3 Ways to Stop Your External Identity Crisis and Discover Your True Self

Dan Sullivan [00:00:00]: I believe the three most dangerous words in the English language are should, would, and could, because no matter what you did, somebody will come back said, well, you should have done this. And it's it's kind of like a big weapon that other people try to get you to internalize in your own brain that no matter what you do, you have this notion that you should have done something else. Mike Koenigs [00:00:23]: I often say what we all seek, what we really need in the world of hope, is an upgraded identity. And that is a true, positive, moving future when you don't have to say, I'm sorry for who I was. I'm only excited for who I'm becoming because I'm becoming more of who I am. Dan Sullivan [00:00:40]: The only difference between the internally driven person and the externally dictated person is they take their experience much more seriously than other people's opinion of their experience. Mike Koenigs [00:01:07]: Let's talk about an external identity crisis. And this began, Dan, with you saying something that really caught my attention, which is, if you know who you are, you don't need anyone else to tell you. So first of all, why don't you tell us what you mean and what you meant when you said that? And then you had another gigantic hook today that I can't wait to dig into, so take it away. Dan Sullivan [00:01:31]: Yeah, well, one of the things I realized is that people living in today's world are a bit binary, and one side is about 99.9% people, and the other one is the one 10th of 1%. And the one 10th I'll start with the one 10th of 1% because it's actually an aspiration for the other 99.9%. And the aspiration is, I would really like to know who I am. Okay. Mike Koenigs [00:02:07]: Wow. Dan Sullivan [00:02:07]: But they take a wrong turn in trying to find that out, because they keep asking other people who they are, and other people's opinion at a certain point becomes greater than their own experience of who they are. I don't know when it happens. I think it happens fairly early in life, and entrepreneurs are a special class of people because they don't follow the path that other people say they should. Older people, parents, teachers, and so on. And they say, well, you should go into this, and you should. And the operative word there is should. And I believe the three most dangerous words in the English language are should, would, and could. Okay. Dan Sullivan [00:02:57]: Because no matter what you did, somebody will come back said, well, you should have done this. And it's kind of like a big weapon that other people try to get you to internalize in your own brain that no matter what you do, you have this notion that you should have done something else. So you go back outside and get other people's opinion about what I should do now. And my feeling is you can settle that really early just by telling yourself who you are and kind of ignoring what other people say. Mike Koenigs [00:03:32]: Oh, man, there's a lot to unpack there. Dan Sullivan [00:03:36]: Does this take you back to the Midwest? Mike Koenigs [00:03:39]: Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, the phrase that there's a Tony Robbins saying, and I don't know if he made it up, he says, yeah, you're shitting all over yourself right now. And then I started jokingly call it, I'm going to go take a should right now. But paying attention to your language patterns and how often you react or respond to should, would, or could, or often you say it to yourself does say a lot about who you are. And I think someone who lives a life of many regrets lives in the world of shoulds. Shoulda, what a couldas. And I also think about right now, I think I mentioned this to you in the past. Mike Koenigs [00:04:32]: I've been reading the entire Dune series, even the ones after hebert passed, and so his son picked up the mantle. And one of the things that I really love about these books is they're a deep dive into looking at human society for millennia. And the books actually take place over thousands and thousands of years, and one of the characters actually lives for like, over 3500 years. And the reason this is so valuable right now is because I'm looking through these lenses of the development of the most powerful characters who are also representative in our own cultures and our societies. And even you're looking through the lens of countries growing and passing in terms of power, and I'm thinking, like, what makes for a powerful character? So getting back to raising a kid, I'm watching Zach right now, and he's going through this really hard time as a 21 year old figuring out who he is and what his purpose is. And he started a little business creating audiobooks with AI. And yesterday one of my books that we did with AI got published by Amazon. So the process works, and he's got a bunch of new business. Mike Koenigs [00:05:48]: But his struggle, know, his identity came from his friends. And of know, one of the things that you notice is when your kid starts not wanting to be with the parents, it's because their identities are wrapped up in their friendships and what other people think of them. And societally, it's a disease, and I think it's just part of your cultural conditioning. So what I'm getting at here, my big takeaway is once you don't care what other people think of you or what society thinks of you, and you do things on your terms and you're willing to live with yourself because of it, that really tells you where you are in your own evolution. And I've also noticed it when I realized I found my own voice, when I could write in a voice, and it was truly mine and I wasn't modeling someone else. You really know who you are when you're not copying someone else's style. So there's a lot of branches we can go down. But I'm just curious about when do you feel do you think entrepreneurs are born that way, or entrepreneurs learn to think a certain way, to find themselves and create their identities? And when do you think or what are the conditions that cause someone to realize who they are? When you don't have an external identity crisis any longer, where you don't care what someone else thinks, but it's not because of anything more than