What's happening people?
Welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Dan Martel.
He's an entrepreneur, investor and an author.
The saying, money can't buy time is often used to emphasize the importance of not wasting your days.
But what if there was actually a way to buy back your time?
What if using your money well can actually liberate your life?
Expect to learn what the bigger it gets, the harder it gets means in business why so many successful people suffer with more chaos rather than less.
As they grow, Dan's framework for outsourcing all the stuff you don't want to do in life, what the buyback principle is, what it means to run your family like a business, how to work out things that you need to let go of and much more.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dan Martel.
The bigger it gets, the harder it gets is that a rule of business.
Most people would think so.
I think that the truth is if you do it right, that as you grow, the bigger it is, the more resources you have and it should get easier.
The way I think about it is I'm kind of on a mission to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate because I have so many friends, people I've seen around that they're great creators.
They're artists. They get a passion to solve the problem.
That's for sure. But their own craziness, it's almost like the entrepreneurial cra- like it takes a certain level of like kind of being crazy.
I mean, that's why people call them crazy because you're willing to do things that very few people are willing to do.
You can hold a vision that most people can't see.
The problem is that if you don't adjust, that version of you will be the Achilles heel to actually growing a business.
You know, and oftentimes your Achilles heel to growing a business is the thing you're best at because it's the thing that you're going to be most monotonic a lot.
You won't allow anybody else to do.
You don't know how to work through people.
So it'll get you some level of success.
But yeah, most people believe the bigger it gets, the harder it'll get.
And because of that, they they self sabotage to play small because it feels safe.
Your superpower becoming your Achilles heel is something that I've felt basically throughout my entire career and business.
To give you my most obvious, ridiculous example of this, I ran one of the biggest events companies in the UK for about 15 years.
And our first big weekly that we ran was a Saturday at a club called Riverside.
Anyone that watched Jordy Shore, which was the UK equivalent of Jersey Shore, that was where they went every Saturday.
And we were absolutely crushing.
This was the hottest event in town between a thousand and 1500 kids every weekend.
And it was just churning out cash, not insane money.
You know, we maybe make five grand a week or something like that.
Bottom line would be sort of two and a half to three something really, really great money.
And I'm 24, 23, 24, 25, phenomenal money between me and the other guys that ran the company.
And we would need to set the club up.
We'd need to hang inflatables from the ceiling, the smoke machine, the haze machine, the banners that go over the barriers outside.
You just sort of getting the club built ready for this.
Every Saturday for four years without missing a single Saturday for four years, 210, 208 Saturdays in a row.
I built the club with my business partner.
We could have paid any of the 400 students that worked for us, 400 of them.
And they would have happily done it for five or six pounds an hour.
But I was adamant that nobody else could hang the inflatable in quite the right place that it needed to go.
That what if this thing was missed off?
This would be the beginning of the downfall of the business because if the smoke machines five inches to the left, then Asian society is going to stop coming to room two to watch R&B.
And that's going to be the beginning of the end.
I'm going to be homeless under a bridge.
So for four years and the first weekend, I'll never forget the first weekend when I missed it, was because I had such a bad stomach infection thing that it just ripped me out of it and I couldn't.
And then sort of the veils fell from my eyes and I realized why have I spent four years of Saturdays from 11am until two, sometimes three in the afternoon when I could have been having fun, it could have been working on the business, could have been doing anything as opposed to just spending a bit of time training somebody up and, you know, 60 pounds a week to get someone
else to do it. It's one of those things because I had my equivalent experience on that just processing physical mail every Sunday, four hours.
Go get the mail from the PO box and just sit there and process mail.
What was the business? It was a software company that sold enterprise and it was just like contracts, checks.
Like this old school is not 2004, 2005.
And it was, you know, I remember reaching out to the CEO because I just thought, I got to be doing this wrong.
And he laughed, I said, who processes your mail?
This guy ran like a hundred million dollar insurance company and he says, well, my assistant.
Well, how do you, you know, what is that and how do you find them?
I just thought like that's not something people that start companies should have in the early days.
I had all these beliefs around it.
But, you know, it's funny because it's also the reason you're successful because there's like a level of attention to detail that's required.
That creates a product like you obviously created a product.
And I was a big, I have this like a secret addiction to reality TV.
So I'm very familiar with Jory Shore.
Money enough. And then again, it's just at a certain point, maybe it would have been six months, not four years, you know, handing it off to somebody else could have been a better use of your time.
Even just even energy, if you think about like just the amount of stuff people do, they shouldn't be doing and how much headspace it takes with the energy.
Whereas they could be a lot more present with the people they're with or more creative.
It's it robs, you know, distractions rob a lot of people from bigger, bigger visions.
Yeah, it's, it's kind of embarrassing to realize, you know, there's something called path dependency, which you might be familiar with.
So path dependency is also called the Einsteinling effect.
And it explains why we kind of get locked into particular modes of working.
So for instance, the QWERTY keyboard on laptops is a path dependency from the QWERTY keyboard on typewriters.
Yeah, where the most common letters would be out on the little fingers and letters weren't close together, so it wouldn't fire to at the same time.
There are other layouts for keyboards.
Yeah, my software programming friends use different ones because they're more efficient.
Some of them actually have like four directions.
It's like a touch and it's like a it's a direction.
Oh, so when you hit it, you can.
Yeah, so it's like, I think there's only 10 buttons, but you push it in a direction.
Oh my God. So you're never moving your finger away.
No. Your finger has a button.
Organically, it's like 150 words a minute.
So you've got this path dependency and it's basically, you know, the entirety of the insight is the tools that got you here won't get you there.
There's a lot, I think, that sort of correlates from your background to mine.
I didn't grow up in a trailer park quite so much, but very much sort of super working class environment.
The idea of leverage, the idea of outsourcing, you know, really was not a skill that was instilled into you from childhood.
It's a type of physics that you have to learn when you're in 28 and fold this into your work, your worldview with your Puritan work ethic guilt that you have over getting somebody else to do something that you could.
