Join Dean & Dan as they talk about the benefits of a team to make the most of what procrastination gives us.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep025
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Ah, Mr. Jackson.
Dean: There he is.
Dan: Yes. So? This is a pleasure knowing that this is really an important activity for both of us.
Dean: It really is. It really is. So are you back from…
Dan: Yeah, just got back, just got back last night. Did three days in Delmar, just north of San Diego. We were there for J.J. Virgin's wedding. Met a lot of people we know that all still ... Some new people, and we were thinking maybe that we would just extend there for three days, but it was kind of foggy and we just had already reserved for three days in Sedona, which is just a gorgeous spot. So we followed through on the original plan, and we flew to Sedona Sunday, so Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Delmar and then three days in Sedona. It was just spectacular there. It was like 85. Then we went hiking, and it was brilliant sunshine. We're so happy we did. Then went to Scottsdale and did terrific. Genius Network with Joe and Dean, Dean Graziosi. Just some terrific immediately applicable ideas that we got out of the two days, including one of them was Joe Stumpf.
Dean: Yes, I heard that Joe was coming to talk about-
Dan: Yeah. We reconnected because Joe had come in at the same time you did, originally-
Dean: In 1997, '98.
Dan: Yes, in 1997, and he gave a terrific talk on his 7-step, you know the 7-step process where you-
Dean: The 7 levels, yep.
Dan: Yeah, the 7 levels. I had heard about it through a financial advisor, but I had never really done it, and I was just blown away by the kind of fast clarity you can get on almost any topic from Joe's thing. I just told him that. I said, "This is just a really terrifically useful concept and process that I can use now for a whole number of things," and then yeah, we had a terrific two days at the Genius Network, and met a terrific ... another guy who has just a very simple way of getting your emails in response to blogs up to ... He went from like 50 emails a week to 20,000 emails a week-
Dean: Wow.
Dan: -which adds to your contact list, and it's very, very simple. We would be able to implement this in like 90 days, start the process. We were going to do it, so yeah, it was a terrific two days.
Dean: Very cool.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's kind of an interesting place to start a conversation about the Joy of Procrastination here, is you've come back from having some wonderful ideas and what's your process now for turning those ideas into like, "Is this something we're going to do?" You mentioned that idea that you got about the blog emails would be something that you could implement in 90 days. I'd be interested to hear how your ... because I always get the impression that you're very thoughtful about implementing something new, but also very recognizing when something is a good thing and able to move quickly on it, so what's the process that you go through to decide what gets put into action?
Dan: Well, I've also got the benefit of distinction that you've made a number of times in our podcast series here that when you have a project that you really think is worth doing, the next question is not, "How do we do this," but "Who does this?"
Dean: Exactly.
Dan: Babs and I were sitting next to each other throughout the whole session. We just looked at each other after this presentation, which was about a 15-minute presentation, and we both looked at each other and said we talked to Linda, about this on Tuesday morning. Babs sent a really great email to Paul Hamilton, who's the head of marketing, at Coach, then Linda who is the head of social media, so all the blogs that we now do, and we do a lot of blogging, goes to her, but we all have a meeting on Tuesday morning, tomorrow, as you know, you being a Canadian part of the dime as our Thanksgiving day in Canada.
So on Tuesday morning, we already have a meeting. We'll have an impact filter, and we have the complete slides from the presentation. We already have the slides from the presentation. We have like a one-hour talk through of how the process, so all we do is say in the impact filter what we want done and then we give it to Linda-
Dean: "This is what we want."
Dan: Yeah. Then it's essentially, from our standpoint, it's implemented so from my idea on Thursday to implementation on Tuesday.
Dean: All it is is from what to who.
Dan: Yep.
Dean: That's really…
Dan: Yeah, she would immediately understand exactly how to do this, and she's already got her blogging process in place. It's just that there were two or three refinements, and one of them kind of surprised me that if you really want your blogs to be read and to get enormous number of hits, the number of words in the blog should be between 2000 and 5000.
Dean: Yeah, I've heard that and it's interesting to me. I don't know what the metric of that would be.
Dan: Well, part of it has to do with how Google responds to these things.
Dean: Oh, I see. Okay.
Dan: One of the things is that Google favors people who write more than 2000 words, and the reason is that Google's only interested in engagement, time of engagement. Yeah, so someone reading a 250 word blog is only going to be engaged for a very short period of time, where somebody reading a longer blog is going to be engaged that much longer, ten times longer if it's 2500 words.
