Join Dean & Dan as they check in on the use of Jackson Standard Time and the opportunities Procrastination has presented this week.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep024
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson. Be good to get your report.
Dean: I really am. That is the truth. It's like this week in procrastination.
Dan: Well, this week, yeah, deeply, even more deeply into the joy of procrastination.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: Dean, we've discovered the secret back entrance.
Dean: I think you're absolutely right. I was just reflecting on the combination of the things that we've uncovered, since we started talking about this and how magically they work together.
Dan: Yeah. Just a little report, which I've found interesting is three particular, ten times, couple clients, during the past week, and I had two workshops Monday and Tuesday, reported on hearing about the new time system and have immediately adopted it.
Dean: Wow, I love it.
Dan: The ten minute units or blocks or Jackson's, whatever's going to win out there as the winning name, but they said it just makes so much sense. And it also, just to add one more point before getting your report for the week, I updated our very famous, very popular, book from 20 years ago, which was The Gap; and I renamed it The Gap and The Gain. And a just little brief context for the listeners, what I've noticed is that people are either happy or unhappy with their life based on how they measure their progress. If they have an ideal that they're trying to get to, and they achieve a great deal; but they measure their progress against the ideal, it's like measuring your distance against the horizon. You don't feel like you've made any progress. But if you measure your progress, on the other hand, looking backwards to where you started then you feel progress, even if it wasn't the total achievement you were looking, you'd feel you'd accomplished something very good and you'd get energy for it. And it seems to me, and we can talk about this, but the time system that you introduced to our conversation, this is, of course, the podcast where we'll be talking about this, that I feel that somehow this is the time system for staying in the game and not getting caught up in measuring against the ideal.
Dean: Now why do you say that? Tell me what led to that.
Dan: Well, it's the chunking process of taking time; and if you say I can do something in the next 10 minutes, that's not an ideal that you're heading for, that's an actual achievement.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: And then all you have to do is look back 10 minutes to see where you started. It kind of immunizes you against gap type thinking or idealistic type thinking and keeps it all within the framework of measurement, including the fact that you're measuring the time units.
Dean: Yes. I've been fascinated, throughout this week in particular, at how much you can actually get done in 10 minutes. I mean it's really, it's such a useful time frame, especially when, I was thinking about how we brought up in the very beginning this idea of brainstorming as the verb of choice. That 10 minute brainstorm on something that we're defining as a noun, you know, this big ominous task, this project, is a surprisingly ample amount of time to get some clarity and progress. I think that what that leads to is that it's not so much that ... I know that looking at something as a noun and looking at it as the big project has been a block; and it's not that it's going to take so long to do it, but our focus is so resistant to it, because it doesn't know what's going to happen. But when you brainstorm, and there's no commitment to brainstorming as you said; but there's also seemingly very little commitment to 10 minutes. And the fact that I'm sitting these 10 minutes ... The 10 minutes I'm finding most useful are the in between stuff. When I couldn't dedicate an hour or two hours to something, but I've got 15 minutes; and I can dedicate a 10 minute unit in there to brainstorm something. It's really been amazing, and I'm finding it as the perfect amount of time for my check-in with procrastination and in the morning. What have you got for me?
Dan: And I got 10 minutes to get a ham.
Dean: I mean, mine has you, as I said, I think it was during my first week where I was actually keeping count of the number of 10 minute periods during the day, and I reported last week that my average for the first week where I actually followed that for seven days was 32.3 10 minute periods. Last week, the average was 46.7, but the thing about that is that I had a chockfull of scheduled activities-
Dan: A workshop.
Dean: Yeah, I had two workshops, which I had also had the week before; but I also had full days of recording in the studio, very easy to calculate it. You're in the studio solidly recording for 40 minutes. Well, that's four 10-minute periods, and I don't fool around there. If there was some getting ready and there was some afterwards I don't count it. Maybe I will later, and I'll add more value or more structure to those set up periods of time; but I said I'm just going for the actual production of a video or an audio. Thursday I had four podcasts with four different people, so this is the actual record time, and it was 22 time periods. So you get a big chunk of the time periods. But the interesting thing of it is, when just before right around a half hour before we started today, I said let's just look back over that week. So I'm back in touch with some insights I had, so that they would be fresh in my mind when we started our podcast. More and more, I'm noticing my achievement for the day isn't the actual tasks that I got done, it's the number of time periods I got done.