Because you've been told the opposite of your whole life.
I mean, I don't know about you, but like I was told by my dad or the people around me, like if you want done something right, do it yourself.
Correct. Yes. And, you know, just like all these money beliefs or outsourcing beliefs or you just hear it all the time, who does the real work?
And like it's frowned upon to be somebody that doesn't do certain things.
Like you should be somebody who knows how to fix your car and take care of your stuff.
It's like till you just have so much you're trying to do that, it's just physically impossible.
I mean, like, I don't know.
I just luckily, you know, 28, 30 years old, I realized that there's no way I can do what I want to do and possibly do it all.
And that was like, so I'm sure you know, Neval Ravikant and his stuff.
That was like when I understood the kind of the high level concept of leverage.
Like that was like, I've always been like, I was at four hour work week when it came out, you know, did.
And that's what really inspired me to stop doing the mail.
Right. I was like, okay, this is.
Thanks Tim. Yeah. Yeah, that, you know, email, the autoresponder, messages, all that crazy stuff.
I mean, I picked some stuff up, left the rest.
But Neval taught me, you know, I moved to Silicon Valley and started building tech companies there.
And it's just, I'm not scared of winning.
I'm scared of what I'd have to get.
I'm scared of having to renegotiate the new standards at that level with everybody in my life.
Because that's what happens with success is that you start worrying about like, it's like if you lose weight.
Like most people don't even want to lose weight because then they got to keep it off.
Because if they put it back on, then they fail.
So it's easier to just maintain what they got.
Like I don't want 10 million.
And like what's funny is the language they use, they actually like poo poo it.
They like, it's not about this stuff.
You know, it's like, I'm not a car guy.
I hear all this stuff and I'm like, no, it's actually a lot of fun driving around in a fun car.
Like so don't say it's not, you're not a car guy.
You're telling yourselves these stories so you don't have to attain because if you do, then you're going to have to ask yourself like, what's this new level of responsibility?
What's funny is that most people when they start, and I know this is true for me, when I started the mental model I had about success was actually a lot, I was way more driven.
It's when I got up the mountain and I was halfway and I had something to lose now.
I started getting scared and acting out of, you know, trying to protect.
So I call that the big dog syndrome when you become the big dog amongst your peer group.
It feels good, but you know inside you're just not there.
And honestly, I want to say this about your pod.
Like what I love about what you've created is you continue to push.
Like you pushed you. Like it's just, it's really cool from outside watching because I'm like, oh no, this is a guy that cares about the craft.
And there's no like, if anything, every resource you get, you're like, how do I pour it back in?
And I think that's, I didn't have that when I started.
It was something that I think I had to develop to respond to some of my desires and honestly do the work and be honest with myself.
But yeah, I think everything is like, you know, pain of fear.
And then there's, you know, if you're lucky, you get to a place where you get pulled forward from a desire to do something bigger and that's a different energy, right?
There's a dark energy of like moving away from pain.
And then there's a light energy of moving towards some level of creating something that's never been created before.
Yeah, I think if you don't ever learn to let go of that fear of failure, as you become more successful, the fear grows rather than diminishes because of that.
It's a dirty energy. Yeah, that higher altitude that you fall from.
Okay, so getting into the buyback your time and the buyback principle, it seems to me that there's sort of going to be broadly two groups of people that this applies to.
The first one is going to be, you know, aspiring little bit of disposable income within the business professionals and then somebody, another group who maybe don't have the entrepreneurial side, but have got a little bit of disposable income within their personal lives and they're just wanting to sort of free themselves up for that.
Take me through the buyback principle, how this works for someone that's never been introduced to.
Yeah, so the concept that I learned that helped me get to this place is calendar over capacity.
So, and it sounds so subtle, but the mistake to make is to add people to your life that can do what you already do because then it costs money and you didn't actually get an ROI.
So I always look at my calendar.
I don't add capacity. So like if I was a logo designer and I was overwhelmed, most of them would go hire another logo designer.
But what you should do is figure out the other stuff that isn't logo designing, have somebody take that off your plate so that you could do logo design because that's what you get paid the most money.
The buyback principle states, you don't hire people to grow your business.
You grow your business by buying back your time because if I buy back my time, then I can go do the thing that is the killie's heel or the friction point or the bottleneck of why I'm not growing.
And if you do that, that's where you can build a business you don't grow to hate because as you grow, you have more freedom.
And it's kind of bananas because when people see it and it doesn't even take money.
So like, how do I get somebody else to help me with something?
It could be an intern, right?
It could be a friend. You can literally ask friends.
You like you said, you could ask one of the 400 students.
And the whole premise is look at your calendar for the past two weeks and just ask yourself, where am I been doing tasks that are not things I enjoy doing?
Okay, I call them energy suckers that I could have paid somebody at least a quarter of what my hours worth.
Okay, so a quarter or less to do.
And the reality is if you're doing anything on that list, you're working against your dreams.
Like it's this is this is mathematical equations.
If your if value creation in the world is what value create within a unit of time, and let's call it an hour, then your ability to create value in that hour is the most the most important thing.
So you should not be doing anything for eight bucks an hour, setting up the design thing when closing another or getting another contract to go promote another show could bring you on average $100 an hour for your effort.
Like it's just bad math.
And that's why like my background in software really kind of made me think about like, what's the first principles to leverage, right?
All those four master skills.
Okay, cool. But how do I translate that into some kind of equation that I can kind of run through this loop?
So the buyback loop, I run through it all the time.
All what is the loop? The loop is as soon as you feel pain.
Okay, so I always say that most entrepreneurs hit a place where they hit a pain line, okay, where their opportunity, they could say yes, but saying yes, would create chaos in their calendar.
And guys like us, that's every day.
We are not at the mercy of not enough opportunities.
Some people are that's not us.
And what you want to do is that when you accidentally get to a place where you have that pain, then you have to go to the audit.
So it's audit transfer fill.
So audit stands for looking at my calendar two week window and literally printing it off.