Dean: Right.
Dan: There was somebody else there who talked about this, and he's a ranking expert. He knows how to get your stuff ranked on Google, and he does that ... Google really, really has one criteria that's based on your ranking, and that's how long you can engage people, which I found interesting. I found that very interesting. Of course, it's got to be an interesting blog. It's got to have qualitative things like a great headline, and you've got to be giving them really, really useful information. Anyway, it's one of the things... When I got to a conference like that, people will say, "How many good ideas represents a good conference?" I say, "One. One that I hear immediately that will make it"…
Dean: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right, and to be okay that it might not even be ... You can often say there's sometimes, to pass up the idea kind of thing, to know when it's the one idea and that maybe it's not, but it gets you by implementing the-
Dan: Yeah. But it gets you by implementing it, you're going to find out whether it was a good idea or not. You have to test. Anyway, I get really excited because I'm going to live a long time, so if I get one good idea out of one meeting ... A lot of people, "Oh, I'm falling behind. I'm missing all the other good ideas." I said, "Well, when you go swimming, you miss a lot of water. How much water do you need?"
Dean: "I didn't hardly touch any of the ocean!"
Dan: Yeah, yeah. I try to use as little water as possible when I go swimming.
Dean: Right. That's funny. Yeah, and in the context of living a long time, an idea that has longevity has that much even bigger impact. That strategy that you were talking about that I'm a little bit familiar with is something that will have legs for a long time.
Dan: Or forever, ideally, like compound interest. You put the investment in today, and then you leave it alone and every quarter, it multiplies its value. I was just thinking of that on these topics because one thing that we haven't really talked about, Dean, here which I think really should be brought out in the Procrastination series here is good habits that you just do all the time. In other words, good lifetime habits that you do all the time because you don't think ...
If you do a habit, and every day you do the habit, you don't really think of that as an achievement because it's not a new thing. It's an old thing, but if you really look at successful people, especially when they put in decades of being successful, you can watch them on a daily basis and then saying, "Well, he's not really doing that much new." No, but he's doing something old that it's growing in impact. He's doing something old. So I think we bypass or we pass over habits in our own mind because, well, it's not something new and exciting. No, but the fact that you've been doing it for 30 years or 40 years makes a big difference.
Dean: I'm fascinated by that in a way. I'm very attracted to that. I think about that movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and I think of things like that where it's a lifetime of just consistently doing that one thing. It's fascinating. I love longevity things like that. I look at ... I always talk about 60 Minutes, the TV show. Now, for 50 years, every Sunday night at 7:00, you've got that consistency of bringing you the three most fascinating things that are going on in the world in a long form, 20 minute in depth kind of things, which is almost the equivalent probably of writing a 4000 word article about something, but the same kind of ... and the compounding effect of that. That's really what it is.
Dan: Yeah, and over the long run, if you see people who are consistently successful and they always seem to be on top of whatever is going on in the world, you say to them, "Well, how can they be paying attention to something new all the time that allows them to be on top?" I said, "Well, I kind of get a feeling that it's just the opposite, is what they're paying attention to things that are longstanding and deeply, deeply grounded in them in their approach to life on a daily basis that just keep paying bigger and bigger dividends as they go along."
Dean: It's interesting how the-
Dan: What would you say if you had to pick, Dean Jackson, if you go deep and taking a look at Dean's habitual activity that have just continually paid off more and more and more the longer you go and this requires no work on your part really to remember it and do it every day, it's just always there, so what would you say your three are?
Dean: When you were mentioning that, I was kind of thinking about that because I tend ... I look for context that are long-lasting. I recognized how attractive those are to me when you brought that up for me, like looking at a 25-year timeframe, and then even going back to things that have lasted hundreds of years. So I look at ... I think what you could say, if I look back, one thing that I've consistently done is recorded conversations about fascinating things with marketing, for me. I think just continuing to move forward on shaping out my framework of the eight profit activators, but that's the master work that is the structure of it, and everything that I do, everything that I learn and apply and develop is with that overlay, through that lens.