Dan: And that's interesting, isn't it, when you start to think about that.
Dean: Yeah, because that's the real shift. I mean it's almost like I'm taking greater pleasure, and I'm getting more a sense of success and satisfaction out of the number of time periods not so much what went on. You know, lots of different activities went on, but I got the value out of all those activities; but I wasn't really comparing them to anything. The fact is that I used so many time periods to get it done, so I shifted my thinking about what's actually satisfying.
Dan: Well, that's interesting. I really do love that idea of the ... almost like the step counter in a way, just the fact-
Dean: Yeah, it totally is. I mean if you count your steps. Our entire company went through a competition during the summer, and what Babs did is she brought enough Fitbits for everybody in the company. There are about 125 people in the company, and she just brought 125-
Dan: Everybody had a Fitbit.
Dean: Yeah, and then the whole question was, you can get a Fitbit for using if you'll commit to be in the contest, and over a 100 day period you get one million steps. And actually, we had somewhere between 110 and 120 who actually went for it; but at the end of the day more than 80 of them completed one million steps. Some of them had extraordinary days. There were 45,000 step days in there, you know, with people who weren't in the habit of walking; but because they were in this activity ... But it's very, very interesting is that what they remember is that they did one million steps. Not so much good day, bad day. Maybe I forgot all about it today, and I only ended up with 5,000 steps. Where in order to hit a million in a 100 days, you have to average 10,000. And they say, "Well, I'll just make up for it tomorrow. If I've got five today, I'll get fifteen tomorrow and then back to my average." But it's really interesting.
Everybody was high as a kite when we hit September, because they had been ... First of all, there was just the benefit to exercising that much. But Fitbit will allow you to create a master scorecard, so the moment that they get to the end of the day they check on their iPhone because it's keyed to your own site in your iPhone. I think it is. I didn't take part in it, because I've got a knee that won't take that amount of pounding. I've got my own exercise program, and I'm doing great with it.
But I was just interested in the experiment. You know, more than 100 people involved in a followed activity of counting steps for a three month period. I was just fascinated with the response to it. The person who won it, and there was an overall winner. Babs had worked out a whole series of different prizes. But the person who won it is the head of production in our company, and her name would never occur to me as being the person who would win it; and, she was over 3 million steps.
Dan: Holy cow, are you kidding me?
Dean: Yeah, she was averaging 30,000. That's roughly about 15 miles a day.
Dan: Wonderful. How do you do that? She was rigging it. She was rigging it. She probably tied it to her cat.
Dean: No. Nope. See how negative your mind goes.
Dan: She won.
Dean: She's won. It's like talking about the presidential election, you know. How'd that guy win? He must have rigged it with the Russians.
Dan: Yes. Exactly.
Dean: But the fact is, she said that she just felt that this would be a new stage in her life. She said it wasn't so much the competition, but it was just that she got her husband to do it with her, and they would talk. They would talk, and they would rearrange all sorts of their summer vacation, what they were doing around an activity, rather than just hanging aground for three or four hours around the house, they would go out and do various hikes in the city of Toronto. There's all sort of mapped out city hikes in Toronto where you go, and then you can see things as you're doing that; so she got a totally different view of the city, and the weather was generally good for it. I mean they got a few rainy days, but then you put on a raincoat; and you're walking in the rain.
But back to the point is that this time system, you know, you start out the day with a budget available to you of 100 10-minute time periods; and they're available for you to use. The goal isn't to do a hundred of them. The goal is to use as many as are needed to get all kinds of personal business activities done. So I think it's a marvelous context, and it shifts our notion of what time is.
Dan: I agree. That's what I've found a hundred percent. Today I was kind of thinking about how it overlays with your ABC concept of the things that are your "A" activities, "B" activities, "C" activities. "A" being things that you don't like.
Dean: Irritating things.
Dan: "B" being things that are okay, and "C" being the things that you really enjoy. The things that you're good at, likability things. Right, and so it's interesting, on reflection, to look at how many units you actually get to spend on your "C" activities. The things that are the high level things.