you know who you are and you're willing to live that way and live with yourself? Dan Sullivan [00:07:37]: Yeah. Well, first of all, I have a thought that I've had for a long time. So I'm just pushing 80 next year, and I'll go back to eight years old, and I was fortunate that I grew up in the middle of a big family. I'm a number five in the family, but the age differences on both sides, older and younger, are sufficiently that I didn't really play with them, and I didn't really play with other kids until I was in first grade, age six. But before that, I had really developed the ability to talk to adults simply by asking adults what their experience was. And my first really effective question for me was when I was six, I would ask an adult, when you were six years old, what was going on in the world? And they would talk, and they would talk, and they would talk, and then they would say something. I'd say, well, can you explain that a little bit more deeply what was going on there? And they'd talk and they'd talk. And one of the things that I learned very early, that adults will talk forever and explain things to a child who's really interested in their own experience. Dan Sullivan [00:09:02]: Okay, so I'd had a steady diet of that, starting probably around five years old, six years old, and I found I could get these big shapes to talk nonstop. All you had to do is ask them when you were my age, what you were doing, and immediately they were back to six years old, and they were explaining their childhood. And then I'd say, So what was going on in the world? And I talked to people who were born in the 1870s, because I was born in 1944. So there was a lot of people who had been there for the turn of the century. They had been through the First World War. It was going on while they were growing up. The Spanish Flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenty S, the Great Depression yeah. And then I was born right near the end of the Second World War, and it was like a living history book. Dan Sullivan [00:09:57]: I just got it filled. And then I would ask another one, and I would check one fact against another, and I would have this growing accumulation of history just from my conversations with adults. And what I developed is sort of a confidence that I could do this for the rest of my life. There was sort of a skill there. And then when I got to first grade, I ran into all these little shapes who had their parents faces and they didn't know anything. I was never influenced by my peers, and I think it's just an accident of birth, an accident where I grew up, but probably a pretty good brain for figuring out where I was. And so I've always had this really central feeling that I kind of now know who I am, and I kind of know how to go about my future. And what it did is made me very immune to peer pressure or peer opinion or even adults who were trying to tell me where I was going with my life. Dan Sullivan [00:11:02]: You should do this, and you should do that, and not consciously. I'm not saying this was conscious because I don't think our brains are fully formed until we're in our mid 20s. But it was enough of an immunity at an early age that I developed a sense of myself that really wasn't subject that much to other people's opinions. Mike Koenigs [00:11:30]: So I want to try something out on you, which is I know who I am versus who I am is what I do, because that is a strong drive for us entrepreneurs, is we have this identity associated with what we do, and that becomes our business. And in a weird way, being a great listener and being able to evoke a reaction or response from people is very much what strategic coach is. Because the model of the way you've created the coursework even is asking questions that cause you to think about your thinking, talking about it with peers and then talking about it with you, and you effectively select the most intriguing, interesting stuff that's the showbiz part of Strategic Coach. Right. It's not only entertaining, but you have a mechanism for taking the best ideas and rising them to the surface and the top, which then you build more great ideas on top of, and it's a culture that encourages that. So in a way, it's sort of like strategic Coach began in some form when you were five years old because of your pecking order. But I'm going to take that to another degree, which is very often. Then whatever we're good at is hopefully how we're able to express ourselves. Mike Koenigs [00:13:06]: And if you can, in a perfect world, not become a factory worker, but become an expression worker, right. I always say the step above being a human being is a human expression, where you turn your expression into a business that has use and value and other people value it, and you could become wealthy from who you are versus what you do. Dan Sullivan [00:13:32]: Well, that exactly describes my own experience, but I remember one of our early podcasts. I got your first six business careers out of you, and I was just sitting there listening listening, then I would ask you questions. But I had done this with hundreds of people, and it opens doors. I mean, if a child is interested in an adult and the adult learns something from the child's interest, they open doors for the child. Mike Koenigs [00:14:11]: Yeah. Yes. And I think the one thing that a great coach does is evokes the questions that force the I suppose you could say the apprentice, in a way, into really understanding their purpose and their value without reinforcing falsehoods. Right. So evoking that. And I think what I'm getting at here, what I really want to do is just imagine the tool that would help you help young people especially really figure out purpose, value, identity. And if we were going to build in real time, right now, the best questions that would help someone create their value, what might that be? And you and I have talked about this before, but not this specifically, but something else. So here's what we talked about, and I tell this story frequently about how I created what is now my current business, superpower Accelerator. Mike Koenigs [00:15:40]: When I had sold my last business, and I asked you, what do you think I should do next? And you said, well, do the dos. Ask dangerous opportunities