We were having a conversation about it, I just had a breakthrough blueprint event in Orlando, which was the reason I wasn't able to make it to J.J.'s wedding, but we were talking about back in ... when I back test this. I go all the way back to 1988 when I first got my real estate license. I started out as a realtor, and I've seen how this framework was equally valid then as it is now, and will be 25 years from now, but what's changed is the content underneath that context, like the idea of selecting a single target market, or the idea of a before unit, a during unit, and an after unit are all very timeless. What fits underneath it, it's always fascinating to me to look at what are the new things, the new ways of applying those? It's very helpful to have a context or a mothership that's heading in a constant direction, and being able to then only fit things in that fit into that context.
Dan: Yeah. It was very interesting. I don't know how many years ago it is now that we had the famous ... I was sitting in the kitchen. I don't know where you were when we had this phone call, but I asked you Dean, if there was one thing that you could focus your attention on that would absolutely fascinate and motivate you for the rest of your life, what would it be? You had ... The words weren't out of mouth before you basically ... You said, "I think it's this idea of the breakthrough blueprints," and you even had a name for it at that time, and it's these eight profit activators that you had.
I think my question was useful because oftentimes, we will really commit to ourselves about something that's really crucially important if we're answering a question from someone else, to actually identify it, but I was really struck from that conversation, is that there was no ... I'm eyeing on your part when I asked the question, you were right there with it. You had it right there.
Dean: That's been a big ... because the words that you used, it was the first time that I had heard you articulate, essentially, unique-ability that way by asking, "What's the activity that would fascinate and motivate you for the rest of your life?" That gives me the freedom, it's not an introspective thing. It's not a "what quality about me is my unique ability" but what's the thing that I am really fascinated about, to apply my unique ability to, to pursue, the activity that I love to do.
It's fascinating, Dan, that when I do these events now, I say that I've been working on this for 25 years, the first 10 years unconsciously and the last 15 years consciously, and knowing what they are now, that I've got such a rich experience level of seeing how all of these things apply in so many different situations now, having done nine of these events for the last five and a half years now, and having had all the experience of talking to all kinds of different business owners. Even before that, just seeing and having an experience of how all of these things fit together is really a ... It just keeps getting more and more valuable because as I have an experience of something and I can put that as the ...
I'm very fascinated by the scientific method, and that is really what I look at with this is the ability to experiment, to have a hypothesis, to prove or disprove that hypothesis, and then to consistently test it to reprove that it's actually scientific, that it's not a whim, or that it's not a thing. I think that that really is fascinating in that I get to have almost like a ... You can imagine how excited Thomas Edison was to do different experiments, that there's so much rich fulfillment in that, that that's never going to subside.
I can't wait til we're testing how virtual reality is going to fit into the eight profit activators, and how augmented reality and artificial intelligence. I just get excited that when I look at it, the entire framework of the eight profit activators is really something that would lend itself to an AI, understanding all these because they are scientific principles, that it would be something that you could program in a way.
Dan: Yes. Because you brought up the Sushi Dream's documentary, and my sense is that if you spend some time with a sushi genius that you would see that there is a central organizing structure that is continually testing right at the center of it. You could take a top-notch athlete who just stays really at the top of their game for a long time, and I think golf is probably the one-
Dean: I was just going to say, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, because you look at ... That's a framework. You've got the rules, the rules and the things. Like music, in that, music is theory and I like in a lot of ways the eight profit activators like that. There's eight notes in an octave and yet every song ever written and every song that will be written is some unique combination of those eight notes. The same thing is true with the eight profit activators.
Every business, whether they acknowledge it and are aware of it or not, is being affected by these eight profit activators, whether they're acknowledging them and doing something proactively about it or whether, just like a couple of the people at this event that I just did, we overlay the metrics and the idea of the before, during, after and it's a complete eye opener for them because they've never segmented it like that and looked at it and realized what's actually happening, but it's happening without them even knowing it.
Dan: I would say mine is that everything that I've done probably since I was in my 20s, I started journaling for the first time when I was 20 years old, where I really started writing down my notes and observations. So I was 20 years old, that was 1964, and then in 1982, 1982 so that's '64 to '82, it's 18 years later, 18 years later one day I created the strategy circle and it was based on the fact that I had been coaching entrepreneurs starting in 1974 for eight years. I had gone through a lot of turmoil, and I'd gone through a lot of different situations.