Dean: So do you notice activities, which things work better, if you do these activities on a regular basis or every day. What would fall in the category for you of something that's just ... previous to starting our experiments here ... What would just be an okay activity, which has been less onerous? My definition of okay is it doesn't really take away energy, but it doesn't actually give you any energy.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Some sort of maintenance activity.
Dan: Yeah. Like for me, responding to emails and things like that. That would be a thing where you realize it's a "got to do it" kind of thing, but it's not as exciting. What I have found is that doing the proactive and moving things forward emails, it's really helped with that. As I said, you can really write a thoughtful and meaningful and moving forward, you know, have a lot of depth to something in a 10 minute email. So I've found that's been a good thing. But I also tie it, now, to my procrastination. I may spend 10 minutes and say ... Because I've found now, it's a good thing to address questions that you have. So we ask, "Okay, procrastinations, what have you got for me today?" And one of them might be, "Who do I need to connect with?" And because there's always people who are on your mind, and having that list, making that list ... In 10 minutes I can make a pretty exhaustive list of both the people who are front burner, and I'm procrastinating on those; and then, you move into the proactive where I'm not procrastinating yet, and this would be a good thing to move forward. So I can add those people to that list, too.
Dean: Yeah. So here's another question that I have for that, because you're the one who really, very early in our Joy of Procrastination Series ... Your terrific distinction, and I've used this I the workshops lab ... I said, "Just check out the difference of what happens to your willingness to go forward or your resistance of going forward where you now have to figure out how to get something done." So that's one category; and now compare that with the other category of "This is a really good thing to get done." Now, who is it that you know who actually will take charge of this, but actually enjoy taking charge of it because it's in their wheelhouse. This is the type of activity that they actually enjoy. I was just thinking about that in relationship to "Okay" activities, that even there when it's an "Okay" activity, if you switch your action anticipated from figuring out how to actually identifying who, it actually seems to put a pop of energy into the task for me.
Dan: Yes, I agree. I've found it's really fascinating ... I really see now where we're at the point where imagination, you know, thinking is ... really there's so much access to leverage now, no pun intended, but we talk about our friend, Ari, my sales company, get leverage who can do anything for you-
Dean: Yeah, I did a podcast with Ari. He said the crucial problem that their company, Ari's company, really solves is that ... He said that 99 percent of the projects, when you reverse engineer them, the person who's thinking about it for a long time, and then say, "Okay, I'll give Ari a call." And they contact Ari. And he said, "When you reverse engineer right from back to the time when the person first had the idea, they immediately turn themselves into a bottleneck." They want this, but they are holding themselves responsible for the how of the project. They immediately become a bottleneck, and being in a bottleneck means that you're in a state of procrastination. He said, "The moment they contact us and clearly define what it is, and we take charge of the project; then they're no long in the bottleneck, and action is starting to take place. I'm recommending Ari left and right with all my clients.
Dan: Me too.
Dean: What you need, is motion, what you need is activity going on, that you freed yourself from the how responsibility of it.
Dan: Yeah, I think all procrastination is taking how responsibility for something that you really are the least capable person to actually do it. There's other people who can do it much better, but you haven't made the connection. You haven't clearly put it out there within a framework where somebody, a who, who really can run with it. We're down to some very fine distinctions here that could make all the difference in the world.
Dean: Let's take a moment here for that, because that's exactly what I've been thinking about the importance of defining what it is that you want. I think that there's something, those words what and want, I think there's something there. Almost like, I think when you think about it with Ari, the example that he gave of being in the bottleneck is that I have found that you almost can't believe that it could be that easy in a way. That we're used to having to solve the problem, you know, rather than being able to just say, "This is what I want."
Dan: Yeah. I think it's a past history thing. I think we're imposing a painful past history on the present moment.
Dean: You're right. I think we've really come full circle to where it's now, the actual power move, is to be able to achieve excellent results with what seems like little effort.
Dan: Without whining. We've come all the way around, and my third grade report card is actually the power move now.
Dean: Yeah, tell everybody. I think we've hit this story early in the-
Dan: Yeah, just to kind of catch everybody up, you're right.
Dean: You're giving yourself now a retroactive report card.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: To counter the report cards you got when you were nine years old.
Dan: I was fully prepared for this moment. At nine years old, my report card, that I found at my mom's house, said in hand writing ... You know they would write comments about you, and mine was that, "Dean is able to achieve excellent results with what seems like little effort. Imagine if he applied himself." And, I've always carried that with this, "Well, that explains a lot", and also, almost have a sense of, "What are they saying?" That I should try harder; that I should, I don't know what it is; but now it's like we've got a whole society-
Dean: You've had this brand on your forehead since you were nine years old.
Dan: Yeah. That's right. I could have been a wizard this whole time.
Dean: Well, you took on a certain kind of judgment from that, that's kind of like a gap phase thing. Like you weren't living up to your potential. You weren't living up to their ideal for you.
Dan: Right. But I look at so many of the things that are now completely ... you know, I had no knowledge of the principle then, even though I was living it and acting on it. We had an event this week in Orlando with my friend Perry Marshall.
Dean: Oh, yeah.
Dan: Do you know Perry? Okay.
Dean: Oh, Perry. Yeah, Perry was a coach for about three or four years. Really a great figure. Perry's got a first class mind.
Dan: He does, and a couple of things that he said when we were together were really impactful. We were talking about the ... He's a big, big believer in the 80-20 rule. So much so that he wrote a book about it called "80-20 Sales and Marketing." And he's friends with Richard Copps, and that 80-20 guy. One of the interesting things that he's talking about, some of the correlaries to that, and the business opportunities to it, where one of them is to take 80% of the result at ... No. What was that? How did it work out? ... Yeah, 80% of the result at 20% of the cost. And I thought that ... I didn't realize it at the time, but that's really what the 90 minute book is about, about getting 80% of the value of writing a book, book, at 20% of the cost in both time and money. And I thought about an effort, and you can apply that same thing to ... That's what Dial Fox Done is, as a podcast service, is 80% of the value with 20% of the time, effort, and cost. That's a winning formula.
Dean: Yeah. The thing that ... What did I do? I wrote a variation on that. The 80% Principle, I did it; and basically-
Dan: Yeah, yours is the 80% approach.
Dean: Right. Yeah, the 80% approach. My whole point was that you just have a ... I picture it as a rectangle. You have a rectangle and the total rectangle requires the time amount to get it to so good that people think it's perfect. It correlates with a concept in the corporate world, especially in the technology or the engineering world that's called Six Sigma. And I was always intrigued with Six Sigma. It seemed very abstract and involved, implying a massive infrastructure of measurement in a corporation, of course, which I would not be interested in all. But I just took the rectangle and I cut it in half and I said 80% on the left hand side; and that means that half the project is done with your first crack at it. It might be brainstorming, quite simply, that the first 80% of a project might simply be done with brainstorming that you could do in a 10 minute period; and then pass on that information or your conclusion from that information to someone else who could then take it and fine tune it. So what you do is, you cut the starting rectangle in half, and that's the first 80%. Now you have a half rectangle and now you treat that as the whole rectangle and you cut that in half, and that's the next 80%, okay? So, if you do this mathematically you are already at 80 points, which means you only have 20 left, and now you take 80% of the remaining ... You know, you only have 20% to really fine tune it. Then you take the remaining half that isn't filled up, and you cut that in half. That's the second 80%, which leaves a smaller part, which you cut in half; and that's the third 80%. And my feeling is that if you just proceed with 80%s, you'll get to the sixth 80% and it's 99.3% of 100%. Then it gets too small. You can't even see what you're working on.
Dan: Right.
Dean: You have to determine upfront with the project. Is a one 80% good enough? Is a two 80% good enough? Is a three 80%? Because by the time you're at a three 80%, you're already over 99%; and from an outside standpoint, is that good enough? I mean with microchips, it's not. You can't leave room for a 1% defect. It would screw everything up, so in the world of really fine engineering you may have to go to eight 80%s or ten 80%s, down to where the possibility of a defect has just statistically disappeared. But in our work, where we're just creating ideas that will stimulate great creative conversation, oftentimes the first 80% is just good enough.
Dan: Yeah, I've seen that.
Dean: And that's Perry's point. When you get to the bottom of 80% it's a calculation of how good is good enough to get a really good result.
Dan: Yes. That's it. How good is good enough?
Dean: To get a good result.