and strengths to a bunch of entrepreneurs? It'll be very obvious if you talk to ten business owners and founders. And the story I tell is, after speaking with two people, I knew exactly what I was going to do next and very possibly for the rest of my life. And now it's evolved into something where I get to reinvent people for a living and build their new identities. And I often say what we all seek, what we really need in the world of hope, is an upgraded identity and that we can live into a full expression of ourselves that supports an evolution without apology. And that is a true, positive, moving future when you don't have to say, I'm sorry for who I was. I'm only excited for who I'm becoming because I'm becoming more of who I am. Yeah, all right, so unpack that one. Dan Sullivan [00:16:48]: Well, the other thing, just to pick up on a few things you said there, you helped them create a new identity, but they had already created a whole bunch of identities in relationship to their living through generations, experimenting with different capabilities, occupations. In my sense, the only difference between the internally driven person and the externally dictated person is they take their experience much more seriously than other people's opinion of their experience. First of all, nobody really you or I or anyone else, we live in a world of vast experiences that we're making sense of, and I think that's unique for every human being. But my sense is that you make a fundamental decision where you're young, well, whose interpretation of my experience counts. And if somebody else's interpretation of your experience counts, you give up on your own interpretation of your own experience. Mike Koenigs [00:18:07]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:18:11]: And I think it's binary. I think there's a fork in the road. And once you get on the external, you're trapped in the constant shifting of other people's opinions. But if you take your own experience seriously, then it's a constant evolution of greater insights, greater capabilities, and you find other people's experience instructive. You find it informative because they have knowledge you don't have. They can do things that you can't do. And I find all that useful, but it has no bearing on how I interpret my own ongoing growth. Mike Koenigs [00:18:52]: Yeah. And I would also say happiness, for sure. Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:19:00]: I don't think there's any happiness in depending on external feedback to say who you are. And I'll give you a great political example, which always struck me, and it's Hillary Clinton. So when Hillary Clinton was 18 years old and she went to Wellesley that was the college she went to, a couple of teachers immediately zeroed in on her because she had a strong personality and she had great presentation skills. She was very smart intellectually. She was very smart. And they told her, we believe that you're going to be the first woman President of the United States. This is at 1819 years old. Okay. Dan Sullivan [00:19:48]: She's from Park Ridge, Illinois, the town that I live in. When I'm in Chicago. We have our home. But at that point, I think she decided that other people's opinions about who she was going know, they gave her a big goal. President of the United States. First woman President of the United States. That's a big deal. But what I think happened is that Hillary never in the course of her life actually knew who she was. Mike Koenigs [00:20:22]: Wow. Dan Sullivan [00:20:25]: And then she had the misfortune of first of all. When she started to get first of all, she had to get some experience. She had to get to the top, and she married a person who knew exactly who he was. Mike Koenigs [00:20:40]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:20:41]: And so she attached herself to this person, and then she got to the White House. But she wasn't the president. She was the first. And I have to tell you, being First Lady is not the same as being president. No. And Bill made a good catch because she gave him a certain kind of credibility, that he's a good old white boy from the south, and he's got wandering eyes, and he created a lot of messes. And her job was to clean up the messes. It was a good deal for him. Dan Sullivan [00:21:24]: I don't know if it was a good deal for her. She became very famous, and then somebody said, well, automatically, she's going to be the next president. And then she runs on the Democratic side for President, and she runs into another male who knows exactly who he is. And she's shifting throughout her campaign to get the nomination in 2008. She's shifting from one version of herself when she goes to the south. She has a Southern accent and everything else. Mike Koenigs [00:21:59]: Wow. Dan Sullivan [00:21:59]: But he's just constant. Her husband was just a constant. So finally she gets clear of that. He gets elected, she's Secretary of State again. She's not the president, she's Secretary of State. And then she has a little bit interim of getting a senator seat in a given Democratic jurisdiction, and then she's going to run for president. And the byline, it wasn't the official byline, it was, it's her turn now. And this is kind of she goes back to the professors at Wellesley College and they said, yeah, I've arrived. Dan Sullivan [00:22:39]: And then who does she run into in the general election? Someone who knows exactly who he and my thesis about this is anytime a person who isn't sure of themselves who they are runs into a person who knows exactly who they are, the person who knows who they are always wins, always comes out on top. Mike Koenigs [00:23:03]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:23:08]: I'm not discounting any of her abilities. No, not an ability in that. But in any situation where she runs into somebody who knows exactly who they are, she comes out second. Mike Koenigs [00:23:20]: Yeah. And I think the cost you and I have talked about this before, but I think you could feel her level of resentment is palpable, and it's what is incredibly unattractive to anyone who has any male energy whatsoever. Dan Sullivan [00:23:42]: Somebody said she reminds every divorced man of his first wife. Mike Koenigs [00:23:46]: Yeah. The angry ex wife. Dan Sullivan [00:23:48]: Not the happy, angry ex wife. Mike Koenigs [00:23:50]: Totally. Dan Sullivan [00:23:52]: My feeling is it's a decision that she made very early in life that other people were going to tell her who she was. Mike Koenigs [00:24:00]: Yes. The secondary action you think about, if you asked any man what's the most sexually unattractive byproduct of any female, it would be resentment. It'd be like to be resented is to be hated silently and painfully. How that manifests is horrific. Oh, that's a good unpacking. Dan Sullivan [00:24:30]: Yeah. But I just want to say that by all standards, she's been a very successful person. Totally. Mike Koenigs [00:24:37]: But anybody look at her yeah. With your potential and what you could interpret your interpretation of this to be is in order to get to where she thought she could go, she compromised herself and became second, hoping she'd be number one instead of pursuing the number one. And life would have been very different for both of them, obviously, I think probably for this country. I agree with you. I've had a little bit of one degree of separation away from Clinton on multiple levels because of Vivian's philanthropic work. And one of the things she told me the first time she met him was how deliciously charismatic he was. And she said it goes way beyond sexual energy that this guy has because of just how incredibly well he was able to lean in and listen to you and genuinely what she said. You genuinely feel like you're the only person not just in the room, but in the world. Mike Koenigs [00:25:53]: While you're in his presence. It's his listening and capability. Dan Sullivan [00:25:58]: That's a capability. But I don't think anytime since he was a kid he's been wondering who he and I think Obama was the same way, and I think that Trump is the same way. Now, I'm not putting any good or bad. I'm simply saying that the person who knows who they are doesn't need someone else to tell them. Mike Koenigs [00:26:23]: Yeah. And in that case, the way I would create a little bridge is you figuring out who you were had to do with. Like you got really good at asking questions and knowing how to captivate and mesmerize someone to talk about themselves, which of course, anytime someone feels like they're really important and heard and listened to, they're going to feel good, they're going to walk away, which philosophically is important. Core value of strategic coach always walking away feeling I can't remember you have a particular way of expressing it. What are the key things people have to walk away with to know they had a great experience? Dan Sullivan [00:27:05]: Well, they learned something. I think the big thing is that you learn something that's useful for you in the future. You just learn something in the present. And that's what I'm looking for in all my conversations. But I've created a feedback loop on this that along the way, and it's going on more than 70 years now. I've figured out that if I can ask questions that allow other people to look at their experience and they learn lessons from that, that they can immediately see that I'm going to use this lesson in the future. I've created value for them and they find it very compelling. Mike Koenigs [00:27:49]: Yes. There we go. Dan Sullivan [00:27:51]: Now, it took me till I was 30 to figure out the business model that goes along with this because otherwise you're just a kind of lonely, interesting guy living by himself and he's worried about the rent and probably drinking a little too much during the lonely hours. Yeah, I qualify. Mike Koenigs [00:28:17]: Yes, for sure. Okay, so here's the other great distinction that created the basis for this episode. And I want you to dive into just defining this one is what you cannot not do. And I know you've got a story. I've got one that literally is fresh and brand new. And I'm really excited because I've learned a couple incredibly valuable lessons over the past few months, but especially in the past couple of weeks about finding and hiring people. And it's as though and when you said that one thing, I was like it was articulated so much better than the way I had been articulating it for the past two weeks. So you first, what you cannot. Dan Sullivan [00:29:06]: Mine relates to not so by hiring, but who do I collaborate with? Everything and what I want to know right from the beginning. And I ask people a lot of questions about what their experience has been. And the reason is I want to see what the unchanging constant is, regardless of whether they're 20 years old, 30 years old, 50 years old. And I want to know, what is it that they always do that at this point in their life, they cannot not do? They cannot not do, because you can bet on that. You can bet that they're always going to do that. And then I try to arrange my collaborations. So the only thing I require in terms of collaborating with them is the thing that they cannot not do. Because then I don't have to think about it. Dan Sullivan [00:29:58]: I don't have to think about it at night. I don't have to think about when they're away from me. I know what they cannot do. Mike Koenigs [00:30:09]: Okay, so I'm going to give you. Dan Sullivan [00:30:12]: One of the things I went after your experience because you're now in, let me say, your 6th technological dimension. And one of the things I know that Mike Koenix cannot do is whatever the new technology is, he has to master it and integrate it back into the capability he already that that is. Mike Koenigs [00:30:39]: The story of my, uh there's a long line my mom used to say this. There's a long line of things that have been taken apart and partially put back together. The first thing my dad gave me the best thing ever when I was a kid. So he gave me power tools when I was like, five. And the workshop was never off limits. Just put my tools back. That was the only request he had. And I was pretty bad at that, honestly. Mike Koenigs [00:31:10]: But he gave me an old fashioned typewriter and I took it apart. So that was filled. If you looked at any old mechanical typewriter, first of all, they were just beautifully sculpted works of art. And I remember it today as though I was four or five, and I had a whole