One day I was saying, I said, "I have a feeling that everything I've been doing for eight years, certainly since I was out in the marketplace as a coach, but even before that is a single process." The process is always the same. I just had a bit sheet of paper, and one afternoon I just paid out the entire process and I called it the strategy circle. I would say that everything that ever has been created in strategic coach since, let's use the beginning of the workshop program in 1989, so 15 years as a coach on my own and then we started doing it in a workshop, everything starts with a strategy circle.
You set your vision, put a date on it, put measurements on the vision, come backwards, how all the obstacles that are in the current situation that don't support that vision, and then starting picking off the obstacles and clipping them into the actual strategy and action that will actually produce the results you're looking for. I would say my whole life, I would say my whole life I've been operating ... I can go back to childhood and I wasn't conscious as a 10-year old or a 16-year old or even when I started my journaling at 20, but I had just gotten a lot of experience. I hit 38 and I said, "No, no. This is a single process." I've been doing the single process for my whole life…
Dean: That's what I was thinking about that, being unconsciously, that you had been doing it for all these years unconsciously before you identified what it was. Once you've identified it, that's when it really takes off is when you identify what that is. That's what I think you're instrumental for a lot of people who are in strategic coach to recognize their unique process.
Dan: Yeah. It's different how it comes out. Yours came out as the eight profit activators, and nobody else would come up with that. That's why a lot of people worry, "Well, if I put this out there, then other people are just going to grab ahold of it and say it's theirs." I said, "Well, they won't because they don't have any of the ... They have none of the iceberg below the water level to ..." Another analogy, iceberg may not be the right one, but if you go to the ... I was looking one day at a map that showed the height of islands in the world, and each of the Hawaiian islands, you've got this little grouping of islands that sits way out in the middle of the Pacific but what you don't realize, that each of those Hawaiian islands that we can see is higher than Everest.
Dean: Is that right? Wow.
Dan: Yeah. If you go down to the ocean floor where the-
Dean: Oh, I see what you're saying-
Dan: Where the ocean starts, by the time you get to the surface, you're above Everest level. You're at the 30,000 level. Those islands have been building because new ones, they expect within the next 50 years there's going to be another Hawaiian island that actually surfaces, and it starts having a land area that doesn't get ... It stay above the water, it doesn't go down below the water. There's tectonic shifts underneath that, the earth is moving and everything, but those islands are being shoved upward. The trend is upward.
Well, if you look at all the mountain below the water, which nobody sees, that's all the work you've been doing all your life, devoting your unique ability to do something that fascinates and motivates you. That's what's happening. At a certain point, it pops out as the eight profit activators or it pops out as the strategy circle. So the fact that someone ... I've shown the strategy circle in public forums for the last, well since '82 I've shown it. I've never seen anyone come out with any process that looks like it. I think the reason is that you couldn't steal it because you don't have any of the mountain beneath it. What are you stealing?
Dean: That's so great. That's it.
Dan: A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an idea.
Dean: Yeah. That's a really good one.
Dan: Yeah. You know what's happening. In a way, it's a hypothesis. That's what it is, yeah. That, yeah, having all of that depth of knowledge there is really something.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Einstein had a really interesting quote and that was, he said ... He's famous for the theory of relativity, won the Nobel Prize for it. Actually, he came out with a series of papers, I think it was in 1905, that just shocked the entire world of physics. It was headline news in the major publications around the world, and he came around that. I don't know what he wrote that. I think he was in his, might've been in his late 20s, early 30s when he wrote these two papers, but my feeling was ... He actually has this quote. He says, "Well," he said, "I wasn't the first person to think about relativity." He says, "I was the first person to think about it and not think about anything else for ten years."
Dean: Yes, that's true. Oh man. I think the essence of the question you were asking about what the daily, the habits, it comes back to something that I've been really thinking about even in the last 30, 60 days here, really wrapping my mind around this, is I was rereading our friend Craig Ballantyne's book, Perfect Day Formula, and that when you really get right down to it, we've had this conversation that the only day that we can live or do anything is today. Some of the things that we have aspirations for that extend beyond today require that some little piece of it, some little thing, has to be done today.
Almost like you have the ... We're taking these sonar readings, and the sonar comes around once a day and it plots, "Did you do the thing that's moving you towards that action?" Because otherwise you can get off course. It's kind of a combination of Steven Covey's idea of the law of the farm, that there's no ... Some things you can't cram, you can't shortcut, get everything all in at once like building or planting a crop that's going to yield, but those things, there's nothing often more valuable than doing things right now that are not going to have an immediate payoff today but will have an amazing payoff for years to come once you pull them off.