Dan: Right. And I guess you have to have the wisdom to understand what the situation calls for, like we're talking about building a plane that's going to take you from point A to point B with an 80% chance of getting there, that's not good enough.
Dean: That's not good enough. That's like Kazakhstan airlines. You know, there's a list of the 20 airlines on the internet. Never book a seat on those airlines.
Dan: Oh, really.
Dean: Oh, yeah. And I think Kazakhstan is the worst.
Dan: Oh, Vince, that's so great.
Dean: Yeah. That context, though, coupled with the ... When you look at really, we're at a stage right now where more than ever execution is becoming a commodity. It's available. There's a marketplace for it. You can literally ... We talked about Ari's ... We talked about leverage, but with all that's been building to that point, where there's lots of market places that allow you to tap into execution. You know, you think about Uber as an example of that. It's really come down to you just have to have the idea, right? You just have to have the idea, "I want to go from the Hazelton to 33 Frazier and I want to go now." Let me push this button and articulate my want, and somebody has set up a mechanism and a market place to have somebody at my feet in three minutes to take me to 33 Frazier.
Dan: And I don't have to take responsible for anything except opening the door and getting in the back seat.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: And I think that that kind of thinking, that's coming. That's where we're really at now where I'm really embracing that idea of that's the whole idea behind 90-Minute Books. I want to write a book. I'm on it, 90 minutes, and we'll take care of everything else. And I think that's the opportunity that we have with almost everything, 80% probably, of the things that we want to get done could be done just with articulating the idea to the right who.
Dean: Yeah. I mean it's really interesting how inter-overlapping some of the discoveries are making-
Dan: Yeah. And other parts are coinciding with our going deep on procrastination. One of the things that I am very passionate about is the thinking tool that has become very central thinking tool in strategic coach, which is the impact of the ... So I'm now, you know, I've got my book writing system, Thanks for the Kickoff, from the 90 book experience that I had with Sue Austin. You read it?
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And the thing is that I'm at the point now where I'm doing the cartoons with the cartoonist on the next book, which is the ABC model, which comes out in December. Just finished The Gap and The Gain. But this Friday I started the book that's going to come out in March, which is called The Extraordinary Impact Filter. I've never written anything contextual about the impact... explains itself, but there's actually a lot of dimensions built into it. The reason I'm bringing it up here is that if you take a 100% responsibility for clarifying your intentionality to yourself, and then communicating it very clearly to someone else, you have freed yourself up from the execution stage. Your responsibility is the intentionality stage. My feeling is that a lot of people will commit themselves to a long period of execution because they were never very good at the intentionality in the first place and they're hoping that if they get involved in an execution stage that that will clarify your intentionality. I can guarantee you it won't. It will only magnify your starting confusion.
Dean: Well, I think that's the thing that's like where just the environment has really kind of rewarded that "just roll your sleeves up and get to work, do it, just do it, just get it moving, just get down and action over meditation" and all these things which kind of almost idea shame in a way. Almost like, well, that's not enough, right? Yeah, ideas are useless. Execution, that's the most valuable thing.
Dan: Yeah, and it's almost, I think that there's a bit of a social pressure here-
Dean: That's what I mean, yeah.
Dan: And what I mean is, if you have an idea, you're the leader of the idea. And that means that anyone who joins in, you're the leader of that group of people who do it. And I think there's a bit of shame or embarrassment about inequality. You know, somebody's idea and they're in charge of the idea. Well, what gives them the right to ... What gave them the right to be the idea, you know, the leader of the idea? And, we've got to equalize things by the first person not being so clear about their idea that they emerge as the leader. You know, we've got to have some democracy. The democracy of confusion, in other words. "Well, let's have a meeting and kind of clarify what it is that we're going to do." T
Dean: Then our action item-
Dan: Yeah, and what I find is that if you take six people who are kind of confused and rub them together, it won't create clarity.
Dean: That's true. Oh, that's so funny.
Dan: Yeah. Then take 100 people and rub them together, and now you're getting somewhere. Take a country of 300 million and rub them together and see what kind of clarity you get out of that.
Dean: Oh, man, that is so funny.
Dan: You'll get street riots. You'll get broken windows and everything like that. So really, it seems to be endless the implications of those, but it puts such an onus on you knowing what you want.