bunch of tools, and it was filled with springs and gadgets and levers. And just by taking it apart, first of all, it was such an exquisitely, perfect piece of mechanical machinery. It was artistic and heavy and perfectly balanced, like that thing. A mechanical typewriter had to feel good, so it was an aesthetic achievement as well. Get more clients. Mike Koenigs [00:31:59]: Grow your business with better marketing and messaging. Make more money, and get a better life with more freedom of time, money, relationship, and impact. Learn more about our three day, one on one Done with you reinvention Workshop. Visit connecttomike.com to book a conversation with me right now. All right, back to the episode the Next Big Thing. I bought the first time I made any money. I corny tasseled for summer and bought an electromechanical pinball machine. So I learned how solenoids worked, and it was basically a computer controlled by a whole bunch of rotating solenoids and things like that. Mike Koenigs [00:32:39]: But the first thing I did, figured out how to take it all apart and clean every single thing and these relays, I mean, there was a zillion things to go wrong in those things. Incredibly complicated. But for something that was built in the early 70s until my parents sold the home a couple of years ago, that thing still worked just fine with almost nothing done to it sitting in kind of a damp basement right. For 40 years. So I think if you fast forward, I've always known just whether it's intuitively or because I got cast into it, and I got a lot of satisfaction from figuring out how things work. The reason why I'm pretty good at that now and it's helped me out throughout my entire life and career is I'm not afraid to take things apart, figure out how they work, and figure out then how to apply it to create value in someone else's life. So I'm rewarded financially, it turns into a job. Basically, coding was the same way. Mike Koenigs [00:33:46]: Okay, well, there you go. Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:33:52]: But the thing that I see is that there's a single central activity with you which to outsiders seems very different because Mike's doing this and Mike's doing that. And when you told me your history, I said, no, there's a constant R and D project going on here, and some of it requires self development on your part. You have to be smarter about yourself combined with being smarter about the world that you're living in, and you put the two together constantly. And when you hit AI, people said, what's Mike into know Mike's into AI? What about all the other stuff that he was doing? He just put together back the parts that really made. He didn't put the whole thing back together. He just put the parts that served him to move forward. And when I first met you, I met you at the Fountain Blue Hotel in Florida. It was an ebb and pagan green room. Dan Sullivan [00:35:09]: And I met you at the pool, and I got an instant connection that this is a person who knows who he is. And I was around the pool. There were a lot of people in that room who were looking for external proof of who they were. We didn't connect right away. I think that you went through your cancer period and you joined coach, but then you had to drop out because you had cancer business. But I always had the sense, you know who you are, and you can build a future on collaborating with people who know who they are because they can't not do what they're doing. Man. Mike Koenigs [00:35:58]: So I'm going to ask you this. I'm going to do it for two reasons, although it's going to sound like I'm totally narcissistic. So if you were going to communicate. Dan Sullivan [00:36:08]: Just accept that you're totally narcissistic. Mike Koenigs [00:36:11]: Yeah. How about I don't apologize for it, but it's a learning experience? Because I'm going to build my next statement question on this, too, which is if you had to create a headline. Mike is blank. What would you say? So someone says, who's this Mike Koenigs guy and why should I talk to him? What would Dan Sullivan say? Dan Sullivan [00:36:33]: I think what I would say is, spend three days with Mike Koenix and you'll get a whole new future out of it, completely packaged, completely focused, completely building on everything you've done in your life before this. Mike Koenigs [00:36:55]: How interesting is that? What you did there is you made it all about the other person, right? And an accumulation of your interpretation of my history. So it's a stack of capabilities. So that was useful. So now I'm going to go down another rabbit hole with you. I'll call this the end part of this episode. But back to what you cannot not do. So what? We recently hired a couple developers because we have integrated now when we're doing our superpower accelerator and we're inventing someone's future and we're building their next business, their next brand, their next whatever, we're also building and prototyping software in real time. And I think that's for me, the ultimate capability amplifier, because the framework I tell people is in the now future, for most people, if you use AI, for example, you can make more money and you can genuinely create more value in your organization, which passes on to your customer. Mike Koenigs [00:38:11]: So you're going to be more efficient or whatever. But that's sort of like using a script. It's like having an SOP or an entrepreneurial operating system, whatever it is. But the value of your business will remain probably the same, meaning it's a multiple of EBITDA. But if you amplify that new capability so let's say we figure out a way to package a person and automate them, so then they can effectively have four of you in an organization that's efficient all the time. Not only can that make more money save on costs, but because you've created more predictability in the business, when a buyer sees it, you could actually get a higher EBITDA multiple because it's automated. What I've been telling people now is, and I call it the trillionaire mindset, which is if you commercialize that amplification, you could actually go out to the marketplace and sell that amplification ten or 100 times and create a subscription income. But the value of that new business, of that amplified