said. He took over as a 26-year-old his family, the company, and it was worth 21 million dollars in 1961, and they've ushered through a 5,000-fold increase over that period of time. To hear him describe the methodology and the way that they went about it, was really, you're seeing these concepts peeking out, almost exactly the way that we talk about them. The idea of who do you want to be a hero to and unique ability.
His approach, as I heard him describe it, but I've never heard him speak before, but the way he described it was the method is to develop capabilities, the unique capability to do some result for other people, which is an interesting thing, when you're saying who do you want to be a hero?
Dan: I think you want to just to provide a context, Dean, of you just start off with his pipelines before there's oil.
Dean: Right! I'll definitely tell that story, because this is kind of laying the setting stage for that, this ability to get results for other people, which is an interesting thing, not just develop skills, but develop an ability to create results for other people, which led me to think, you know, who do you want to be a hero to, being outwardly focused on what does the marketplace need. Who can I do that with, and then seek out partners, people to partner with, who will allow you to execute your unique capability on their behalf and allow you to participate in the benefit that you can create together, which is the free zone frontier really, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: He described, as a lot of the things that they do are petroleum-based products which require a lot of oil. They're an oil refiner, basically, and so they have to constantly get new oil. He took an approach of when companies were drilling for oil, exploratory drilling for oil, he would go to them and say, thinking from their perspective, thinking about them, it's who do you want to be a hero to, that as soon as they strike oil, they're going to want to commercialize that as quickly as possible.
Most other companies would be waiting until they strike oil, and then approaching them and saying, "Oh, let us build the pipeline. Oh, let us build the pipeline for you," right? "We'll buy your oil."
He was saying, "Let's go ahead, and in the interest of time, let's build the pipeline now in case they strike oil, and when they do, we'll be able to help them commercialize it right away, faster, and we'll take on the expense of doing that and we'll do the stuff and get them to agree to sell us the oil when they do."
Of course, everybody was completely amenable to that, and that was how they got in. He said it was really interesting to see that when they would do that, and then as soon as they would strike oil, then all these other companies would come and say, "Oh, let us build the pipeline. We'll do it cheaper than they will," and they would say, "No, we're good."
The image that that brought up for me was all these companies. It's almost like the hound dog pack is waiting for them to strike oil, and then everybody's going to, all of a sudden, descend into town and start wining and dining and pitching and trying to get somebody selling people pipelines. Getting them to buy their pipeline.
It struck me as a concept that I had been developing that every person in an organization is 100% authorized to bring money into the business, but there's only a handful of people who are allowed to take money out of the business. Everybody's competing for the money going out of the business, almost like they're all gathered around the shipping dock waiting to fight for the scraps of the money and the budget that's going to be allocated, and yet if you go and you walk around behind the building and approach from the receiving dock, there's no competition at the receiving dock. They're welcoming at the receiving dock. They're, "Oh, right this way. What have you got for us?" They're 100% delighted to see somebody at the receiving dock.
I thought, you know, that's really an interesting metaphor, just to think about how can you position yourself to approach through the receiving dock and not wait and fight it out at the shipping dock, waiting for the crumbs, you know?
Dan: Well, one thing now, right in our Free Zone Frontier program, one of our participants, Chip Mock from Detroit, without knowing that this was going to develop, he created a cure for a disease that has not been cured in 130 years. It's been maintained, it's been managed, and it's out of control varicose veins in the lower leg.
He's a plastic surgeon, so that's been a problem that's been solved in beauty parlors, which are the surgery centers that are mostly cosmetic surgery. A great number of people, 97% of Americans are untreated for this. They either do the disease management or they just live with it, and it hastens death because it creates open sores and infections.
Anyway, he solves this, and he's now developing centers all over the United States that cure this. Once he did that, all of a sudden he noticed that there was a build-up in the health care industry of people who had created cures but the health care system really isn't interested in cures, they're interested in the diseases that don't cure, but can be managed.
It's not a health care system, for the most part, it's a disease management system, because there's a lot of money in managing a disease over a long time, but never actually curing it.
Dean: Recurring revenue, yeah.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, and the only part of a cure that the health care cures, the health care industry wants here is re-curing revenue.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Re-curing a recurring revenue, so what he found is that all of a sudden he solved a very major problem for all the innovators around the world who have created legitimate cures, but they can't get in the front door of places that just want to have disease management techniques and processes and pharmaceuticals that go along with that.