If you're diligent in putting stuff in your account, it's a lot easier.
But if you're not, that's cool.
And you just highlight and read things that take your energy and dollar sign one to four, one dollar sign is very inexpensive, four dollar sign is saying, paying somebody to do what you do.
And then you take all the reds and all the one dollar sign stuff and you put it on the stuff and you put them in a bucket.
And that is the only person you should hire next.
And if you don't, you're literally making it hard on yourself.
So I always, when people see me scale companies fast, they go, how did you do that?
Well, I just, I follow that principle.
Now, as you get bigger, now all of a sudden you're outsourcing more complex skills.
But that is actually the, that's the skill to learn.
How do you hire a creative director?
How do you hire a general manager?
How do you hire VP of sales?
Like these are, you know, it's easy to hire an administrative assistant.
And even some people have a hard time with that one.
But like learning how to build the machine that runs the machine is what I call it.
And that is where, you know, some people say work on the business versus in the business.
I always use my calendar because I want to, I want to literally audit, then transfer.
So the way I transfer is video cameras.
I literally record myself doing the thing.
So for example, I do triathlons.
I have a lot, I got one of these fancy bikes.
I got two bikes, my road bike and my TT bike, and they have like computer chips and all this stuff and can't like all the Garmin devices.
And it's actually like a pain in the butt to me, the maintenance of it.
So I had my assistant did a video of me doing it.
Here's how I do the chain.
Here's how I plug the machines in.
It has to be done in this cycle.
And I just record myself for like 12 minutes and then message them that video.
They created the SOP for the bike maintenance.
They followed the bike maintenance.
And then if there's any tweaks, I put it in the document, but it's got a training video and it's got a document.
So I call that the camcorder method.
That's the transfer side.
So how do I take something in my calendar I don't want to do no longer transfer it and then fill.
This is the part most people get wrong.
Most people hire folks before they know what they're going to do that new time.
So then they feel lazy, then they feel guilty.
So they hire an assistant and all of a sudden they have 10 hours back and they just, they watch Netflix, they chill out, they go to the front side.
That's not what I'm, I want to help people build empires.
Like the subtitle of my book is build your empire.
And for me, an empire is a life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from.
Like I really want to encourage every creator in the world, every entrepreneur, every artist, get to a place where as you think to create, you have the resources to create.
And the constraint is a byproduct of your creativity.
And the fill part is asking yourself, well, who do I need to become?
So if I'm a hundred K a year and I want to make half a million, well, what are the skills you get acquired, what are the character traits you have to acquire, what are the, what, what, how do I look at the world?
Dude, most of his beliefs, right?
It's the money beliefs.
For me, I had to like work in the early days of like valuing my time.
My self-worth was almost zero.
When I started off, the reason why I worked a hundred hour a week is because I didn't value me.
But you want to prove to yourself that you know the piece of shit.
All of it. Yeah. And the end of the, I'm not enough.
The subtext that you've been taught from every working class person ever is your value that you add to the world is not your output.
It is how hard you work. And if I was a fundamental problem with leverage, you don't understand that you can multiply inputs over outcomes.
Yep. It's not about effort.
Cause if it was, if it was hard, if it was about working hard, I would have made a lot of money when I was putting roofs on houses.
Yeah. Mark Groves says, uh, there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
That's leverage. It's beautiful.
Yeah. Beautiful. So that was like, that was the beliefs, the, the, the traits that had to develop.
And that's the fill part.
And if you don't do that, you don't actually complete the loop.
So some people are really good at auditing their calendar, hiring people, transferring the stuff to them, but then they don't know what they need to do.
So they don't evolve. They don't become better.
And they literally oscillate.
So what, what do they do?
What do the people who fail at F do?
They do a lot of stuff. Some of them take time off because they've been burning the candle at both ends.
Some of them have vices that they don't even realize are taking them away from becoming better.
I call them the five-time assassins.
They, you know, they get working in the business again.
They just kind of move around.
It's like, uh, like, That bit's being filled.
Some people, I'm going to do that.
I'm going to do that. I'm going to obsess over website design or something else.
Yeah. Yeah. They launch a new project.
They self-sabotage. Hand grenades.
Psh. It's like, why, yeah, why do you need a new website?
You just did it 16 months ago.
It was like, I don't know.
It could be better. It's like, yeah, it could be, but is that the right problem to solve?
So they get, that's why I say distractions has been the biggest destroyer of wealth because they just, they, because the, the, the fallacies, they think they're actually being productive because they're working.
That's why the whole like, when people say hustle, I know what they mean.
I just don't agree with them because their version of hustle is working a lot.
My version of hustle is doing things that scare me.
So if you're hustling, it means you're inherently doing something, ideally for the first time, a little anxiety, right?
I think you should choose goals to grow you.
Like I, when I look at opportunity, one of the big filters for which direction I go is, will this teach me some new skills?
Will this push me outside of my comfort zone?
Whereas most people, their hustle list is literally stuff they know how to do.
And there's nothing hard about it.
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It's interesting. You made a passing comment just before about how you're the only constraint to what you put out into the world is your own supply of creativity, essentially.
That's so antithetical, I think, to how most people experience life, that they have all of these things and ideas and sure, probably 80, 95% of them are bullshit and not going to work.
But they don't even have the opportunity to stress test whether they are bullshit or not, because they haven't got the ability to deploy it.
Is what are the five criteria that you've taught somebody to look for that after they're done the thing that you could prompt other people to give feedback on as a sensor on how well it did?
So I have sensors set up in my companies that report up so that there's thresholds, just like you would do for a production line where it's like red, green, yellow.
And unless it goes to yellow, red, I don't need to know about it.
So you could ask yourself, for example, in your situation, what would some of those numbers be?
Would it be attendance over time?
Would it be some level text message?
Hey, how is the night? You know, feedback one out of five.
Plains, customer complaints.
Exactly. So then, because this is the part that broke my heart the first time I realized it, you may have somebody on your team that are going to get better numbers than you.
And I'll tell you, man, just even recently, I have a company I'm involved in that coaches, software CEOs, biggest in the world, and I hired a CEO to run it.
It was actually in Austin in February, I came here and I transitioned, I guess, from the guy to the talent or whatever.
And he asked me not to come to 98% of everything and just do a 45 minute Q&A.
And I went, I did my Q&A and then they did the NPS score at the end.
And they did the event net promoter score, which is like a customer satisfaction score.
And it was the highest we'd ever gotten.
That one hurt. Because I mean, essentially, the business in many ways, in extension of who I am, I was part proud, but I'm not going to lie, man.
It really hurt. And then it made me question, where else in my business life am I bottlenecking the team?
How can people who say, okay, Dan, I trust that you're not lying to me.
I believe that I can overcome my Puritan work ethic from my working class background.
But I've got this existential connection to being the guy.
I have this sort of need to feel needed and to contribute and stuff like that.
How can people learn to relinquish some of that existential guilt?
It's beautiful because I actually want them to lean into it.
So I love that people have that.
If you didn't, you're going to fail in business.
So let's just start that.
So they've got the right desire.
It's just their approach is wrong.
So like most people, they like that.
They hire people and they want to see the person succeed.
So they jump in and help them out.
Well, you just hired somebody and then did the job for them.
So you didn't actually buy back any time.
So how about instead, for example, one of my philosophies is we train, we don't tell.
So if I see something that somebody is doing wrong, if I outsource something, or if I give somebody else accountability for something, I just say, hey, I used to do this.
I no longer do it. You now own it.
There's clear ownership.
Anytime I see a defect in their work, it didn't get done the way I would have loved to or I would have done it.
You write it down and you train them.
Why would you do it that way?
Well, that way I record the training.
So then the next person, if somebody else doesn't work out, they get that training.
So most CEOs, this is fascinating to me and I got to get the stats around this.
Most people spend more time training customers.
I'm going to be prepared to evolve through this.
I need to go back and go, you know when I said that I stand on the front door?
Guess what? I don't stand on the front door anymore, but you still have to.
So there is this. Yeah, you sort of create these odd standards for yourself when...
Another thing as well is at the beginning of your business, just rolling up your sleeves, spit and so does, is the way to go because there's no one else to do it.
And you don't have a fucking spare capital.
Slingings of the axe. Yes.
Just go. Yeah. Yeah. So it is the right way.
Okay. I really like this sort of framework and I think it's important for us to get people across the line with this philosophically first before getting into the tactics.
It's the mindset and beliefs first and then they'll do the thing.
I think so. So hopefully we've managed to erode some of the blockages that people may have had.
I really want to get like just super duper duper tactical.
Just before we even get to that, the pain line that you mentioned there, what are the warning indicators that you have crossed the pain line threshold?
I mean, it's everything from being on your phone the whole time you're on vacation, having your partner in life upset at you all the time for being delayed.
I mean, I did it all. I mean, so I'm just kind of like, what else did I do?
It's even like, I think 10 years ago, I decided to take on a new project and I didn't talk to my wife and all of a sudden I was doing calls at eight o'clock and we had kids and she's like, what are you doing?
Like you hadn't done this in years.
Oh, I started a new thing.
And I never talked to her about it.
And so like over the years, I've just like, oh, that's a symptom.
Not having space to think, not having space for yourself.
I think a lot of people, again, there's no self-worth.
So they'll start sacrificing the workout, sacrificing the routine, sacrificing the resets, the recharges.
Oh, this is noble. Yeah.
This is what builders do.
Like they're dying on the sword and it's like, no, you just suck.
Like it's actually not the way to do it.
You just don't know how because I can show you.
I wrote about it and I can introduce you to people and Richard Brantz was a big inspiration for me watching this guy like literally just live life and also run billion dollar companies.
So it's possible you just need to learn the skill set.
But the symptoms are just overwhelmed.
But and physically, dude, I work with a lot of people.
I talk about in my book, one of my clients, Stuart, he had like, got shingles, like even physical response.
Have you ever gotten shingles?
No, what is it? Shingles, I got them once.
I had this spot on my back.
It was like red and kind of patchy and it hurt when I touched it.
And I went to my doctor, Aaron, and said, I got this thing and he showed it to me.
He goes, oh, he goes, what's, he goes, you stressed out?
I said, nah, man, things are awesome.
You know, he goes, what's what's going on in your life?
I said, well, just close the new round for my company.
So close about a million and a half bucks.
Oh, we're having a baby.
My wife's pregnant. Just found out and oh, we decided to move back to Canada.
And he goes one sec. He leaves.
He goes, gets this this this pill box or whatever.
And then he goes and he pulls up Google and he types and he goes, this is what it was about to look like.
Shingles, it's attached to your nervous system and it literally is your body's response to stress.
So there's physical adrenal fatigue.
Some people have that. If you've never felt that it's literally like you're drunk all the time or hung over.
Sorry, you're hung over all the time, but you can't, it's like, you don't know why.
Anxiety attacks. That's a big one that a lot of the women typically have.
I mean, so there's as much as like I used to be the guy that was like positive mental attitude, mindset, put like, can't deal in and how to, oh man, I give it to me.
I literally would say to myself, I'd rather die.
I'd like give it. I'm not going to stop.
I'd rather die. So, so either the world gets easier or I'm going to just die.
And that's at least I figured out where my my edges are.
So I just think if anybody feels that, that's the pain line where, and really it's just asking yourself if you tripled your business over the next three months, what would break?
Because most people, they couldn't even absorb opportunity because of the way they built it.
So saying no to things that should be yeses because there's just no spec capacity for you or the team or whatever.
That email from a friend that wants to make an intro to the guy that could probably add a zero to your revenue.
And you, it's, you don't even know you're doing this.
You just slow, you put, you start unstuck.
You know what I mean? Then one day after the gym on a Saturday afternoon, you're sitting down to do your image of feeling good about yourself and you reply two weeks later and the person's like, yeah, we already went a different direction.