or automated IP would be valued at a multiple of revenue. Mike Koenigs [00:39:33]: So it's a different mindset. And now I'm thinking about, well, if I can find people. And the way I described it is I hired several developers, but the one who really stood out is a young German kid who I knew I found the winner when he came back, and he had optimized something he had made at least a dozen times over a period of 48 hours. And he said, I can't help myself. I just have to figure out, I know there's always a better way. And he had figured out how to reduce the number of calls to OpenAI the platform by ten X. Okay? So instead of taking ten calls, it took one. And then the next thing he did is he figured out how to create these really beautiful reports. Mike Koenigs [00:40:23]: So our tools generate Google Docs and PDF files that look like magazines. They're just beautiful. And so he figured out the structuring and the formatting, and I'm like, oh, that's who I need, an aesthetic, someone who makes things that are not only beautiful, but efficient and cannot help himself. And now when you said what you cannot not do, I realized that will now be the most important question I ask on every application or in every interview. Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:40:57]: And for some people, I think they know it intuitively, but they've never expressed it because no one's given them a chance to explain it, because most people would never ask that question. Mike Koenigs [00:41:10]: No. It requires so many levels of thinking, and I even think human experience, like successful experience, that would come from your internal compass, not an external one. And that's why I asked you before what your headline would be for me, but also my answer to the question. So the question I was trying to get to from you today was if we had to devise a series of questions to discover your own identity, that was the question I wanted to get out of this. And I'd say, well, if you answer the question, what is it that you cannot not do? And the only thing that would be a part two is see what they say, but then say that you value and other people value, and they'd be willing to pay you for that. That's the entrepreneurial discovery question. Dan Sullivan [00:42:13]: I think there's an obstacle to people coming to grips with that. And I drew a diagram. It was in our last workshop. It was at the Free Zone when you were in Chicago. And I just drew a little circle here, and then a straight line arrow up to a bigger circle. And I said, I'm just drawing a portrait of your entire life. And the little circle is here, and the big circle is there. Okay? And I said, So you've always been here, and you're trying to get there, but there's a habit developing of always being going from here to there, but the habit is that you're never there. Dan Sullivan [00:43:03]: So I said, the way I've solved that, I just declare myself there and now just keep adding capability to there. Yeah, okay. And it has a lot to do with the reason why they're here and they're there is because they're depending on external opinion to define who they are. In other words, they have an ideal of themselves in the future. And it's an ideal. It's not a reality, it's an ideal. And my sense is I just declared myself there probably about 30, 40 years ago. I said, I'm there. Dan Sullivan [00:43:38]: There's no place I'm trying to get to. But I want to be in a situation where I can constantly expand the there that I am. So my sense is that the thing that you cannot do in your life is constant. It's not any different. What's the exact age now? Mike Koenigs [00:44:01]: Me? I'm 57. Dan Sullivan [00:44:03]: 57. So you've been at this for 50 years. You've been at your central exploratory model and that's your central habit. So there isn't any point in the future where you won't want to be doing something more. That's your habit. And anything that ties you down or traps you from expanding it further, you immediately reject. Mike Koenigs [00:44:36]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:44:38]: If we talk ten years from now, you're still doing this with vastly more capability and vastly more success and vastly more influence in the market. Okay? But it's always going to be the same thing that you cannot not do. Mike Koenigs [00:44:56]: And do you think you talked about the central habit and the distinction between where you are versus where you want to be. When I think about what ambition is, so ambition is my desire to always get better and to be at a destination and something I haven't done, what you just said, which is just given myself the prize and said, there, you're there. I hadn't thought about it quite through that I accepted a sense of divine discontent, which is to allow myself to always feel ambitious and never give myself the prize of saying, I made it to a destination for the fear that I'd become lazy. And what I realized is not only is that an obsolete belief system, it is giving yourself the prize. Dan Sullivan [00:45:58]: Yeah. It's an obstacle. Mike Koenigs [00:46:00]: Yeah. It doesn't exist. Dan Sullivan [00:46:08]: My sense is that the ambition is a standard operating procedure for you. It's not wanting or not wanting, it's just that the ambition is completely internalized. Okay? And whether you're thinking about it or not, you're ambitious, okay? And I am too. Mine is there's no stopping point in the future except death. And I pushed that off way into the future. I said, let's not have that as a present thought. My sense is that the moment that you say, okay, I don't have to make myself ambitious, I don't have to gear myself up to be ambitious. I'm just ambitious. Dan Sullivan [00:47:07]: And it's not fair because a lot of people aren't. Life's not fair. There's ambitious people and people who feel, oh, I got to get something out of myself outside of myself to make me ambitious. And I said, no, the ambition is inside of yourself. You're just exploring new ways to express it. Mike Koenigs [00:47:31]: Yeah. So I'm going to go to you real fast to wrap up this episode. When I think about someone will say, like, who's Dan Sullivan and what's he great at? Summarizing strategic coaches is always tricky, but it's interesting that I immediately