The interesting thing is that he's kind of creating pipelines. If you think of his network of centers, and he plans to have 300 or 400 of these. He's creating the centers where this person who's innovating something, there's already a network to go into. He doesn't have to knock on the door and try to get it into one center-
Dean: Oh, so now they can do other diseases or other things.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dean: Smart.
Dan: He's created a capability that solves their problem, in other words, and you know, it's just really interesting.
A lot of people don't know this, but Sears and Roebuck used to have housing kits that they could deliver 100 years ago, being probably 1920s or so, and they had a catalog and there would be 25, 30 different kind of house designs, sizes, styles, and they had contractors who would build these kits, and everything was templated. Every part had to be right or they had specifications for all the parts and they all had to be numbered and then they had to be packed in a certain way in big cartons and containers.
You would order a kit, and two weeks later, it would be delivered to your town by train, and all you needed to do was get local carpenters to follow the rules, and then they could build your house for you.
There's thousands of these across the United States. Most of them are historic houses, now, so they're protected.
They created a free zone frontier. If you think of a free zone frontier, they created it. They created it for the house builders, who might just be a local house builder, but they said, "You know, if you're a really good house builder, then we want you to build these kits. We don't want you to build houses, we want you to build kits."
It'd probably be a woodworking factory, actually. It wouldn't be a builder, but then you had lots of local carpenters who could get into the network of carpenters who built these houses.
Dean: The house assembly process, right.
Dan: Yeah, and then Sears would let each community know where they could find these carpenters who got very, very good at this, so these carpenters might start off in one town, but then they just followed the Sears building kit network, and they would bid on jobs, and everything like that.
This was 100 years ago, you know, this was 100 years ago, so this free zone frontier actually operates.
The big one, of course, and repeated is the Cyrus McCormick, because he's considered one of the three greatest technological innovators who propelled the American economy during the 1800s.
Dean: Mm-hmm, yeah, and that was with the reaper, yeah, along with the telephone and the railroads. That was credited as one of the three greatest inventions of the 1800s.
It's an interesting thing that that was a gateway to a new era. When you look at that, that really changed the make-up.
You think about those three things; the railroad making us mobile, the telephone making us being able to communicate through a distance, and the reaper allowing the workforce to go out of the fields and into the factories that you could see how that was such a catalyst.
Dan: The other thing I would say, Dean, is it allowed the farmers to have much bigger fields and it allowed the spread of the productive farms, yeah, and to spread the bigger field farms straight across the country maybe 20 or 30 years faster, so the whole development of the agricultural sector probably was speeded up, and really wealthy farmers would have more than one reaper. They would maybe, say out of 1,000 acres or 2,000 acres they'd have four reapers with four men and four horses, and they would be able to produce what 56 other people in addition could produce, so yeah.
Dean: It's pretty amazing, and then look at that now. We see that now with the internet, between this Cloudlandia and mainland intersection here that we're at, and you look at those kind of things, like what Chip is doing is, you know, varicose veins are decidedly a mainland situation that you're going to have to get that treated on the mainland, but the network, that ability to manage that is Plowedlandia-enabled.
Dan: Yeah, very much so.
Dean: It's something, mmm-hmm.
Dan: Yeah. Another one, I saw a play in London called the Lehman Trilogy, and Lehman refers to the Lehman brothers, who became a very famous investment bank in New York City. The story goes, and it tells the story, that these were three brothers who came from southern Germany in, I think 1830s, 1840s, and well, the first one came to New York and just felt that the competition, and what they were, they were clothiers.
Dean: I didn't know that.
Dan: They bought fabrics. On a tip from someone he met there, he actually quickly moved to Alabama and he set up in a small town in the middle of plantation territory, so this was before the Civil War, and he would provide clothing, work clothing and formal clothing and fabrics for the women, and everything else, and set it up so it was Lehman.
Then the second brother came over, and the sign changed and became Lehman Brothers Clothiers and Fabrics, and then what he noticed was that he would get to talk to the plantation owners, the workers, and there were the plantations. These weren't real effective businesses, the plantations weren't really effective businesses, and so they were always lacking in tools and they were always lacking in seeds. They didn't know anything about seeds, and everything else.
He had a second brother, he says, "You know, I think we ought to broaden our scope here. We've got a captive market." There were about 25 big plantations, and they were talking about half the state of Alabama was 25 plantations, and so what they did, they broadened it to hardware. It was basically general store. It was basically a general store, and so they had their clothing. They still had their clothing and fabrics, but they added tools, and one thing led to another, and pretty soon they were a provider of all this stuff.
Then there was an absolutely cataclysmic fire that swept over most of Alabama, and it burnt all the fields, the cotton fields, just when they were about to come to harvest, and so there was no cash, but here they were.
They got this idea, and they'd been very frugal and they had built up cash. They had cash confidence, and they did a deal with all the plantation owners that they would give them, like Cyrus McCormick, they would give them everything they needed for the next season, and they would get paid at the harvest. They would get paid with part of the harvest, so this switched them from the money.
Then, one of the brothers, and by this time, a third brother had come over, and the third brother said, "Well, I'll go, and I'll take our share of the harvest and I'll find buyers." What they found out right away is that even on their first trip, they were better able to find buyers for their pay-off crop, the share that they got a pay-out crop, and they came up with the idea that they would be the seller for all the plantations.
They went around, and they said, "Look. We've got a network of buyers, and we're going to specialize in this. You only do this once a year, and you don't know who's who and you don't know they change."
They became buyers, and now they were back to New York and back to Massachusetts, because the big mills had actually turned the cotton into fabric, and were in that area, so they got the connection, and so they became cotton buyers and brokers.
Look how they had moved. They had moved and in every case, they were seeing how they could be more valuable to the plantation owners.
In the 1860s, the Civil War came along, and everything was gone. The plantations were gone, and immediately they just switched gears, and they started going to the Caribbean, and they became coffee brokers.
One thing led to another, and then they you could invest in their company and they would be a bank for other coffee brokers.
They kept moving upstream, if you can see what they're doing here, and then eventually, they just became bankers.
They were very agile at just being where the value, larger value proposition was, and everything. They lasted right up until the collapse in 2008, so from the 1840s to the downturn in the market. Lehman Brothers was the trigger point of the crash in 2008, 2009. There were no Lehmans involved by the last one, I think was gone, the last relative was gone about 20 years before then.
Dean: ...documentary that you were watching?
Dan: No, it's a play. It's just opening in New York.
Dean: Oh, a play.
Dan: It's really worthwhile. It's a really worthwhile play to see. We saw it in London. It did their big testing in London. I think they had opened for about a week in New York, and then they switched to London, and we saw it. It's just three actors, just three actors, and they portray 25 different people.
Dean: Wow.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's amazing.
Dan: It was very good.
The big thing is that whole notion, and specifically with Cyrus McCormick of them seeing that the plantations had no ability to pay, so they just gave the capability to the plantations to actually stay in business, and they got paid not only in cash, but they got paid in part of the crop.
Dean: It's a really interesting thing being able to keep those parlaying.
I don't know much about Charles Koch, but when you start thinking about how they didn't start out with 12 business divisions, they started out with one, and it was always at the adjacencies that they ended up finding the opportunities.
I think that it's like you said about the books, where when you read Who Do You Want To Be A Hero To, that then creates a vista that you see something else. You see WhoNotHow, and you see then The Free Zone Frontier.
Dan: Yeah, when you identify who you want to be a hero to, rather than you're thinking in terms, well, I've got a product and a service and I've got to find some customers. Well, that's a very, what I would say, a procrastination-friendly approach.
In other words, because you don't really have an emotional connection to any potential prospect out in the marketplace, so there's lots of reasons for you to procrastinate, but if you are emotionally committed to a particular type of person out in the marketplace, then it's not about the product or service, it's about that person's future and where they're trying to get to, and then you'll create solutions, and some of them may be products, some of them might be services, but those are irrelevant. It's how you help the person who you want to be a hero to actually get to where they're going, and it's exactly with the oil well, he was anticipating where these high-risk oil drillers, if they hit oil, what they were going to need next, and he made an instantaneous solution. If you hit oil, the solution is to get it to the market, and we've created the solution.
Dean: We already went ahead and built it. See there's the thing, is that the hound dog pack of other vendors. I love that distinction that you've been making there, that the people who position themselves as vendors are waiting until they strike oil to then go because they're thinking, "What have you got for me? What's in it for me is that I'm going to get to build your pipeline. You're a client, a prospect for us," as opposed to putting your selfish needs aside and realizing that it's Zig Ziglar's approach of you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
Dan: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Dean: In addition, right? That's really the thing, is everybody thinks that it's an indication that you need to hustle and work harder and help more people, but it's really conditioned precedent. It's you get them what they want, and then you get what you want through getting them what they want, and it's really getting that confidence.
That's where you're saying this is where it resonates so much is your unique ability developing your ability, continuing to develop your ability and your confidence in your ability so that you're not betting on them, you're betting on you and your ability to get the result for them.
Dan: Yeah, and I think there's two confidences that you have to have these and play this game. You have to have cash confidence, in other words, you have the cash that you can wait for a much bigger outcome.
Dean: Future, yeah.
Dan: I know entrepreneurs are very, very creative, but they never have cash confidence that they can bet on their new idea.
The other thing is it's an imaginative confidence that if I suspend my own self-interest and put my imagination on someone else's future and what they're going to need.
There's two things: There's cash confidence, and I think there's imagination confidence. I'm taking care of cash-wise, and I'm also taking care of, just in terms so that I know I'm really useful, and depending on what I can see in someone else's future, I can actually use my skills, first of all, for them, and then I'll get a reward for using my skills for them, so it's actually a two-sided kind of like muscle. I use the word muscle. You've got cash muscle and you've got imagination muscle.
Dean: Yes, that's good, and I think what backs it all, though, is the capability muscle. That's the baseline thing that you've got the capability to do it.
I was saying to Stewart today, we had breakfast, and I was just sharing how much buoyancy I'm feeling going into the 20s now.
I really like the discrete packets of a decade, like a century kind of thing. I really love that we're coming into a decade of what now feels like the first proper decade of the new millennium.
Dan: Just terms of what was happening before, or the beginning, you know, 2010 would've been the beginning of the decade that we're just finishing up. It was, you know, the end of the first decade of the century was a really, really scary, confusing time because of the crash, the '08,'09 crash, and so it was mostly about did you survive? Secondly, how do we recover from this right now, I mean for most of the economy. That may not have been your particular situation, but you were dealing with a lot of other people that was their situation.
Right now in this space, I've been coaching for 45 years, and I have never seen in my 45 years of coaching entrepreneurs the level of confidence at the local level right across the United States. I mean, there's corporations that are freaking out because of the readjustment of tariffs in the world, but that really, really doesn't affect entrepreneurs.
Dean: I wonder what I'm observing, Dan, is that there are so many people right now that are poised and waiting for the downturn, because they're looking at it as a good thing, a good opportunity for them, that that's going to, I think, kind of slow the arrival of it, and I think it's going to soften the severity of it, because I think there's such a pool of people who've really taken advantage of the long, long growth period that we've had after the crash and are waiting now for the opportunities that will come with a downturn.
Dan: Well, it's really funny. We had Roy, who comes from Singapore, in the workshop on Friday, and Roy's for five or six years, and he represents an investment fund in Singapore that invests in American real estate, specifically homes. I mean, that's been his specialty is undervalued homes. He's done well. I mean, he's done really well, but he was sitting next to Ken Newman, who at one time was in the top 10 home builders in the United States. He got hit. I mean, his company got hit but he didn't get hit because he had been wise about how he protected himself.
He does a whole bunch of things, but one thing that he does is that he looks for untitled property that has not been serviced, and you'll know the deal because of your real estate development.
Let's say, there's farm land outside of Toronto, and it's been titled, which means it's been totally approved for development, and if tomorrow, if somebody wanted to, they could begin the process of servicing that property, putting in the electricity, putting in the water, and everything else, so you're right at the threshold, but until that tomorrow happens, that land is still considered farmland. It's not considered development land, that's right there.
What Ken does, and Ken says this is the secret to real estate billionaires around the country, they just wait till it downturns, when even the farmland is now selling at a dollar, but when the downturn comes, that farmland might sell for 10 cents an acre. Well, it'll sell for a dime on a dollar, whatever it is that's being purchased, and he said his experience was that whatever he pays for it three or four years later, he gets 15 times his investment on it. He was just informing "Roy," he says, "since you're coming over here," he says, and he says, "I know you're going to get a good return, because compared to Singapore real estate prices, American real estate prices are very cheap." He didn't say free, but it is very, very cheap.
The most expensive real estate property in the United States would probably not equal to the most expensive real estate price in Singapore.
Anyway, but that just confirms what you were saying is that you just wait then for the downturn.
I bet there's as much of an economy that takes advantage of downturns as the areas that actually produces upturns.
Dean: Well, it's like you said, that everybody's bad news is somebody's good news, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's really, you know, we've talked about Norman in North Carolina.
Dan: Actually, it's South Carolina.
Dean: South Carolina.