Dan: Yeah. One of the things, I'm going to hook up another habit that I've observed in you, and you talk about it all the time. Since you talk about it all the time, I think it's really the key to something, and that is fast brainstorming.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: My feeling is, if I can put two things together here, is your eight ... You have the operating system, which is now a fully formed Hawaiian island.
Dean: Yes. An archipelago. Yes, exactly.
Dan: Yeah, and the whole aspect is is that you'll get a new idea, and what you'll do is you'll do a fast brainstorming, and now with the new time system that you've introduced, and I'm going to say that you're the introducer of the time system, the ten minute period, which I've been using tremendously over the last four or five weeks-
Dean: Oh, that's great.
Dan: Yeah, I'm averaging in the ... because when you go on free days you don't get as many because there aren't as many specific, but I'm still averaging in the high 30s as I measure it every day. The thing is that, for example, I have a live cast with Dean Graziosi that I'm doing on November 1st.
Dean: Oh, nice.
Dan: Dean is just going to ... He said, "I'm just going to take you through my entire process, live, with a worldwide audience, and I'm just going to ask you all sorts of questions about strategic coach." I said, "If I did an impact builder in my intentionality or that live cast, would that be useful to you?" He says, "Oh yeah. Yeah, that would be great." He says, "Because I would make sure that everything you put in the impact filter would get talked about in it." So I was on the plane coming back from Scottsdale yesterday and I said, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to work on that impact filter every day between now and November 1st. I'm going to do something related to that impact filter.
So I did what's called a fast filter. It's a miniature version of the ... It's just a little card, so I did that on the plane and now I'm locked into that November 1st thing, and just doing the 10 minute. You do a fast filter in 10 minutes. I did it, and all the sudden, my mind is starting to really zero in and lock in so that when I walk into the studio, it's in the afternoon in Scottsdale, and I said, "I will have been thinking about this and clarifying things and getting myself totally intentional about that so that when I combine that with Dean's magical act ..." I watch the guy and he's an absolute magician with what he can do, but I don't want to show up as a guy off the street. I want to show up with somebody who has 30 days of intentionality about the hour that we're going to spend together, so I think that's going to be kind of magical when it happens.
Dean: Wow. That's awesome.
Dan: I don't really have to do more than about 10 minutes a day. I don't have to ... There's not a doctoral thesis that I'm getting ready for. All I have to do is keep sharpening my intentionality for it. It doesn't matter what I write down. Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what I write down. It only matters that I write something down.
Dean: Well, that's something that I've been really-
Dan: But you're brainstorming has been the instru- ... Well, two things: the inspiration but within a ten minute framework.
Dean: The challenge as a quick start is that we have the capacity to brainstorm and to visualize something completed, and that the execution of those things really requires the real-time thinking. We talked a little bit about this in some of the early conversations that we had. That's something that I still sort of, I won't say struggle with it but fascinated by it. I think it fits with your idea of really realizing that you can only do three things today, kind of thing, and being okay with that.
Dan: Well, I get 100% credit for the day if I do the three things.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: My whole thing is that I observed over a 40 year period of coaching entrepreneurs that they always get three important things done every day, but they don't get credit for it in their mind because they were assigning themselves 15 things, and they missed by 12, so even though they got three important things done for the day, in their mind, they failed by 80%.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I said, "What a ..." It's like a slow suicide. Excuse me. You're kind of killing yourself every day even though you're achieving a lot every day. You're just not getting any of the value from your achievement, and that was my big thing. Well, why don't we just say that three is 100% and anything over a three is bonus territory. If you get eight done that day, that was a heck of a bonus day, but you handle the 100% by noon.
Dean: Yeah. I think what it has to really balance for me is this bigger context. As a procrastinator, I, in the past, have seen myself be forced into things because I feel behind on things a lot of the time. Since you and I have been talking, and I've really been embracing these ideas of the joy of procrastination and turning procrastination into the raw materials, I don't find myself behind on things, but I find myself in a situation with an abundance of proactive choices with no real consequence for not taking action on them, and that leads me into I'll call it a mild paralysis.
There's so many things that I could do, but none of which are urgent or owed to anybody, a great place where I could choose to do things proactively, but I find myself delaying the implementation of them, which now that I hear myself say that out loud, that sounds like procrastination…
Dan: Here, I'm going to challenge you with your-
Dean: You're going to free me?
Dan: -with your operating system that basically, would you say that probably every day you're making process on your operating system?
Dean: Yeah. I'm within. It's gotten to where, Dan, when I've embraced so many of the good things that have come from just us having these conversations that realizing that conversation is the thing, and going immediately to steer things into conversations, and setting myself up as I've been with my "who's" that I realize that there's little that I have to do. I get those things done, and the things that are synchronous and scheduled actually get done repeatedly.
I feel one of my greatest accomplishments for this year has been, first of all, I had all of my dates for my events laid out for the entire year, which is something different than I'd ever done, but laid out by intention was that I was going to send three emails a week and one flagship podcast, my More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast every week for the year. Here we are, October, and it's been just this tremendous catalyst in doing that. Events are going great. All the other things that we have, I've moved consciously things into the recurring column, which is like riding the jet stream.
Once I get them into that recurring thing, it's like that has laid a wonderful foundation for me, which gives me all this freedom to move forward on other things that I don't yet have the recurring elements in place. I'm still involved in pushing things into the "make it real" area along with a project manager, but not really having the ... I think I may have answered my own question here, is really I think it's having the regular and consistent conversation with intention of the things that we're making real, like just having more of a conversation about them rather than waiting for me to, you described it a while ago, go off alone and come back with something, with a plan.
Dan: Yeah. A thought just occurred to me as you were saying that because I've experienced exactly the same phenomenon, that the best way for me to activate something is to have a good conversation with the "who".
Dean: Yes.
Dan: In other words, the "who" rather than the "how".
Dean: Yes, I get it.
Dan: Before, I would have a conversation with myself about the "how" and now I have a conversation about the thing with the "who". Okay?
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: To get to clarity on the "what", on what it is...
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Two things happen out of that. One is that I am very likely out of that conversation with the "who", the person who is actually going to do the implementing, I will then probably follow up with a short email or an impact filter, or a fast filter as I'm doing here, that confirms what the intention of the project is, but also captures, because I'm very very good at capturing the context of what gets talked about, and that then gets delivered to the person so they're much clearer. They're much more enthused because there's a focusing that takes place where they may at least start taking action.
So generally speaking, the action that I will take out of the conversation is a communication with them by email that then really clarifies and really packages what we talked about. My package to them will be more powerful than any package they get from anyone else that day.
Dean: That's the skill that I need.
Dan: First of all, my "who's" generally have really good follow through.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: But they have a lot of things on their follow through list, and I want to be ranked very high. As a matter of fact, I want to be ranked highest as the thing that they're going to pay attention to that. So they've had a conversation with me, but the conversation got packaged and delivered so that there's a clarity to it. Usually, there's dates and there's specific measurements about what's going to be done next, and I've just out-competed everything else on their mind for that day.
Dean: That makes sense.
Dan: That's a terrific accomplishment. The neat thing for either of us, neither of us are doing it.
Dean: Right. That's so funny. That's the trick.
Dan: Yeah. We pull a rabbit out of the hat and then the rabbit goes around and gets all the cash.
Dean: That's so great. I love it. Do you have a standing "who" meeting or "who" conversations?
Dan: Not standard, no. Always just related specifically.
Dean: Yeah, when you've got something ...
Dan: Yeah. I never have a meeting over an itinerary. I have a meeting over ... I only have a meeting in relationship to a specific project.
Dean: Right, and you're the driver of that. You're not-
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the meetings are called to make the next step, to make the next jump. I can't stand meetings for the sake of meet.
Dean: Right. The reason I was asking was I was debating whether it would be a good idea for me to ask that bit of a deadline to have a meeting with my "who" and say, "Here's what I'm thinking and I want to get together next week," and I'll package up, like actually setting my intention for what I'm going to do.
Dan: For that meeting-
Dean: The package I ... Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Well, I think you can do that, but that's for your own sense of progress.
Dean: Yeah, just til I get used to it. Yeah, clarity of progress.
Dan: I have six individuals who are ‘making it real’ people in my life. I mean, workshops and podcasts, and book projects, and that's it really. Then could be marketing, the thing I'm doing with Dean Graziosi, that could be a special project and everything like that, but I think that I'm staying in my area of strength. What I'm trying to do is not go out of my area of strength here.
Dean: Right. Yeah, which is the conversation. I think you shared that you, for 25 years, kept daily "what do I want" journal.
Dan: What do I want, yeah. 9,119 days out of a possible 12 more. There were 12 days when I didn't do it, and I don't beat myself up for that.
Dean: No. That's where I scream too.
Dan: Yeah. I don't know what I was doing on those days, but it’s coming up a lot. I'm noticing it's a thing, that there's a thing out there right now. I'm noticing a lot of different people out there with a purchase to journaling. I think it's because of the high distractability of the general environment that people are seeking a constant daily activity that keeps them grounded and focused, and so I think that journaling is becoming very, very important simply because there is so much that's eating away at people's ability to stay focused for a very long period of time.
Dean: Yeah. I think that I have journaled every day since 1996. Well, Joe Stumpf is actually the one that really was a catalyst for me in journaling. I got in that habit. The very first journal, I've got a bookshelf full of them, but the very first one is from April of 1996. I've been doing it consistently since then, so for 22 years ... I used to write and I used to do a lot of that, but it was not really with an intention of keeping anything. I would write in notebooks or in other things, but I just had that vision of ... I'd write consistently in the same notebook, the same style of notebook.
Dan: Yeah. See, here's an idea, and we can pick this up in the next podcast, but the idea I have is that the eight profit activators are actually your journal.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Okay.
Dean: Say more about that.
Dan: Well, at a certain point, the writing in the journals surfaced. It's almost, to use the model again, nobody knew you were doing this. It's kind of like me with the strategic coach. Well, where did strategic coach come from? Well, strategic coach came out of the strategy circle. Well, where did the strategy circle come from? I said, "Well, I've been keeping these notes and observing things, and I've been interacting with people about what I'm thinking about." Then one day it come out as a complete structure and process. According to my recollection, that was after, around 18 years of journaling.
All of a sudden, this has an outward form, but when I showed it to people, they were blown away by how simple it was but that was after me refining it several thousand times, or ten thousand times, or whatever it is. So why it was impressive to them is because it had all this momentum behind it of a daily working on something that they couldn't see. You really can't see the work that people have put into something. That's all hidden, and so then when it comes out, you have a clarity and a confidence and you have such a certainty about your method here that you don't have to pay attention to yourself at all.
All your attention could be on the other people. When you have the circle around you in one of the breakthrough blueprints, Dean doesn't have to think about Dean. Dean's already thought about Dean. Dean is handled, so all your attention can be totally on what's happening in their process that they can't see. All you're trying to do is get them to bring to the surface the process that they have because you're completely confident about your own process.
Dean: Yeah. That's exactly what happens. You're absolutely right. Yeah, and it's what's energizing about it because it is three days in my unique-ability. It's the thing I've been thinking about more than anybody in the world.
Dan: Yeah. Seeing Graziosi in a little video of someone giving ... They have a blog and then they have a thing that when you're finished with the blog, you can hit a button and up comes a video. The video says, "In addition to the blog I've just given you, I've given you a daily checklist." So if you hit ... In the video, they have another thing, and you hit that and they get the free checklist that comes up in addition to the blog. So they get this extra thing. Anyway, he was taking the person because when you saw the video, it was Snoozeville and the guy on there, it was just not a good video.
Dean just put him in the spotlight, had a camera there, and he says, "Let's liven up your offer for the checklist and what you're doing there." I was sitting there, I was just watching Dean and he was just, he's just a magician in front of you. Anything the person said, Dean would immediately take something that was boring the person, using the same material but he'd make it really interesting and stimulating. I said to him afterwards, I said, "Dean," I said, "It looks like magic, but you've been at this for 30 years. You've worked out every angle, so you can just take somebody's raw input and you can produce a finished product in about five seconds." It's almost like simultaneous translation. Dean can take boring and turn it into fascinating at the speed with which-
Dean: In real time-
Dan: -simultaneously transla- ... Yeah, in real time, he's doing that. He said, "My problem is that you can see that but I can't see it."
Dean: Wow, yeah. Yeah, because he's looking at it from inside. Yeah, you're right.
Dan: I remember Ted Williams, who is arguably the greatest hitter of baseball, ever. He had like a 340-something lifetime average over 20, 22 years. They asked him one day, the curve ball in baseball is the toughest pitcher that pitched to him. You've got major-leaguers and then you've got all the other players that can't hit a curve ball. They ask him, they said, "Well, you just ..." He said, "Well, I just watch the spin on the ball when it's coming in." I said, "Oh geez, all those years trying to hit a curve ball."