go to Dan's. Identity is coach and what coach is, is Dan. But if I just said okay. Who's? What? What's? Dan. In the way that we described earlier, I'd be like so what I would have said a month ago is very different than it's. Dan is a philosopher who loves and has studied history and really understands how people think and how to understand yourself fully in your pursuit of self expression and as it relates to being a business owner and an entrepreneur and happy, a happy one. Mike Koenigs [00:48:43]: Oh, that is such a great distinction. Yes. Dan Sullivan [00:48:45]: I want entrepreneurs to get the real reward for being entrepreneurs, and that is that I saw a cartoon once. It used to be that I haven't seen cartoons for a long time, so I don't know if it exists, but it was called Animal Farm. Mike Koenigs [00:49:02]: Oh, yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:49:04]: Animal Farm or animal? I think it was animal. I'm not quite sure. And there's these two people talking and one of them says, I'm reading about this movie star and turns out that he's got five mansions, he's got ten cars, and he's enormously successful. He's never had a failure in any of his movies, and he's incredibly popular and he can go out every night with a beautiful woman of his choice. So the other character is listening to this frame by frame and gets to the end, and the other one says, yes, but does it say he's happy? And the guy says, yeah, it says he's very happy. And the other one says, Nuts. Mike Koenigs [00:49:51]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:49:55]: Where's the penalty? Is there any where's the penalty? Mike Koenigs [00:49:59]: I remember which one that is. I do remember that. I don't remember that specific. Dan Sullivan [00:50:04]: Animal Crackers. Animal Crackers. Mike Koenigs [00:50:05]: Crackers. There you go. Dan Sullivan [00:50:07]: Animal Farm was George Orwell. Mike Koenigs [00:50:09]: Yeah, that was a sad book, but I do remember. Dan Sullivan [00:50:14]: But the whole point is what I've noticed is that entrepreneurs are getting success. They're getting reputation, they have money, they have the symbols of success. They have them, but they're lacking happiness. And I think the happiness is that they haven't admitted truly and valued that they cannot not do what they're doing. Mike Koenigs [00:50:41]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:50:42]: They have to think they have to drive them, and they think it's outside factors that are driving them. And I don't think it really is. I think it's internal. Mike Koenigs [00:50:51]: It's really good. Well, I think this is a perfect place to end this episode because we covered some really interesting stuff. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about you. I learned a lot about me, and I learned a lot about how I've thought in order to get to where know. Dan Sullivan [00:51:15]: So you forgot one part. You were going to explain the me a month ago and the me now. Mike Koenigs [00:51:21]: Oh, the Dan Sullivan you a month ago. Here's what I wouldn't have mean. Dan Sullivan [00:51:27]: I've got to get some payback. Mike Koenigs [00:51:28]: Yeah, you got to get some great payback here. I always say, like he's the master of thinking tools and builds these amazing tools. Dan is so ambitious and the most productive human I know. And I brag about you. I say 79 and the amount and volume of work he's created and how he's designed a life around creating and his own form of self expression. And then being able to create momentum amongst a whole bunch of people is incredible. But I didn't realize how much of a philosopher you are and how that to me is where your core capabilities come from. Because you know how to not get wrapped up in the unimportant details. Mike Koenigs [00:52:23]: Because your anchor in history, your anchor in philosophy enables you to separate yourself from the busy noise. And I couldn't have articulated that until very recently. I just had this massive AHA. And I'm like, oh, God, I don't know how I missed that. And maybe I knew it, but I couldn't have articulated it and I didn't consciously realize it. And now when I describe strategic coach, I describe Dan Sullivan to entrepreneurs, I really know how to hook them when I learn a little bit about them and give them my version of the customized headline, depending on the so it really does come from that combination of philosophy, history rolled into understanding human psychology and self realization. Better than Buddha. Better than Buddha. Dan Sullivan [00:53:29]: Yeah, it's like Buddha with cash flow or Socrates with cash flow. Socrates. You don't have to drink the poison anyway. Mike Koenigs [00:53:45]: Yeah. Dan Sullivan [00:53:45]: Well, I think I do have a natural philosophical bent and I've always been interested. There's two things I'd say about this. When you know who you are, you're always the same. You don't become a different person for different other people. You don't become a different person for other situation. You're still the same person, but you're just growing in understanding of mastery of new situations. And the other thing I would say is that I relate totally going on 80 to who I was at eight. There's nothing about the eight year old that I think is inferior to who I am now. Dan Sullivan [00:54:38]: It's just me with the benefit of 70 plus years of experience, but it's still the same person processing the experience. The other thing I feel is that I don't think human beings I think there's a constant called human nature. And I think they now can push it back a couple of hundred thousand years. Some people are pushing it back to a million years. And I think fundamental human nature isn't any different. But we're going through changes of economy, we're going through changes of politics, through changes of technology constantly. But you read things from 2000 years ago and they're as smart as anything written today. And so the people thousands of years ago were just as smart in relationship to what they had available to them as people are today. Mike Koenigs [00:55:32]: Yeah, it's our ability to fold time and stack capabilities and communicate and transport and manufacture. Right. It's tools and the mind thinking that go