Dan: He's in South Carolina. He comes to the dinners so they've just been through two weeks of a hurricane and its aftermath, and he's at dinner and he says, "You know, I feel guilty seeing this around home," but he says, "you know, I truly do enjoy a good hurricane," because he's got a waste management company, and all these big messes to clean up. Then he sells plywood, so every truck that goes to clean up the mess has a load of plywood, because there's windows out, there's doors out, there's holes in the siding, there's holes in the roof, and your temporary solution to all that is you get plywood up right away, as fast as you can. You use canvas and plywood to actually do a fast patch job.
Then he's got restaurants and bars, and he says, "Well, you know, people aren't eating at home, so where are they going to eat?" He says, "They come to the restaurants and bars." He says, "Nothing like a great hurricane week."
Dean: Isn't that amazing? Yeah, you look at the downturn.
I remember in 2009, right when Obama was inaugurated. They launched the stimulus program, and offered two great things for real estate, one of which was an $8,500 tax credit for some home buyers, and that was to stimulate people coming into the market. They could get the money back off of their taxes. Not a tax deduction, a tax credit, and so it's like free money. I built a whole program around that for our real estate agents. We put together a free tax credit guide and became an education provider for first-time buyers.
We've also created a program called Bank-Owned Weekly where we would provide information on bank-owned homes, and for buyers and there were people who had their best years in that downturn by providing for the people who were happy that the downturn had come. First-time buyers who didn't buy while the prices were going crazy and they got out of reach, now it's affordable for them, or people who didn't buy the bigger house they wanted because the gap got too big between what their house and the bigger house they wanted was.
Lots of every dark cloud has a silver lining, I guess, right?
Dan: Yeah, and you know the thing that I find about that, and I'll just make reference to the bank-owned real estate. The last thing I think the bank wants to own is somebody else's real estate.
Dean: Right, that's exactly right.
Dan: It's not their role, and especially a private home. So they'll go through hoops to help any realtor who will help them take that piece of property off their hands.
Dean: You're exactly right.
Dan: They real estate, the whole banking process. I mean, you know. We want to sell this car, and we'll give you a full tank of gas. We'll service it and everything to get it off your hands.
You see, the whole point is it's not seeing yourself in a particular business as seeing yourself in a greater and greater stack of useful skills that help other people get on with their lives. It's really your usefulness stack keeps getting bigger and better as you go along, and I mean, and that's really the whole key here.
You know, it's very, very interesting, and it's a thought that I had about three weeks ago, just on this. Everybody's good news is everybody else's bad news that I have a book, one of my quarterly books in mind, and the title, the big title is Relax: Everybody's Saving the World.
Dean: I like that!
Dan: Yeah, and the whole point is that there's downtimes, and the people who are taking advantage of the downtimes are saving the world, and then if there's uptimes, the people who are taking advantage of the uptime are saving the world. It doesn't matter. It's a flip back and forth, so what looked like the worst news in the world, well actually, skilled people are turning this into new advantages and new capabilities and new types of opportunities, which the other people who are disadvantaged right now can take advantage. I mean, you just have to be flexible in your thinking and being willing to learn new skills and new approaches, especially new mindsets as you go along.
The one thing that I was really, really itching to ask you is to go back to our original thesis of procrastination, and just bounce it up against this whole concept of Free Zone Frontier. What relationship does procrastination have to the Free Zone Frontier?
The Free Zone Frontier, I'll just leave it off with a destination for our listeners.
The Free Zone Frontier is where you are increasing your value creation collaborations in such a way that you create an entirely new kind of service or new kind of solution in the marketplace that's amazingly free of competition. In other words, you're taking advantage of something and creating something that the normal rules of competition, which trap people in their conventional way of thinking, is not available.
What I'm saying is, and here's my question, if you're in a Free Zone Frontier, do you procrastinate at all?
Dean: I don't think this is where I've got my remarkable tablet here, and I didn't share this with you, but I'm sharing it with you now, that I find that when I'm going down the path of expanding my free zone frontier opportunities that I have endless focus and attention for this, because I think it's free of friction, too, is really the thing, that you're able to take your capabilities, you're able to just move forward on executing without having to get buy-in. I think that's really the thing.
If you're positioning as you've got this capability, and then you're trying to find people to convince to work with you to get that result, where you're trying to get it where you're trying to get them to buy into your idea, almost like they have to do something, in a way, whereas if you're just bypassing them, in a way, and you go and start moving towards the result that they actually want, that they're much more likely to join in on your enthusiastic pursuit of the result for them.
Dan: Yes, yeah.
Dean: That's energizing. There's no friction in that. I look at that, and I see these incredible opportunities like that.
I was talking with Abraham the other day. Almost two hours we talked about the arbitrage, those words that he was using. The opportunities that are available in this commoditizing. Yeah, and I think I'm using that word. I said to Jay is that we're certainly at a point right now where execution has become commoditized, and I'm not using commoditized as a derogatory, diminishing way of talking about it. I'm talking about it as an opportunity, meaning the true definition of commoditized is something available that you can buy, and what I'm saying is you can buy execution of everything now, just like in China you can buy every electronic component that you would need to make anything in combination. You don't need to invent anything new in electronics, really. It's all been solved and it's all available. That's why when you see Peter D'Amando showing things about Shenzhen, or wherever that marketplace is for all those electronics manufacturers. You can literally just go and combine this and this and this and it's effortless to create things like that.
I think that in this free zone frontier, creating results is really the same way. Execution elements are commoditized, and I mean that in a joyful, positive way, especially if you have money and the ideas. The ideas are really what is the driving of it.
Dan: Yeah, well.
Dean: Even money has become commoditized.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's cash confidence and innovation confidence, really. That's really what you have.
You know, but it's really, really interesting. I know a good concept when I do it, because all of a sudden you can use it to look at all familiar situations and see entirely new things in what were kind of conventional, familiar, habitual, repetitive situations. You say, "Oh my gosh, there's a whole new thing there that I never saw. I never noticed that doorway in the back of my closet. I wonder what's just behind the closet?" You open the door, and there was another 15 rooms in your house you never knew about.
Dean: Well, look at this! Yeah.
Dan: I've been living in these four rooms, saying, "Gee, I wish I had a bigger house," and then one day, you say, "I wonder what that door is? I never saw that door in the back of my closet," and you open it up and there's 15 more rooms, but you weren't curious enough.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: Yeah. Well, one take-away for you. One take-away. It's always useful to know what is better at the end of the hour than it was at the start of the hour.
Dean: Yeah, you know, I think hearing these conversations and looking at the vistas of each one leading to the next, I think like when we discovered here the adjacencies here, and you tell about the Lehmans and putting that aside or beside the Koch brothers and you see that is really-
Dan: Cyrus McCormick.
Dean: Cyrus McCormick, where that all Sears and Roebuck. Wherever that leads.
What's the next book in the series, by the way?
Dan: The next one for December is Always Be the Buyer. Always Be the Buyer.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: My definition of the difference between a buyer and a seller: A seller is someone who can be rejected. A buyer is someone who does the rejecting.
Dean: I like that. Always be the buyer.
Dan: Yeah. I'll give you an example just to finish off.
The Koch brothers, they're in a position, yes, to go and say, "Look, we'll build the pipeline, but we're looking for oil operations that we think will really fit in with our new pipelines, so do you have the wherewithal to actually be the oil explorer and developer to actually going to have a wonderful pipeline, we just wonder if you're worthy of it."
Dean: Mm-hmm.
Dan: The Koch brothers are selling nothing there, so the Koch brothers is the buyer.
Dean: Yes. It's so great, and that's exactly what happens. Very interesting. It's a great time, and then you can-
Dan: And they're amazingly free of competition, because no other pipe developer is going to take that risk because they think they're sellers.
Dean: Right. Isn't that interesting? When you think about it, this is what Stewart and I were talking about at breakfast this morning, that the oil companies are not going in to just randomly drill for oil anywhere. When you think about the millions of dollars and time that they put in geologically to take this area, and the millions of dollars that they're investing to actually do the drilling, that they're 100% committed that that's where the oil is, so why not align with they're taking the risk on? If you're aligning your risk to be rewarded along with them, it's a whole new world.
Dan: Yup, yup, yup. It's just a very interesting way of looking, and again, you can look at hundreds of businesses that already exist out there that have lasted a long time and have grown, and when you analyze, you'll be able to spot that they didn't succeed because they were a better competitor, they succeeded because they created free zone frontiers that their competition couldn't even comprehend.
Dean: I get it. Exciting times to be a frontiersman.
Dan: Yes it is, a frontiersman, and you know something? Frontiersmen don't have to worry about their status. All they have to worry about is pushing forward.
Dean: That's exactly it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Wow. Well, I can't believe how fast these conversations go.
Dan: Yeah, this one really went quickly, yeah.
Dean: It did. I will look forward to our next, as I always do.
Dan: Yeah, and that'll be next Sunday.
Dean: Perfect. Have a great week, Dan.
Dan: Thanks, Dean. Bye.
Dean: Talk to you next time. Bye bye.