Dean: I just went to ... Yeah.
Dan: "I wasn't watching the spin on the ball." I said, "Most people can't even see the ball."
Dean: Right, exactly.
Dan: He slow enough to see the spin.
Dean: He just slows it up.
Dan: But that comes from years and years and years and years of just zeroing in. My top contract in the major leagues comes from picking up on one thing. If I can see this ... Probably helps to have 20/10 eyesight, but even with 20/10 eyesight, other people with 20/10 eyesight wouldn't pick up on that particular thing.
Dean: Knowing what to look for, it is interesting. We had a guy at my country club who plays on the senior tour, the golf tour, and he shared something about a putting thing for me. What they do, he looks at the back of the top of the back of the hole to see where the turf is worn, and the middle of that shows where directly across from him is the fall line of the break. It's really fascinating that when you're faced with a put that you can't ... It's not immediately easy to read, when you go up and you look at that, it's the clarity. That was one of those things that's right in front of me for all of these years, but didn't even know to look for it. That was from all of those years and years of experience that he's had with that little bit of knowledge. It's something.
Dan: Yeah. You find everybody's who's great has not just one of those, but he has about 50 of them and there are little checkoff points that nobody else knew, but he tested it out and then it amalgamates into a system. The eight profit activators, when you dig deeply, each of them has got about 25 different little adjustments.
Dean: Oh yeah. Right.
Dan: But you just kept adding to one central activator and then ... Well, yeah. There's this and this, and you have to pay attention to this. You put the salt in before the oregano.
Dean: Yeah, I'll have to share with you in the future poll because I've been layering your 80% approach on top of the eight profit activators, and in each of them there are two or three things that are easy wins that will get you 80% of the way there.
Dan: Really quickly, really quickly.
Dean: Very quickly, yeah, so it's fascinating. I love things like that where you get to experiment.
Dan: Okay, Dean. We have to go back to home base, so what's one or two or three things that we've said today that actually relate back to procrastination being a really joyful area?
Dean: Well, the joyful thing is, I think I have my actions for this week here are really turning my musings into a conversation, just having my "who" and being in conversation about what I want, turning that into actionable things for packaging up my "what's" so I can explain them to a "who".
Dan: A "who", yeah.
Dean: Yeah. I think that's going to be my one thing. We were just having a conversation about that sort of peripherally earlier in the week, and so that will be very helpful. That will be my action thing. You reminded me of the fast impact filter, or the quick-
Dan: Yeah, fast filter, fast filter.
Dean: Fast filter.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: The fast filter as ... That's going to be a very helpful tool for me that I can do in one Jackson, I could do in one unit.
Dan: It just takes one Jackson to pull that off.
Dean: Yep. Yeah. Well, that's my two things.
Dan: The thing for me is that I've got a workshop coming up, a new one, in December and I'm starting to lay out, and I'm trying to show people what their number one capability is that's marketable in the marketplace. They have capabilities around which they can build an organization, but what is the capability that they braided? The Hawaiian island model was really, really useful for me because I said, "If I just ask you what your number one capability is, you may have a hard time." I said, "If you go back 25 years, what have you always been working on," and then show them the diagram of the mountain that lies below the surface, and then just the island is at the top. Think about the difference of one of the Hawaiian islands that's still five feet under water with…
Dean: Yeah. Do they see the islands that are emerging?
Dan: Oh, yeah. They know where they are. First of all, they had to do, for a ship navigation, they had to figure out where these things were. Now they know where they are and there's dozens of them that could wreck a ship but you can't see them from the surface. Mountains grow, mountains grow like plants, and so anyway, the thing about it is that if people could just get a handle that the thing that's above water has been building for their entire lifetime, I think it gives them a sense of confidence that ... One of the problems is people say, "Well, I've got that capability. Everybody's got that capability." Well, no. Not really. They really don't because they haven't spent 20 years on this single focus and fascination and motivation to keep building something. That's just a really useful thing for people to know.
Dean: Yes. Well, it's always fascinating.
Dan: Yep. Yep. Anyway. This is a good one. We went a full Jackson overtime, but it was worth it.
Dean: That's awesome. Okay. Well, Dan, you have a great week.
Dan: You bet. Talk to you next-
Dean: I'll talk to you next ... Bye.