along with it. Yeah, for sure. Dan Sullivan [00:55:50]: Thinking tools. And we're writing a new book. It's just going it'll go to press in about three weeks and it's called Everyone and everything grows. And it's the backstage description of how we created strategic coach over the last 35 years using nothing but thinking tools. And the thinking tools we use backstage are the same thinking tools that we provide to entrepreneurs in the front stage. And there's a complete congruity between our front stage and backstage. Okay? And the reason I do that is I strive for a complete congruity between who I am when people don't see me and who I am when people do see me. Mike Koenigs [00:56:32]: Yeah, all of those are absolutely true. And the stack is to me, the value stack comes from the fact that when I started with coach now over ten years ago, the core personality of coach is the same, but the vocabulary and power of what can get communicated in a short period of time is significantly higher. And your ability to be more effective, your capability amplification, increases because the density of the tools is increasing as well, if that makes sense. But it's like when you look at your old tools compared to the new tools, first of all, you have to understand the vocabulary of coach to really understand some of these things. But also when you apply them and you stack them, it's like your triple play tool, for example. It takes some explaining, it takes some understanding, and you have to understand some prior art and some prior work. But wow, you cannot walk away unaffected when you use that tool over a period of 20 minutes or 30 minutes or so. Dan Sullivan [00:57:49]: Yeah. And to me, that's the constant. I mean, you have this constant, what I would say, mastery and backward integration of the latest technology to provide an entirely new way for individuals to see themselves in a new light as they go into the future. And mine is constant conversations with talented, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs about the thinking tool that they'll find useful next. And that's my life. That's my entire life. Mike Koenigs [00:58:30]: So here's two distinctions for you. One of them is, I think transformative thinking tools is the way to articulate that. But then what makes Dan Sullivan truly unique? He's a transformative thinking philosopher, but to me, most philosophers are self centered. Philosophy is often self centered. Yours is external, meaning it's philosophy that multiplies your capabilities. It provides transformative thinking. And I have to think about a better headline to communicate that. But I do think that that's, well. Dan Sullivan [00:59:14]: My big thing, the proof of my internal reality, is that the things that I find useful for myself, other people find useful in their own unique life. And I said that's a proof. I mean, that's scientific. One of them is subjective because we don't see ourselves objectively, but the other is objective. Somebody takes the tool and they get more or less the same results, and they come back with dimensions for using the tool that I can use to strengthen the tool. So it's a feedback positive feedback. Yeah, but we had a free zone zoom workshop yesterday, and one of our clients, Steve Kreitzberg, created a tool right in the middle of the workshop. It was a great tool, and it was called the IP filter four quadrant tool. Dan Sullivan [01:00:12]: And he says, it's yours, Dan. You created it here. And I said, well, I'll certainly make mention of you, but that really pleased me, because the person is doing with our tools, they're creating tools. And I see this as infinitely expandable. Mike Koenigs [01:00:34]: Yes. Well, I say this with love to my fellow members. It's when the monkeys start making tools from the tool they were handed. Dan Sullivan [01:00:45]: Right. That's the breakthrough. Mike Koenigs [01:00:53]: And I think the other part of it, when I'm listening to this, the tools by themselves aren't what's important. It's when you stack the tools. So it's the transformative thinking toolkit becomes an operating system. And that is the higher level version of my interpretation of Dan is you're not just getting a whole bunch of tools because it'd be like just because you get a toolbox filled with tools doesn't mean you can do anything for them. First of all, you have to learn how to think about using tools and know what tools to use, in what order, and when to use them. I think you have to understand what the transformation you seek is, so it's potential and possibility that you live inside of as well. So there I think let's wrap this one up, because I've got another one under the belt. But this was super fun. Mike Koenigs [01:01:47]: Great exploration. I learned a lot today. Dan Sullivan [01:01:49]: I got a lot out of it. And just to bring it home, we've created a podcast called capability amplifier. And I have learned more about my capability and how to amplify them from these constant discussions with you than any other one of my podcasts. I will accept that because the topic is the takeaway. Mike Koenigs [01:02:17]: Yeah, it is. And I'll say the exact same thing. I feel exactly the same way. This has been like and I look forward to every episode even more than the last one, which is also a good sign. So it's a positive, moving future. Capability amplifier. Good job. Good job. Mike Koenigs [01:02:37]: Let's wrap this one up. So I'll just say to you, listener, viewer, hope you enjoyed this as much as Dan and I did. Making it. This began originally from dan was around a couple glasses of wine. We were chatting at his house, and we just started coming up with ideas, and I'm like, I'm capturing it. Let's make it so we went through our list of about a dozen ideas, and this is the one that came out on top. So if you enjoyed it, please make some comments below and give us some nice ratings and share it with someone who, you know, could use a Capability Amplifier or a younger person. Or an older person who may be having an external identity crisis and maybe would have a breakthrough by listening to this and get themselves an upgraded operating system so that's this episode. Mike Koenigs [01:03:25]: Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching.