Dan Sullivan [00:00:00]:
The big thing is that you have a relationship with a particular audience, and you want to know more and more about this audience. But the big thing is what is your audience aspiring to?
Mike Koenigs [00:00:13]:
That's the power platform, plus discernment, which is the amount of energy required to produce results is less and less because you have the ability to see the future. And that's the compounding effect of wisdom.
Dan Sullivan [00:00:27]:
So the big thing for an entrepreneur, you're very creative, and you can do this, you can do that, but there's got to be something at the center that is a compounding process that you own, and it gets richer and richer and becomes more valuable as you go along. And I think that's the hard trick for most entrepreneurs.
Mike Koenigs [00:00:45]:
Dan Sullivan creates mental universes that are uncharted galaxies in most people's mind. So, Dan, we're talking about the audience as a creative team. And one of the things that I love about Strategic Coach, everyone loves is how you facilitate meetings and create engagement. And you just start with a tool, have people work on it. You know, it's a little bit of follow the leader, but then it's your interpretation of what happens that builds the next tool and the next tool and the next tool. So why don't you talk about your philosophy as with regards to the audience as a creative team, and specifically, you've got, I think, two different kinds. You've got the strategic coach audience and then anyone else. So if you're out in the world and you've spoken before or done webinars, so we'll call it the untrained audience and then the trained audience.
Dan Sullivan [00:01:56]:
Well, first of all, it's taking me a while to get to this. So, you know, the first. I would say, the first 30 years of coaching, I would come out with a concept, and then I would give a sort of a mini lecture on it. I'm a coach, and, you know, you want a coach, but it took me 30, 30 years, I would say, and this was before I knew you, to really get how you get a big audience, really engaged. So this morning, we had about 50 on Zoom. And so I said, I'm gonna. I have a tool. It's called strengthening your strengths.
Dan Sullivan [00:02:49]:
So I said, and I think this is a really crucial entrepreneurial thought, that if you're always strengthening your strengths, I don't know, all the other skills that come out of that I think are sort of secondary. Then I say, so, for example, right now, what would you say your strengths are? And then we have a worksheet where they can work on it. You did it. And so I haven't brainstormed. I said, what's everything? That's a strength for you, and that could be your own skills, that could be your organizational skills, it could be other things. But one of the things that I put down is that I have audiences who are 50% of the creative team, so I have an idea, but I'm only half confident in the idea before I tell my entrepreneurs. So, because I consider them to be 50% creative partner, this idea is going to be even better than I thought it was. So I.
Dan Sullivan [00:04:05]:
I take them through some thinking and I say, okay, these are your people. Have eight or nine or ten. And then I say, what are the top three? And why? Why are they the top three? And they do the top three. And then I say, okay, you know what's true right now? Let's go down the road a year from now and tell me how you're going to take your present strengths and strengthen them over the next year. So we fulfilled the promise of the title here, you know, strengthening your strengths. And then they brainstorm again what they're going to do. And then they picked up three, and then they do their insights. They go into a breakout group, which is great about Zoom, and, you know, three or four, they talk five minutes each, and they come back.
Dan Sullivan [00:04:54]:
And then I have another tool I take them through, which is a killer tool in the strategy coach universe, which is called the triple play. And then they go through that and they come back, and now they. They know what they. They know what their thinking is about their. So the first real step is. It's not so much I want you to think about my thinking, because my thinking is just the structure of the exercise. That's my thinking. My interest is, what are you thinking about your thinking as you went through this? And then, you know, we have a solid hour where people are talking and asking questions and everything else.
Dan Sullivan [00:05:37]:
And even if you're not a contributor to that, you're. I really noticed that people are fully engaged. And I. I check. I had two screens this morning. I met. I had two rooms, you know, on Zoom, and nobody left. Nobody.
Dan Sullivan [00:05:54]:
Nobody left during the two hours, which is a real indicator that they're engaged and everything. And. And then I'm just listening. And I got a sheet, you know, as they're talking. Just show you what I have here. I've got a sheet that's got about six or seven possible new tool ideas. Okay. And for example, I came up with.
Dan Sullivan [00:06:19]:
Always start with the punchline, you know, that you know that if you have a thought process, you want people to go tell them what the ending of the thought process and ask yourself, is it compelling? Is the end result of this compelling? Okay, so then you make the compelling thing the title of your tool. So always start with your punchline. So this is some of my initial thoughts regarding your question.
Mike Koenigs [00:06:50]:
Great. So I'm going to repeat what I hear, but I'm also going to add what my experience is in here. So I'm going to show my screen right now for anyone in the audience who's listening and watching simultaneously. So this was. Is it all right if I show the tool from today?
Dan Sullivan [00:07:11]:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Mike Koenigs [00:07:12]:
Okay, so this is your example and, you know, you had the brainstorming.
Dan Sullivan [00:07:18]:
So I'm revealing to how I applied the tool to myself and these are the answers I came up with.
Mike Koenigs [00:07:26]:
Yep. And ultimately we start by brainstorming. What I love about the Dan Sullivan Strategic Coach process is there's never any homework. We're always doing this together. So after you explain and you walk through it, we fill out the form together and there's a timer and you'll have Eleanora, for example, chiming in and saying, okay, take a minute or 30 seconds or however long for each one of these. And because we've learned it with you and we're doing it together, I wish like hell I would have been good at school if I would have been taught this way, because it's the perfect short attention span ADHD mechanism. And also, we're always starting with celebrating our past, but also looking into our future, which is a commonality, and then looking at the insights. And then when we break into groups, if you're in a group of four, everyone's got five minutes to discuss their insights.
Mike Koenigs [00:08:33]:
And then it becomes this collaborative conversation. And of course, what I found is. And I'll show you what mine was. I didn't even have to finish filling in some of the forms. But first of all, I live a fairly similar parallel life to you. I look at it and like, well, that's going on with me too. And I can see it. So I have the benefit of an active, wise, entrepreneurial mind.
Mike Koenigs [00:09:06]:
And then I always make some realizations maybe I haven't been able to articulate before. But in the end, what I found is each quarter, in every tool, I managed to create a new book, a new product, and find a way to simplify. And of course, that's so what I got out of this. And again, I didn't even have to get my top three Because I was already working on the triple play. And these are common. Like, at the end of the day, what I've been good at most of my life is looking at marketing, sales, and figuring out how to automate it. And I realized that's actually the simplifier in me. The multiplier is all of my IP creates products.
Mike Koenigs [00:09:55]:
And then now my new superpower is the fact that for whatever reason, it's as though my brain has been trained my whole life to take advantage of AI because the volume of stuff I can get done with a new automation means I'm not reliant on anyone else. I don't have to, you know, articulate a plan and a roadmap and then communicate that and then wait for them to maybe get it and maybe be able to interpret it. Right. It's sort of like it's done now. So when it came to the triple play, this was yours. And I don't know if you want to describe some of what happens in the triple play, because this is the ultimate multiplier.
Dan Sullivan [00:10:40]:
This is the tool of tools. So, you know, we create, we've created a lot of tools. So since, you know, the 1980s, we've created over 250 thinking tools. And, you know, it took me a long time in that process before I realized that each tool is, is an important product. Okay? And so I create. My goal for the next year is I create a brand new tool every, every week. Okay? So I did one last week and I created another one this week so far. And it's, it's everything that you saw on the first sheet.
Dan Sullivan [00:11:25]:
It's a way of getting entrepreneurs about things that they already have, but they haven't really focused in that they've got an opportunity here, they've got a resource here, they've got a capability here. And. But now they zero in on it. And it's all stuff that they know, but they didn't know. They had never given it importance. And what the tools do is they, they focus entrepreneurs attention on the things that they already have, but they're not maximizing the value of it. And so what we do here, we took their top three from the first sheet, and this is just how you're going to strengthen your strengths, the three strengths that you're going to strengthen. So it's the right hand column at the top three.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:19]:
And I just put those in the arrows, I just put those in the three arrows on the second form right there. And then I, we take them two by two. So I take two arrows and then you say, how do. How is this strength connected to this strength? Excuse me. And then I create a combination in the first pink box, then the second box. So it's two. Two arrows equal one box. Two more arrows equal a second box, two more arrows equal threes.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:55]:
And so you've got the first level of the three by three, you've got the second level of the three by three. And then there's an outer level which are green boxes and takes, I would say, four or five cracks at this for most people. Some people pick it up, you know, first time through. And what it is, is that you're allowing your brain to really do what it does best, which is take two things and connect them. And my. My sense is, you know, I mean, Steve Jobs probably expressed it best. What's creativity? It's combining connecting one thing with another thing. That's what creativity is.
Dan Sullivan [00:13:37]:
Okay, so. So the brain just does this naturally. You don't have to direct the brain. The brain say, I've got this one, I've got this one. What's the connection between the two? Your brain will create the answer. If you're sort of. I think creative people are just people who trust their brain to make connections that are surprising.
Mike Koenigs [00:13:59]:
Yes. So I've got two observations from this. So first of all, the process that I really enjoy is, number one, it's modeling. So we model, it's. And then we capture. And here we capture. And there's a level of reflection. And really it's improvisation, and it's driven and dictated by a deadline.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:31]:
There's one minute deadlines for each segment or 90 seconds. So sometimes it's, you know, when you hear about artists that just start moving the pen, that's what it takes to start writing. It's the practice of writing. It's not necessarily having anything other than, like you said, your brain connects something. But then we have group engagement where we get to listen to someone else's interpretation. And one of the things that happens in Coach all the time is we misinterpret. You know, there's so many ADHD brains going on, the misinterpretation ends up creating a very fun creative outcome. So there's an accidental nature to this, and I think that's the same in creation is if there's going to be variations of a species, sometimes nature has to take over.
Mike Koenigs [00:15:31]:
Just create some accidents and the good accidents survive. And then when we're together, it's the value multiplication. So the three by three is the ultimate value multiplier. And What I did today, I took a different approach. Cause usually this is purely innovation. But because I'd mentioned I had read this book by Dan Martell called Buy Back youk Time, who he dedicated part of a chapter to you acknowledging you in his book, which is fantastic. But anyway, so one of them is simplify and then using AI. And just before we started recording, I showed you one of the ways I'm solving an internal pain which is just soping everything.
Mike Koenigs [00:16:20]:
It's just creating operating procedures, but teaching my team how to use AI to capture what they do and what they know so we can multiply it together. And then you know, the goal is enhancing the team with more freedom, upgraded capabilities always enhanced by AI. And then one of my outcomes this year is, you know, my currently my program which starts at 150 grand and usually goes to 3 to 600 a year, my goal is to turn it into a million dollar offer. And what we have realized, we started doing this a while ago, but the pain was the capturing it is a lot of our clients right now, we give them our SOPs while we're working with them because it saves them a month of time. And I've been thinking like what's the most valuable library of captured systems and automations that we can share? Because it is you know, even just replacing the need for another copywriter, for example, which is a pain every business has. Now one person who's not a trained dedicated copywriter can be a pretty good one. But again having someone who's responsible or knows how to capture processes, that's again, what do you want to do to create a self managing organization? So what I really realized is by teaching, which I did last week, I taught my whole team this, I use this term because it's like the self managing company becomes even more realized. Everyone needs it.
Mike Koenigs [00:18:02]:
The buzzword of AI also upgrading our core products without requiring me and bundling it. And then of course you and I have done the same thing always before I met you, I was always like, how do I capture this, turn it into a product, sell it and continue to evolve. Which gets back to the value multiplier is putting it out in the wild and seeing what your customers, your paying customers do with it. So that was my attempt at at least simplifying my experience of living inside the process. So what's your interpretation of my interpretation?
Dan Sullivan [00:18:47]:
Yeah, well, I think the big thing is that, you know, I'm writing a book right now. This. So I did so in 1970 when I was 70 years old, 19 2014. I was 70 years old and I said, you know what, it would be a really neat project for the next 25 years, which will take me to 95. I said, why don't I just write a small book every quarter and do it for 100 quarters and see how that works out, you know, and we didn't have the team for it when I started, but that's true of everything. You know, when you start a new thing, it's your initiative and then it takes you into areas where this is what I should be doing in this new venture, but there's a lot of areas where I shouldn't be doing it. And gradually, over first 10 years, we've got a really terrific team. It's a 10 person team, including me.
Dan Sullivan [00:19:54]:
And we have a quarterly schedule and we each do our thing and out pops a book at the quarter and we've done 40 quarters and we've got 48, 40 books. And some of the books are interesting for a quarter, but every once in a while some of them pop out that actually can be a bigger book than ours. Ours are about 44 pages of copy, some really neat cartoons and then there's an audio track and there's a video track. And now we're including a tool in the book. And we just mentioned something at the beginning, but we have a new major book coming out, it's called Casting Not Hiring, that entrepreneurs should look at their companies as theater, not as corporations. I, I think you, you treat people inside the company and you treat people outside the company different if you have a theater approach than if you have a corporate approach which tends to be bureaucratic and you tend to consider human beings expendable and you know, and you get large turnover with people. And so my attitude is that you have a theater company and you try to hold the theater company together as long as you possibly can with each of the members. So anyway, but I can see where your process and I've gone through your six entrepreneurial lifetimes on earlier podcast.
Dan Sullivan [00:21:35]:
I say, Mike, Mike's just doing the same thing as I'm doing, but it's just, he's got different unique ability. He's got, he's got, you have access to technical, technological, know how and technological capabilities that I don't. But I, I think that you're, we're both in the same process of taking what are just floating ideas, capturing them, packaging them, putting them together in performance form so that you can actually present them to other people and see if you'll get paid for it. Yes, and then does that have ongoing value? Does it have residual value besides just the live performance where, you know, people are paying for that live performance? But does the, the thing that you've created, does it have asset value that goes beyond that? You know, and you know, yes, but I think the reason why we like chatting to each other, chatting with each other on these podcasts, that we're, we're both doing the same process.
Mike Koenigs [00:22:42]:
You're right. I, I, as, as I was listening to you right now. So I have someone coming in starting tomorrow, new client, met them a couple weeks ago, and they follow pretty much the same path. So first of all, I'm just going to tell you, say the word that we've talked about before is how theater and improvisation, right, what we are doing is improvising and willing to do multiple performances. And every once in a while a hit comes out of it. The pressure. And I was just reading a blurb. This, actually, it was.
Mike Koenigs [00:23:25]:
No, it was last night before I went to bed about John Lennon. Towards the end of his career, he had like, he disappeared for a year. He ran off with another woman who was his secretary, and he went to LA and he was, got in a lot of trouble. He was hanging out with Harry Nielsen, did a lot of drugs. And he also had to do a lot of cleanup, which he did for himself and some other people, because before he could do anything, he had commitments to other record companies who would sue him into oblivion if he didn't comply and deliver. So he had to crank out songs to fulfill. Right. And he had, I think there was a Chuck Berry thing where he got in trouble with, with something and there were a few others.
Mike Koenigs [00:24:09]:
And then he had some friends who were in similar trouble, including I believe it was Elton John, you know, Lucy in the sky with Diamonds came out of that. Couple amazing collaborations. And again, he had a intense deadline, a lot of pain. He was in pain, he was in addiction pain, he was in runaway pain. All these things came and when you look at some of the concentrated outputs, and it was, he didn't have time to think, he just had to get it done. And I'll give you one other second example, which is a guy probably have talked to you about before. He's one of my favorite producers. His name's Rick Rubin and he just got interviewed by a YouTuber I love.
Mike Koenigs [00:24:56]:
His name is Rick Beato, who's this great interviewer.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:00]:
I love Rick.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:02]:
Just trust me on this. Check out the Rick Rubin interview. It is so good. And Rick is the guy who resurrected Aerosmith when he did a crossover between rap and Aerosmith. So they were a dead band. But he's also the guy who brought Johnny Cash back, and he went through step by step how he got Johnny back in the game and captured his essence. And Johnny had more success at the end of his career, the end of his life, than he did his whole life. And for a while, he sold more records than anyone combined at Columbia, which is wild.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:47]:
So I see a huge pattern and a similarity here between what you do, what happens in the music industry and has, as well as theater and movies. And, you know, it's this notion of having the courage to improvise and have the pressure to perform. And, you know, the pressure cooker is what makes entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism so great. And I think when you look at something in hindsight, you forget about the personality pressures that were going on inside, like Steve Jobs, most great musicians and great bands, when, by the time they were. When they were famous and visible, they were just starting to actually keep some of their money. Before that, they were broke and broken.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:41]:
Yeah, and that's really important. Ownership is the most important thing about entrepreneurism. Do you actually own what you create? And, you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs have lived lonely lives in the wild. They make it, and they're just so appreciative that someone's giving them an audience and that the audience is actually paying, that they completely lose sight, that somebody else is making money off this, and someone actually owns your performance and they actually own your creativity, and it's too late. Like the early rock and roll singers, you know, in the 50s, especially the. You know, the. You know, the. The real trailblazers who were most mostly black, like Lloyd.
Dan Sullivan [00:27:35]:
Lloyd Price. That Jeff Madoff's Personality Play is about Lloyd Price, and he is arguably the first rock and roll musician where it was seen that he was doing something distinctly different. But the big thing is he was drawing a different kind of audience, you know, teenagers. And it was black and white teenagers intermixed during the days of segregation. You know, so he was doing something that was creatively unique, but he was doing something that was culturally unique and really politically unique. But. And he was the first one of all them, all the stars, Little Richard, James Brown, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, that actually realized that he could own what he created, and he bought back his contract and he created his own record company and, you know, and started to profit from his own creativity. Well, he's very rare.
Dan Sullivan [00:28:41]:
You know, it's very, very rare. And I mean, if they got a penny on a dollar that was actually made on their creativity, they thought they were really good, you know, and everything. But we're. We're living in a different age now. That was the 1950s. Now we're in the 2000s. And, you know, I think there's a smarter group of entrepreneurs coming along. And they say, yeah, but they, they, they look deeply at the contracts that they sign with other people, and they say, where.
Dan Sullivan [00:29:13]:
Where's in the contract here that I actually own what I'm creating? Oh, no, no. Well, let's not talk about that. We're going to give you a big opportunity. Oh, no. Who owns it? Who owns it? You know, enough. Owning what you create just multiplies your entrepreneurial confidence. Confidence. And I'm just seeing it.
Dan Sullivan [00:29:35]:
After coaching entrepreneurs for 50 years, I said, the first thing we have to talk about with entrepreneurship is who owns what you create.
Mike Koenigs [00:29:44]:
It's. So I've two little forks I want to explore with you, and as usual, I'm going to present both of them and see how you synthesize the two together. That's part of what I enjoy about this. So the fruit, the first one is inside of that. Owning what you create and the value of distribution and publishing. So quite a few years ago, when I sold my first company, Digital Cafe, my partner and I had enough money that we fulfilled one of our core dreams, which was to make a feature film. We did it Hollywood style. We raised about a million dollars, made the movie, and we made a couple mistakes.
Mike Koenigs [00:30:31]:
We made a ton of mistakes, but my partner did everything Hollywood style. So we did everything with unions because he wanted to be recognized by Hollywood and make it in the business. And our first mistake was we shot with high definition. We used the Lucas camera, and we found out really quickly no. 1. And that was the first high definition recorder. But no one had a screening room for video or high def. They only had screening rooms for film.
Mike Koenigs [00:31:01]:
So right away, we were screwed. And we couldn't afford to transfer. That was out of our budget. We just didn't know it would happen. And we couldn't get into festivals because no one had a screen that did high def. And the second thing that came along is 911 hit decimated the indie market. And by the time we did a deal with Warner Warner Brothers, the value of our film had dropped so much. We just didn't have any negotiation power.
Mike Koenigs [00:31:27]:
And at that point, I said, never again will I put my life in the hands of distribution and publishing. I'm going to control it. It's one of the reasons I went headfirst into the Internet and started doing, making my own products that I could sell online and capture the money and do the distribution. Right. So that was a huge lesson. But further on, as I've aged, I now see the value in publishing and distribution because the headache, it's still a headache to create and distribute your own content. And it does require a certain amount of overhead. And for a lot of artists, until they've got momentum, until they have a platform, until they've got an audience, they've got to focus on the one thing which is create and perform.
Mike Koenigs [00:32:18]:
Not so much that way any longer.
Dan Sullivan [00:32:21]:
You know, the big thing is that the greatest piece of intellectual capital in the world, focused intellectual capital, intellectual property in the world is the US Constitution. And what it was was it was a platform for creativity where if you had new idea, you were guaranteed ownership under copyright laws, trademark laws and patent laws. And that went in right at the time they started the country. Okay.
Mike Koenigs [00:32:59]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:00]:
And no other process has created the amount of pure intellectual property that the US Constitution has. So and the big thing, when you say the word intellectual property and you put it in type, you know, in other words, you would print it out. So intellectual is in six point type. Property is in 60 point type, okay? And if you want to understand what intellectual property is, you can more or less disregard the first word and focus on the second word. It's property. So your home is property, your car is property. And some of them are diminishing. You know, a car is diminishing unless it's a famous car, your house, probably the right place, right time, right situation really, but it's property.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:55]:
And it's the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to grasp that how they think about things, how they solve problems, how they create new solutions is property. You know, it's very, it's very difficult people because they're getting paid retail for it, you know, they're, you know, you know, I put on a workshop and today the top workshop, I'll have one tomorrow to be 50 people. And that's worth, that's worth $2.5 million. I mean, yeah, now and just like theater, all that money's up front. You know, I get all that money up fronts for four, you know, it's for four events during the year. So I'm getting paid six and a. I'm getting paid, you know, I'm getting, I'm getting paid $600,000 for tomorrow. Well, I didn't, I didn't start there 50 years ago, you know?
Mike Koenigs [00:34:47]:
Right.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:48]:
Everything but all the property that goes into that performance, I own. You know, we own the theater on the Province, and it's taken me a long time to get here. But the big thing, Mike, you know, we've been both in the entrepreneurial world for, you know, decades, and the way that the world is looking at technology, the way that the world is looking at the distribution of new ideas and everything else is very much in our favor right now. Okay.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:25]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:35:26]:
I think that a lot of people are still thinking about the way things were 20 years ago when they started being an entrepreneur. The world has changed dramatically over that period of time. But what it does for me, and I wrote this on my. The tool that you showed that my biggest strength is that I'm more ambitious at 80 than I was at 50.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:52]:
So two questions.
Dan Sullivan [00:35:54]:
Just because of the world that is surrounding me right now, what I can do at 80 is 100 times greater than what I could do at 50.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:05]:
That. That is where I'm leading. So first of all, an observation and then a question with a setup. So the notion. I never thought of this through this lens, even though I've heard you talk about the importance of the US Constitution for a long time, but the fact that that is what created the cascade effect, right? It's the petri dish that the greatest sum of intellectual property and capital exists in. So it's the most delicious soup for an entrepreneurial mind that could be consumed and back to the promise of being able to get ahead and to keep and own something that is yours. So there's something so appealing to the word mine in it, right? And it's such a powerful word. But the second one, and this is back to AI is a creative partner.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:16]:
So what you just said, again, is, never before has there been a better time to be alive when the food for intellectual stimulation and opportunity and collaboration has never been. There's so much that can be done with so little so quickly. And I'm about to teach how to write books with AI as an extension to our AI product. And I created Publish and Profit years ago, which is when Amazon came out with their KDP program and you could self publish. That was a big deal. And as far as I know, we were the first to really publicize how to do it and turn it into a process. And. And until recently, when people say, hey, can AI write good books? I'd be like, it can't.
Mike Koenigs [00:38:07]:
And it doesn't. It writes terrible books. Derivative content. Okay. And what I'm leading up to is the importance and the need for an editor. So I'm gonna go back to Rick Rubin, because he was talking about how. And he talks about how he's not a. He's not really a musician at all.
Mike Koenigs [00:38:30]:
He doesn't know how to run any equipment in a studio, but he knows what sounds good. And he said when he would be producing, he. He produced Metallica, for example, heavy metal band. But he figured out, he said, what was important and what he changed in that recording is the spacing. So instead of a bunch of what would be known as speed metal, they'd have these big intros and there was space in. And then when he recorded with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they had no cymbals on the whole album, so there was space and how he'd pay attention to what sounds good, not what the levels were. In other words, he wouldn't let the engineers dictate. And as a result, he, first of all, was one of the greatest and still is one of the greatest crossover producers.
Mike Koenigs [00:39:18]:
So what didn't matter if it's country, rock, heavy metal, punk, rap, anything. He just knew how to make it sound good. And what he also did is he made country appealing to young people. He made Johnny Cash appealing to young people. He made Aerosmith appeal to a completely different audience and rap appeal to a completely different audience. But the gap here, especially with AI, is I know if I write a book right now using AI, I still want a collaborator who's a human editor. And the most amorphous part of business as theater and a backstage and a front stage, is that amorphous part of having someone who's paying attention to what's good and can live inside the mind of the audience and predict what they'll most likely have? And even Rick says, I'm always surprised at what is a hit and what isn't. But I'd love your interpretation of that as kind of like the way we close this thing up is, as a entrepreneur, as long as you've been, the need for that amorphous part of what's good, because theater is one thing.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:44]:
Just because you can perform doesn't mean anyone's gonna like you. It's the imperfection. Sometimes it's the flaws. It's the interpretation and the experimentation and the improvisation that makes it great.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:58]:
You know, I guess, you know, the. The central question is, yes, you're doing it for yourself, but who. Who else are you doing it for? Okay. And, you know, when I first started coaching in 1974, I. For the first year and A half I tested, you know, I, I had a corporate executive that I coached. I had somebody who was a government bureaucrat, not a politician, but, you know, a backstage bureaucrat. I had elected official, I had somebody who worked for charity, you know, the charitable organization and non profit organization. And then I had, fortunately I had a number of people who were really top financial advisors who in the 1970s, we're making half a million a year, which is, you know, you're talking $1975 here.
Dan Sullivan [00:42:07]:
And you know, these were, these were big winners. And within about an 18 month period, I just said the only people I'm talking to who are entrepreneurs, who can write a, who can make a decision on the spot and who can write a check on the spot. That was my condition, you know. Yeah, but you know, I had, I had to create my own backstage because, yeah, while you're, while you're performing, you also have to be marketing. So there's this cycle. Yeah, you're, you're performing and you're getting paid for what you're doing this month. But what are you going to be doing three months from now, four months from now? And gradually, you know, I worked it out and I worked it out just in a one on one basis without taking on too much. I didn't really, the first team I had was really Babs.
Dan Sullivan [00:42:58]:
You know, Babs joined Bab Smith. It was good. You know, the big thing is that you have a relationship with a particular audience and you want to know more and more about this audience. But the big thing is what is your audience aspiring to? You know, are they aspiring to anything? Because people aren't anything won't pay you as much as people who are aspiring for, for, for something big. And it took me about 15 years. Mind you, I may be the first entrepreneurial coach who's still living. You know, I don't know, I don't know what if I was the first? Overall, I can guarantee you I'm the first who's still doing it 50 years later and I'm probably the first who's still alive. But the big thing was I was very intrigued by this process, you know, and I've watched you and we've been fortunate to talk about it on podcast over many years now.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:07]:
But I watched you and I said, you know, Mike's doing it. Mike's kind of playing the same game. I, you're just playing the same game. And, but the big thing here is there's something at the center that constantly compounds. You know, I was reading there's A great couple books. One of them is called Same as Ever by a writer by the name of Morgan Housel H O U S E L He's a wonderful writer. He's a wonderful writer. I think he's an investor.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:37]:
It's not real clear what he does for a living. And then he wrote another book called the Psychology of Money, and he said, if you want to know how to get wealthy, master one word, compounding. You start with one thing and you stay with it, and then it makes more money and you double down and it makes more money. And you do that for 70 years and you got yourself a fortune now. And he shows how Warren Buffett made his first investment when he was 10 years old, and now he's making bigger investments at 93, 90, 94. But all on, he's got an unbroken string of compounding his earlier investments. He's constantly compounding. So the big thing for an entrepreneur, you're very creative, and you can do this, you can do that, but there's got to be something at the center that is a compounding process that you own, and it gets richer and richer and becomes more valuable as you go along.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:41]:
And I think that's the hard trick for most entrepreneurs. What's. Yeah, I do a lot of things, and he's interested in doing new things. But what's the one thing at the center that's your property that becomes more valuable property as you go forward that nobody else can do?
Mike Koenigs [00:45:57]:
Yes. So I will. I just looked up Mr. Housel in perplexity, and I'll bring it up here. So psychology, money, and same as ever, emphasize the power of compounding is a key concept in finance and life. And so I'm going to dig in. Yeah. Start early.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:22]:
Consistency matters. Avoid interruptions. Patience is key, which is precisely what you just said. And when I look at my own flaws, which I'm doing something about, you know, you've incentivized me by creating a club that I can't belong to unless I perform, which is the. And which is, by the way, one of the keys to what works about Coach. And what works to what you had just said a moment ago is what are they aspiring you too? You know, and it's got to be something big. And part of that is, again, what you. You make a declaration, whether it's, you know, giving yourself permission to double your lifespan or to create a $15 trillion economy that doesn't require a country.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:17]:
You know, these are universes, mental universes that Dan creates. And I would say I'm writing that one down because I like how it sounds and I like how it feels when I say it. But Dan Sullivan creates mental universes that are uncharted galaxies in most people's minds.
Dan Sullivan [00:47:45]:
Members self select in, you know, they. That, you know. Right. You know, they. It's, you know, very positive. It's a very supportive. Because everybody is bringing a lifetime performance that they can add to what other people are. Other people are doing.
Dan Sullivan [00:48:08]:
And I mean, you know, we live in a country and there's people from other countries in it, but that's not a restraining factor. And you can cross borders. I mean, you cross for borders. I mean, we make most of our money in one country and we spend it in another country. So we're.
Mike Koenigs [00:48:28]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:48:29]:
Used to doing that. Canada is a great place to spend US Dollars. I mean, I highly recommend it. You know, it's. Mexico is a great place to spend US Dollars, you know.
Mike Koenigs [00:48:43]:
Yes, it is.
Dan Sullivan [00:48:44]:
Yeah. And. And, you know, but the big thing is when I look at when I, you know, what I was doing in 1974, when I started coaching and having to explain people in those days what coaching was, I'm still doing the same thing today. It's just that there's been a compounding of capabilities. There's been a compounding of team members, there's been a compounding of really great clients. And. But I'm still doing the same thing. I still have the same business model, you know, and more or less that.
Dan Sullivan [00:49:24]:
And I think in a world where people are distracted this way and they're attempted this way and everything, to stick with something for 50 years is. Is a major capability and you're just. It keeps growing, it keeps getting better.
Mike Koenigs [00:49:41]:
Yep. That's the power of platform plus discernment, which is the amount of energy required to produce results is less and less because you have the ability to see the future. And that's the compounding effect of wisdom, and you can't underestimate that value. So the accelerant. But I think this idea, the notion of your lifetime performance and the audience as a creative team, the title of this named itself with what you just said, and I'm excited for it, that.
Dan Sullivan [00:50:17]:
I can see, which I find very intriguing. And, you know, I think it'll connect in a collaboration someday. I mean, besides us talking about it on the podcast, is this whole notion that people have created one career and they've created one, you know, entrepreneurial universe for themselves. And along the way they've taken notes. If I was really freed up and I had Some major marketing power behind me, and I could package myself correctly and I could create the messaging that really got me as clients and customers, this type of person. That would be great. And you can do it in three days. Yeah, well, you couldn't do it in three days 10 years ago, but you can do it in three days now.
Mike Koenigs [00:51:11]:
And it's going to do it three years ago. And, and I would, I would argue that now inside of the last two weeks. And I'm gonna, I get to experiment with it this week with a paying customer and another one a couple weeks after. Our, our capabilities, our multiplying capabilities just tripled because I've got brand new AI partners that have shown up whose own capabilities multiplied with just a little technology switch and a flip of a mindset. So it's so interesting how the avalanche, the mental avalanche keeps on accelerating.
Dan Sullivan [00:51:59]:
It thrills me to hear it because, you know.
Mike Koenigs [00:52:02]:
Yeah, yeah, you get it too, right?
Dan Sullivan [00:52:05]:
There's infinite roof and there's infinite room in the free zone. You know, the. Yeah, you know, you know, free zone is like a podcast. You know, 30 years ago, we couldn't have a program like this on radio because each step of the band, you know, the spectrum was owned by somebody and there was no room. All the property was owned. You know, the am, AM and FM were owned by other, other people. So you had to pay rent, you had to pay. Yes, and pay a fee.
Dan Sullivan [00:52:40]:
But the Internet, I mean, you know, is there, there you, you don't have to pay a tax, you don't have to pay a fee to use the Internet. You know, you can just go into it. So it's the ultimate free zone. It's really.
Mike Koenigs [00:52:57]:
Yeah. The only limit, the only limiter we have right now is there's not infinite attention, which is why the duration of content is collapsed, you know, to the 30 second clip or 10 second clip. That's the, that is the new capability and skill set that at least the previous, you know, the new generations demand. I don't know about ours, but I, I think it's all affected, but. Well, let's, let's do this. This has been.
Dan Sullivan [00:53:32]:
Stephen Coulter was over. He came in for his 10 times workshop today in Free Zone.
Mike Koenigs [00:53:38]:
Oh, he did?
Dan Sullivan [00:53:39]:
Yeah. And Stephen is, for the listeners or the watchers of our podcast, is probably one of the top IVF doctors in the world. Okay. In vitro fertilization. So he helps otherwise other men's wives have babies, you know, and so, so anyway, he's over and Stephen really caught on to Tick Tock. About two years ago. And now, now it's Instagram. Instagram is much bigger.
Dan Sullivan [00:54:09]:
He's getting a much better return. But he showed us a five second video that he made which has been downloaded 20 million times. It's five seconds and, and he'll put it out there and within a day he'll get a million downloads. And then he takes it off and he replaces it with something else. And about five months later, he puts it back out there and it'll get 10 minutes, 5 seconds of attention. You know, that's. That's a different world. That's a different world that he's living in.
Mike Koenigs [00:54:43]:
It's. It's an insanely valuable skill set. And, and he's really good at it. He really is. He's a great guy.
Dan Sullivan [00:54:53]:
He's a great doctor. But I tell you what he's doing with this communication medium is there ain't any other doctor on the planet who can.
Mike Koenigs [00:55:03]:
Yep, it's hard. Well, I'm. I'm more excited for the future than I was when we started this, which is a sign that it worked. So, any last words to wrap up this segment?
Dan Sullivan [00:55:17]:
I would say the big thing. I'm writing my 40th book right now. And the title of the book is, you are a timeless technology. That how you create your entrepreneurial career is the same way that all technologies actually develop. But you think of technology as outside of yourself. But the technology that really matters is how you make your way in life as an entrepreneur. And I think you have to be an entrepreneur to understand this idea.
Mike Koenigs [00:55:52]:
Well, mine is what I vote to be the title of this episode, which is your lifetime performance within your audience as a creative team. And I think that's one of the greatest keys to collapsing your success, accelerating your wisdom so you can live inside and predict the mind of what, what someone is going to want and what a great skill set to not only predict the future, but also predict the success of your future. That's a great skill set. So. Well, like I said, this has been one of my favorite episodes so far. And I love being able to say that every time we create a new.
Dan Sullivan [00:56:37]:
One just keeps going on and on and on and on, you know?
Mike Koenigs [00:56:42]:
Yep. Let's trust our imagination so well. This is Capability Amplifier. Thanks for listening. Share it with some of your friends and make sure you're subscribing, etc. Etc. All right, thanks, Dan.
Dan Sullivan [00:56:54]:
Thank you, Mike.