It's so subtle that most people wouldn't even know they're doing it.
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Okay, so what are the principles here?
Someone has realized that they've crossed the pain line.
They're in that threshold.
They're saying no to things that they should be saying yes to.
They don't have time to think.
Maybe they're feeling more stressed and let's get tactical.
Like I just love it. I can go to the extreme.
So the extreme where I live is I don't do anything that I don't love to do that requires my unique.
Okay. So we've got administrative time.
Yeah. That's level one calendar scheduling email.
I always say inboxing calendar is where the opportunity is.
If you really want to go full time with somebody, if you have somebody process every new email that comes to you, I'm not saying they have to reply on your behalf, although it's fun, they at least can start to understand where their to-dos are because it's in your inbox.
Just downstream from that, actually, when it comes to email, what's the process from there?
You know, you are this complex decision engine.
No one fully knows whether you're going to say yes or no to a particular thing.
What is your step-by-step inbox management triage?
You're talking my love language right now.
I will give you the goods.
So here's the concept is, you know, in your inbox, even if you get a thousand emails a day, five thousand, like there's certain things that are just don't require immediate attention.
Right? So what I like to do is, you know, even for your hire somebody, just go start setting up some rules.
Right? So like there's in every email tool, there's filters, and you could set one up for just newsletters and say anything with the unsubscribe link, put it in this folder, set a task every Friday for 45 minutes to process, and that way you go in there, you scan through, you read the ones you want to read.
Like that could be a beginning start.
And then what I do is I have seven folders.
So the big idea for me is all companies I'm involved in, if I have different domains in my Gmail, they all go to one spot.
So I have all mail goes into my primary inbox.
And then what I have within there is a label in Gmail or a folder in Outlook that is- Well, that's what you're using.
You're using Gmail. I use Gmail to do all this.
Gmail web? Yeah, I've tried front.
Like front app was, I went there for a bit, but because it does some cool routing task stuff, but we went back.
Superhuman. Superhuman.
I don't know if it has this feature.
I'm assuming it does. What I love about Gmail is the delegated access.
So I can give access to my assistant and her assistant because she's that busy, without giving them password to my Gmail, because my Gmail is essentially- Everything.
Vulnerability. Yeah, you just, there's certain things, attack vectors you just don't want to do.
Yep. And so then the folders are my folder, Dan, exclamation mark, Dan Martell.
And then that's where my phone goes to.
When I open up my email on my phone, it goes to that folder.
Okay. So I never ever, and this is the hardest part.
I remember when I first did it, I just kept checking.
Kept checking, right? Again, you teach people how to treat you.
So if you hire an assistant, tell her to manage the inbox, and then you keep checking and replying whenever it's a week or whatever, then she's going to go, well, if I just wait long enough, Chris or Dan's going to reply to it.
You know, so that was a hard one.
And then what I do after that, and these are the, the, the, there's seven, the other ones are like finance, anything, you know, financial related reporting, all my updates.
I want that one spot. It's easy to find.
But the big one is responded to respond and review.
Okay. So what happens is email comes in and this is what Richard Branson showed me how to do this, where essentially every morning he ran his, his, everybody that needed anything from him went through Helen, his assistant.
She's still with them now.
I think it's 16 years she's been with them.
She travels with them, I'm assuming still, and they would just have breakfast.
And essentially she would only bring to him the things that she didn't know how to deal with.
But again, she's been there for that long.
Everybody knows her. She knows his preferences.
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Really lovely. And I think that it's, it's good to have spent a good chunk of time on the admin thing, given that that's where most people will at least begin at.
And maybe some people will stop.
And I want to say this Chris, if anybody's stuck on this, because I think the admin wants such a heady piece, they want to know like, what do you, I have a document, 47 pages.
Okay. If anybody wants it, just follow me on Instagram.
That's all I ask. I message me EA and I will send them the Google doc.
It's my internal doc. I just sanitize it.
It's got preference section.
It's got travel stuff. It's got my five north star principles.
Like I think once you see it, like once, I remember one time I paid a guy to buy the subway SOP, the subway, the sandwich place, the standard operating procedure.
Because I mean like, I want to know, I wanted to see the, I'm a nerd.
I'm like, what's a McDonald's one look like?
Like, wouldn't you be fascinating to know what do's a McDonald's franchise, what do they get?
This huge big operation.
But it's beautiful because once you see it, it's like, oh, because if you've never created an SOP, you may even know how to word it, how to categorize it.
I mean, for example, the subway, when I remember, they had a diagram of where the store needed to be and it was a right turn corner near, and then I think it was within two miles from a university.
So they had all these details that this is the optimal location.
And I would have never even thought of putting a diagram.
I mean, I'm like, I'm writing words.
They're like, no, put diagrams.
Like, oh yeah, that makes sense.
Pictures. So, so I, if anybody wants that, I'll send it to them.
But that's cool. Instagram.
That's really cool. Okay.
Uh, level two. Level two is delivery.
So doing the thing, just like you were outside freezing your, you know, it's once you have somebody helping with the administrative tasks, which is like back office, then start looking at where in the workflow, somebody else can help you with delivering the thing that you deliver.
It doesn't mean you don't do it.
If you, if you paint houses, like paint the house, but maybe there's an account manager, maybe you have enough work where you need to start hiring somebody to help you with coordination and other stuff.
So it kind of, usually the admin person can play that part a little bit until it requires somebody is a little bit more knowledgeable in the, you know, the domain.
And I always say for that one, it's, it's onboarding and support.
That's what, so if you have any aspect of what you do, like this pod, like having somebody help, once you approve the guests schedule, coordinate, da da da da da.
So onboarding and support, answering questions.
Somebody else takes over that.
So that's delivery. Third is marketing and, and really the big idea is build a marketing system.
Most people do marketing, then have a marketing system.
So a marketing system is somebody else that wakes up every day and looks at traffic and campaigns.
That's the way I look at it.