Dean: Yeah. Well, your book was the book, Wanting What You Want" is a fantastic example.
Dan: Yup. So it would be interesting to think about what we can name the skill of whatsmanship, I guess, or something. What do we call this ... What's the absolutely, the skill of the future here?
Dean: Of wantsmanship or whatever the-
Dan: Wants or wantsmanship
Dean: Wantsmanship yeah that's ... It would have to be whatspersonship if it going to be…
Dan: Yeah, exactly.
Dean: Yeah, but I think it's respecting where ideas of improvement, actually, come from. And our research, solely with an individual, and there has to be an initial idea of an improvement that can be made that is measurably better than how it would be measured right now. In other words, I'll set something up and I got this idea in the future for improvement and it's my job, first of all, to convince myself that this is worth investing time in and that comes back to your brainstorming. In 10 minutes of brainstorming, I could kind of get a handle on whether the idea I have in my mind is really worth an additional 10 minutes. I think the first 10 minutes is really the what.
Dan: Yes, okay.
Dean: But the moment you get that 10 minutes done, then becomes the crucial decision of who, not how, who.
Dan: Right.
Dean: That means with two 10 minute periods you could sell yourself on the idea and then determine what it is that you're going to tell someone else that they'll be sold on it.
Dan: Yeah, and have a jumping off point. Somebody who-
Dean: And how ... the how is in their area.
Dan: That's what I mean.
Dean: Yeah. So it really, it's bridging that gap of being able to describe what it is that you want and describe it in a way that telling it to the right who could give them enough of a jumping off point that they could take it from there.
Dan: Yup. Yup.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: You know, I mean there's an enormous pleasure that people at a particular stage whatever stage they are at in their development as a person and their development as being a useful team member in their life because we all operate in some sort of team either in our personal life or business life and there's an enormous enjoyment when somebody's got an idea that me as an executioner gets very excited. "Oh, I know how to do that. I would know exactly how to do what you're talking about." That's music. That's the sweetest music in the universe.
Dean: Here's how you do it.
Dan: Let me take care of that. Let me- give it to me. I'll write it and I'll show you how this is going to get done. I mean, when you come across someone like that, whoa. That's better than money in the bank.
Dean: Yeah, it really is. Wow, it's pretty interesting because that's been, you know, I've had that experience with a project that I've been working on with a client who ... We've talked about this idea of having a series of guides and videos with a context and just describing that to a project manager, that leverage has led to all of these things that are taking place even to the point of them taking over the expansion of the idea. It's pretty ... it is really ... I just get so excited about the future of really embracing your, my, role as an idea catalyst, you know.
Dan: Go over that a little bit. I'm not quite getting that.
Dean: Well, I'm really like..
Dan: What is the my?
Dean: My, I mean for me, personally, because- I guess I'm talking about it, not everybody, some people would rather be the who than, you know, we're saying this, we're describing it, you just said, like somebody would love to be able to say I can do that. Like for somebody to tell them what they want to do and they're unique ability is to figure out how. Somebody who's dream-
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Somebody else's dream question is how? How do I do that?
Dan: Yeah, well I think the other thing is that in the Kolbe profile, Kathy Kolbe's great.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And her great profiling tool. There is three, you know what they use is the scoring from one to ten and any particular ability area and the one to three is that you will resist what is the skill in this area. In other words, if you are a fact finder, a 10 fact finder is someone who can spend years and years establishing the justification for something. You and I, what's your fact finder?
Dean: Four. So I'm accommodating.
Dan: So you're okay with that. You'll go into it to a certain degree by establishing the justification for things. I have a two and I will resist it. I'll sit and I'll listen to fact finders talk for 30 minutes and I can see about 10 things on the table and I'll say, "I'll tell you. This is the one to pay attention to. You can ignore the other nine, because this is the center." I mean I if you choose this one fact and build outward from this fact, it will get you to the result you are looking for incredibly faster than if you try to organize it around the 10 facts here. There's one fact that's the key to the whole situation and that's what got to be the center of your communication action, this one fact.
And I was looking at when Apple was almost on the doorstep of failing as a corporation they came up with the iMac and what was the real problem with computers there, it took about five or six clicks to get on to the internet, and the iMac came out and there was two clicks. You plug it in. You start the iMac, and then you hit a button and you're in the internet. And that's enough. Their advertising was iMac, no third step necessary. So everybody was building, you know, the Windows products, they were 95% of the marketplace, but you had to go through five or six steps to get on the internet and-
Dean: You had to set up your drivers and set up your things-
Dan: You had to send in a urine test, you had to jump through hoops and everything else. And Steve Jobs says, "Let's just make it two steps."
Dean: Plug it in. Turn it on.
Dan: Once it's plugged in, turn it on, go on the internet. That's what saved their entire future as a company was that they eliminated three or four ... And we don't like going through a lot of steps. And I find myself just totally resistant to you do this and then you do this and then you put in this code and then you ... I'm dead, I'm already lost.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. I think that that is worth seeing that being shaped for even I used Uber as an example of that and I use my Starbucks app as an idea of that. That I just punch in what I want at Starbucks, order it, and then go pick it up at the counter. And I want to go somewhere and I put it in and it automatically happens and I think that if we just translate that it's all be our desires and acceptance of a new norm is very much like the guy who says I don't want to own all the land, just the land that's next to mine. You know, I don't want all the convenience, just the adjacencies kind of thing you know. Now that I can get in a car with a button and I can order a coffee with a button and not pay I want everything else to fall and line like that. But certainly, it's the way we're going.
Dean: Yeah, and I think, you know, bringing it back to our central theme of procrastination, is, you know, and one of them is that you always procrastinate for good reasons. Well, what's emerging out of our conversation here is that the good reasons are that you're being asked to go into a process of how, which, one, is not good for you, but number two, it's not even good for the idea you have.
Dan: Yeah, that's true. It's like the how and do, those are the things that are embraced really now, it's the how, figuring out how to do something and then just getting to work doing it.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: We should ask, you know Ari's joining the 10 times program. He comes in, I think he's a bump up from the signature program, and I think he is there when Joe, you know Joe, I think it's the 12th of October and yeah, I'll just bounce it because he's getting tons of referrals from us and every workshop now people are coming in and reporting them really successful, good leverage projects that they're involved in and I think it would be really useful to have Ari as a guest on Joy of Procrastination.
Dean: I do too. Of course, that'd be great.
Dan: Yeah, because he looks at it completely from the other side because he's created the universe of how.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Yeah. And it's almost in a way just like Ari described as a bottleneck for a long time I've been the bottleneck in a lot of-
Dean: Yup. Me too. Me too.
Dan: Yeah, because I've spent a lot of my life as a very, very bright, creative frustrated bottleneck.
Dean: Yeah. It's like you are, somebody said one time that it's like being a fire hydrant of ideas with only a garden hose as an outlet.
Dan: And a leaky one at that.
Dean: A leaky garden hose as an outlet. But imagine if you could have a firehouse hooked up to your fire hydrant. Or not only that, but 50 of them.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. I get so excited whenever we talk. It's like yeah-
Dean: Yeah. Okay. We're down to our last two jacks. It's 20% of the jacks and
Dan: Oh my goodness
Dean: So we're
Dan: So, yeah, just a new thought that has developed in the course of our conversation. For me, you're Uber thing was a clincher thing for me. I said, well, of course and that's what the R B and D is doing you know that's and there's a proliferation of execution platforms that are now becoming more and more available to individuals, but none of these are worth anything to you if you still hold yourself responsible for the how. That's my insight.
Dean: That's absolutely true.
Dan: You've gotta become master of wanting what you want and that's really what I'm seeing here. That's my takeaway to work on.
Dean: I love it.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I think that, I mean, I just sense that we are on the cusp of something really big.
Dan: Yeah. Well, I think we've been into something really big for quite a long time, but I think there's proliferating dimensions to this that explain a lot of things that have been frustrating in our past lives, and we're beginning to understand the why of the frustration and then where the freedom in each of these situations actually lies.
Dean: Yeah. I can't wait until our next one.
Dan: That's great. That's great. Always a pleasure, Dean. My heartbeat goes up in the 10 minute block before we actually start each one of these.
Dean: I love it.
Dan: Okay well you have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you on the next one.
Dean: Okay. Thanks. Bye.
Dan: Bye.