Like, I mean, how many times have I changed something and broken a landing page or broken, you know, change a color and some CSS file and then the button is the same color as the background and nobody knows how to check out.
I mean, it's just stuff like that.
So having somebody that wakes up every day, delivery, like you built the thing, let's just try it out for a while.
Then you're always, you're reactive and it becomes really hard for people on your team to even, I mean, I used to be the guy where they'd ask them a book I'm reading, because they wanted to get ahead of the whiplash.
Like literally, I remember a guy saying, Hey man, what book are you reading?
I was like, why? He goes, cause we want to get ready for like what you decide you want to do next with the bit.
I was like, am I that bad?
He's like, a hundred percent.
Like, yeah. So, so that to me is it just, there's a whole strategies on how do you run a company that most people don't want to do, right?
Around strategic planning, reporting, scorecards.
Just before we go into level four, what about the sort of internals for a business?
The use of Slack rules around that.
So, async communication, stuff like that.
Can you dig into the nitty-gritty?
Yeah, I just, I just literally did leadership training on Slack, which I think it could be one of my best pieces of training I've ever done.
Was that available? It was internal.
I'll put it on the internet.
Just mess with me on Instagram if people want it.
Cool. I'll tell Sam to consider putting it out.
He's so, he doesn't think my stuff is cool as I think it is, but because the thing is Slack can just become another inbox and it is for most companies.
What I love about Slack and the problem that it solves is it creates an organizational knowledge.
And I think that's what makes it more powerful than email.
And what I teach people in regards to Slack is the difference between one-on-one.
Cause like even if you start, if you're using Slack and you're direct messaging me for stuff that should have been put in a channel, then that also takes away from the potential it could have had, which is the power to create search and discovery.
Like the reason why, I remember Gary V said this once.
He said, my competitive advantage is continuity.
And most people would never understand that if they didn't understand how to operate and lead people, but having somebody on your team for seven years is incredibly valuable in regards to the understanding of why decisions were made, why we went this direction, where things, yeah, context.
So Slack's value prop is organizational knowledge, but you don't get that if you don't use it, or you don't get that if you don't structure it, right?
You don't get that if you don't integrate it, right?
So that's what I was teaching everybody is like there's certain, like there's one-on-one in person and virtual.
So like even sometimes in the office, I'll tell people that meeting should be a Zoom meeting.
They're like, but we're all here.
I know, but you're not allowing yourself like sharing, like when you're on a Zoom meeting, or even on your phone on a Zoom call, it's easy to share.
When you're in a room and you're like talking about the diagram of the thing, it's like, I got to get my laptop, I got to pull up.
You just don't do it and you lose the richness of the potential communication.
So to me, I think Slack is a beautiful tool and understanding one-on-one, one-to-many, digital or in-person.
Like you don't fire somebody over Slack, but I have to tell people this, right?
You don't criticize publicly in a channel, right?
Praise in public, criticize in private, all these kinds of things.
But so that would be level three is the marketing systems.
Level four is sales. And I call it the freedom stage.
And the reason why it's a freedom stage is at that level, if you can actually trust somebody else to take my own agency someday, and he's told me if I help edit the pod that someday, he'll vouch for me and send clients, it's like, so I need him to not be doing this thing so that he can go do the thing to help us build the bigger thing.
And I think that's like a big part of it, learning to let go, doing the work.
Dude, you know how much of it is all childhood stuff?
It's- Old roads lead back to childhood trauma.
Dude, everything. I actually have this thing I teach about like goals and current and, essentially there's limiting beliefs and negative beliefs, right?
Like really everything comes out.
Like why did you not achieve that goal?
I either have negative beliefs around achievement, rich people are evil, or I have limiting beliefs in my skill.
And then people go, well, how do I overcome that?
And then I go, go back. Yeah, you're looking in the wrong direction.
Yeah, I mean, trauma is a book we're meant to read, not just put on a shelf.
And it's in that space of doing that work.
And that's why I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate personal development program.
Correct. It's the coolest thing in the world.
James Cleer talks about building a business, being a personal growth vehicle masquerading as a capitalist pursuit.
Totally. Totally. It's- I remember when I finally occurred to me that my work was literally becoming a better version of myself every day.
I was like- Well, there's just so few- There's so few places, I guess your relationship is one of them too, it's of your intimate relationship is one.
There's so few places that you go to that push you beyond your acceptable limits.
It's, you know, your morning walk, isn't that your Saturday afternoon pickleball game, isn't that all of these things are done.
This is one of the problems that I had with CrossFit back in the day, even as an avid ex-Crossfitter with the injuries to prove it.
Yeah, you and I both. I never liked the get comfortable being uncomfortable thing, because the discomfort in CrossFit was always done through choice.
So, yes, Fran is an ugly workout, 21, 15, 9 of thrusters- An aluminum taste in the back.
Thrusters and pull-ups.
Yeah, it was not fun. But you chose to do that.
What would be real discomfort would be me telling you that you need to sit on the couch for a week and not train.
Like that's actual discomfort.
There's so few areas that you get to where the things that you have to or get to do are sort of forced onto you that there's real pressure coming in from the outside.
That's interesting. So, what you're saying is the frames of things you do that are hard that you get, that you decided to do is a different type of hard than the things that happened to you that you didn't decide to do.
Of course, even your triathlons or your iron man's or whatever, is fucking hard.
But let's be serious. It's a hard that you chose to do.
Yeah. You know, it's obviously fit even to person that's 450 pounds.
But, you know- A lot of a child.
I literally about to say loss of a parent.
You know, like you've got this thing and it was a shock and fuck the funeral is next week and I have to hold family together.
Okay. Like that, I'm not advising losing a parent as a personal growth strategy.
But, you know, that's real discomfort.
And I think that we get a little taste of that when there are other people that are thoroughly invested that we can't get away from.
You know, even friendships don't necessarily push the limits in the same way.
Because you can, ah, fuck them.
Fuck them. They're out of my life.
It doesn't matter. This is your fiance or your husband.
You know, that's a little bit- That's a little bit- Same level of heart.
Correct. So you're- Not a fire and investor.
Yeah. You have to hold on and with business, like unless you're going to, what, close the business down, you're not you.
And that's why it is a personal growth vehicle because it pulls you, it is progressive overload on a treadmill rather than road running.
Yeah. Right. It is moving at a pace and you have to keep up.
And if you don't, things will start flying off on the sides and eventually it'll spit you out the back.
Yeah. Ah, so yeah, I think, I think that's an important insight to remember.
Which is the part when we go back, especially I love you said progressive overload, it's like the volume has to go up, which means I now have to maintain a level of volume to make forward progress, which is why people are scared to make forward progress.
Because it's- That's a new bar.
It's a new bar. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a better and worse ways to think about this.
For instance, we did a video about a year ago with Chris Bumstead talking about 10 exercises, every guy needs to blah, blah, blah.
You only had 10 exercises for the rest of your life.
What would you do? They did a million plays in 24 hours.
And you have this sort of odd sense of elation and fear and wistfulness at the same time.
And it's silly because it's about plays, but it's a nice microcosm for bigger, sort of more existentially connected things.
And the other thing is that when I talk about plays on the show, it's not something that we focus on tremendously, but it is very well metriced and dashboarded.
So unpack that to what you've, what did you find fascinating about that?
So the fact is million plays in 24 hours on a video, or we did Tim Kennedy last week, Trump.
How did Dr. Mike's do compare?
Because I saw his answer.
His fucking, his crush, but not.
His answer was actually better answer.
I mean, well, look, who am I to say that Dr.
Mike with his Jewish foreskin is better than Chris Bumstead.
Dude, I've laughed so hard when he did Lizard, what is his name, liver king.
That one was so funny. He's built different, man.
Mike's built different.
In fact, Mike is the other half of the new thing that I'm launching later.
Oh, so jealous. Any more opportunity to do more stuff with him.
So we, we set a new bar. This could be anybody that runs a business that has a great training session that gets in there and just gravities at 70% of what it is.
Usually you go, oh my God, I feel super human.
The sleeper's dialed, the creatine was dialed, the caffeine was dialed, whatever you did.
And then you have this odd sense of elation and fear or wistfulness at the same time with that great PR session, with that new record breaking video, because you go, oh my God, yes, that's a new record.
And immediately after that, you think, oh, fuck, that's the new bar.
That's now the new standard.
In order for me to get our best performing video ever, it needs to be 1.1 million within 24 hours.
Needs to be 1.2 million.
In order for me to get my next PR, I need to PR.
A PR, I only just PR today in a workout or in a pitch.
Stressing yourself up.
Pick your pursuit of choice.
And, you know, there's this, that framing, you know, it's a really lovely little sort of microcosm of the peril of success, the peril of pushing yourself to a new level, because that then becomes the bar that you measure yourself against.
I've posited an ideal. I've achieved an ideal.
And now if I want to grow, I need to beat the thing that previously was a dream, now has been achievable.
And I need to get what you tell me, I need to go even further than that to do the, to do the next thing again.
It's like a reverse hedonic adaptation, where it's like goal adaptation.
And yeah, it's just, it's interesting.
It's one of those things that, you know, I sort of play with, with regards to the show.
And I think fucking about with metrics is one useful way to teach yourself this lesson.
But at least what I've learned is that after a while, you realize that there are other, more important metrics hiding behind those.
So George, one of my friends who is a great writer, talks about after you reach a certain number of followers on Twitter, you realize that it's not about how many retweets you get, it's about who retweets.
And, you know, he doesn't look at the number of plays or the number of exposures that something's got.
He checks to see if Paul Graham or Elon Musk's retweeted it, because that's what he's bothered about.
Yeah, he's bothered about that.
He's, you know, and what you really learn from that is that you're talking about sort of depth, you're talking about resonance, about sort of the quality of the work.
It's the concept of what is it qualitative versus quantitative.
So like if you, if you quant everything, my buddy, Shani, said this, he said, if we split test everything, we'll end up deporn.
So there needs to be art.
Right. Right. Taste. Yeah.
Taste, you know, curation.
But that to me is, you know, back to, I think he said a few times, just like we're here to create and express ourselves and we need the data to give us a feedback loop, but the real big wins.
Like, have you ever heard of the local maximum problem?
So in software, it's like we talk about all the time because we could be on to something that actually has product market fit, but it's only going to have an impact to a certain size of a total addressable market.
And to go on the journey of trying to make this thing, you know, appeal to a larger group of people, we have to kind of work backwards.
And it's scary. I mean, that's the hard thing about building innovation is sometimes, and I think even Elon talked about this for his like neural net when they were building the self driving, like he woke up one day and looked at it and he said, we have to rebuild this whole thing.
And most people would not have ripped it all out to rebuild it, but he just, he could see we're at the local maximum.
Two great examples of that.
Three, actually one for my personal life.
So Tiger Woods gets to a good level of maturity within his game, but his original swing had a lot of inefficiencies in it.
So he had sort of unnecessary movement as he was pulling back and he learned from a coach, like you're really good, but you're not going to be world class unless we get rid of this, which meant that he needed to get worse before he could then rebuild things from getting better.
And the rebuilding was even harder because he had to de-program the habits that he'd spent, you know, a dex level is a profile assessment.
And I like a lot of them for an assistant.
I like Colby a it's a great one.
You want to, and the thing with an assistant is don't hire somebody that maps to you.
You want to find the opposite.
So it's like, like a key.
If you're a high researcher, you want to find somebody that's low.
If you're a low follower, you want to find something high.
Like it sounds obvious, but I know some people hire their friends to be their assistant.
That's not a winning strategy.
So the other one we use is profile.
Like, see, we use a bunch of different ones.
I let the companies decide, but the big idea is just the default cognitive pattern that that person inherently like people have certain ways to act and certain ways people act will be better for a role than others.
So different leadership styles, different and what we're using to assess the profile XT is one of them profile.
But what's neat is like, if we're hiring a VP of sales, we can actually profile the other people on the team, the other vice presidents, and it'll tell us if a candidate is because of the way they are, if they're going to cause conflicts, it doesn't say don't hire them.
It just gives you a data point.
How accurate do you find those to be?
Well, the very accurate regards to like how they're going to work together, but really it's the maturity of the person to be self aware that they're going to work with to solve that, but it tells you how to solve it.
This person is usually going to act like this in a meeting.
So you're going to have to act like this.
But if you're self aware, you'll adjust, right?
If you talk a lot and somebody doesn't talk, you hopefully should shut up and, you know, let them talk.
But the thing that it does that I'm like 100% stickler for is cognitive tests.
So just pure ability to solve problems.
So like funny part is I think I'm one of the lowest cognitive scores on my team.
So like when they say hire people, it's like, I've got data to back me up.
The idiot in the room. Yeah.
By design. I think I was in the hot tub when I did the test.
What are you using for IQ?
That one's still profile XT.
Okay. It's got both the cog plus the profile fit.
So that's number two. And then the third is test project.
You know, Seth Godin said this to me years ago.
He said, I can't work with you until I work with you.
We were talking about a new startup and he said, you know, how do you hire people?
And when he said that, it was just like off the cuff.
I can't work. I'm like, what do you mean?
He goes, I haven't hired anybody for a decade where I didn't start off by working on a project on some kind of thing just to see if we gel on collaborating communication style.
So what we've gotten really good in our companies is just how to hire people setting up a test project.
So for an assistant, it might be like, Hey, here's a person's profile on social media.
I need it's his birthday.
What should we get them?
Just see. And you give everybody, this is the key is you give everybody the same test project and they present it and then you can, you can map it.
What most some people do, they're like, all right, they asked this person to do this.
They do this. And it's like, if you're hiring a designer, you don't want them to do, you want to say like, redesign our homepage and then see which one did it.
Right. It's like I was hiring a CEO once and I was like, just the test project for a CEO for everybody listening is to build the 90 day plan.
So you're going to hit the ground.
What are you going to do in the first 90 days?
Talk to everybody you need to on the team.
Figure out what you're going to be dealing with and then present a plan.
That's actually the test project.
So there's like three candidates.
First guy goes up, starts reading in PowerPoint slide.
I don't know about you, Chris, but big no, no, I can't.
It's like, I can read faster than you can read to me.
So let's stop that. Next person's plan was just not even, it's like they didn't talk to anybody.
It's like, what company did you make that for?
Third guy pulls up a diagram and I could tell by the quality of the diagram, the quality of thinking.
It was almost like you had me at hello.
So like to me, test projects is non-negotiable.
We don't skip it. And that's what makes it very different.
So it doesn't matter if it's admin, delivery, just give them the thing you want them to do.
It's like my buddy Brian hired somebody to help with marketing and they fired them because their ideas for TikTok videos weren't good.
And I said, well, did you make that part of the test project?
He's like, ah, I should have done that.
So, but I mean, that's just like, where are you looking for these candidates?
Are you using headhunters?
We use, I think we use Indeed a lot.
So again, director level above we go outbound.
Below that we use Indeed.
What's unique is we do spend money on boosting the post.
So we'll spend it on LinkedIn, et cetera.
For remote roles, we'll use, I think it's remote.io.
There's different websites.
Again, I'm not involved in it, but it's the idea of spending money on amplifying the opportunity because most people don't and then they just get a bunch of like super low.
It's just, you get them.
And it's like, this person isn't like, why did they apply?
I don't know what their role like it must be like a select all apply or something.
It must be way too easy to apply for jobs.
So, but I mean, for an assistant, truth is, I think last time we hired somebody on a team it was like 800 applicants we had to sift through like it's work.
We did a two job postings, one guest booker, one general manager, and we had 6,000 for two roles.
For sure in your world. A fucking nightmare.
Yeah. So I mean, again, you don't want to be, you want to get, you want to do the, I do finals, like I do, I do 15 minute finals in most of my companies.
I don't want to, you know, I trust you.
15 minute final. Final interviews.
Yeah. I asked three fun questions.
First one is, because I'm pretty public about my childhood and some of my traumas.
I always say, you know, what's the, you know, what are some of the things that you went through as a kid that shaped you as a person?
And I asked a broad question.
I see where they want to go with this, right?
Cause like, I don't know.
I just don't like doing the whole like suit and tie bullshit kind of vibe and work.
So they don't tell me anything.
Well, I had a great childhood and I'm really grateful for my parents and nothing bad happened.
I'm like, okay, good, good to know.
Then the next question I ask is, what are the two toughest things that you've ever gone through in your whole life and how did those shape you as a leader?
Try to give them another like, can you knock it out of the park, please?
Some of them are beautiful.
Yes, I did an interview and it was actually quite sad.
The guy that was applying for the job, his sister's child, unfortunately got run over by a car a month prior.
I was like, like my heart.
Still in it. My heart. But the fact that he shared that with me, I was like, dude, we're going to create some magic together.
And someday I actually know somebody that his sister should be working with that.
I didn't want to offer it on that call, but you know, I'm waiting until timing's right.
I'm going to offer that up.
But, you know, that's a great question.
And then my favorite one is five years from now, you're living your most beautiful life.
I want to know where you're living, who you're living with.
I'm close to that nervous.
And I was just like, because I didn't want to mess up my words.
And it was, we put it on the turntable.
So it's sitting in the whole showroom, there's a turntable and it was sitting there, but we walked in the other corner and I was looking in the cars.
And then you can see in the video, he's like, is that a GT4?
And I was like, I don't know.
Is that, and I tell, is that a Porsche?
He's like, yeah. And he walks over.
I was like, isn't that the car on your phone?
He's like, yeah. Same spec white.
And I go, and I just started telling the guy about Sam.
I said, hey, can I tell you about Sam?
He goes, yeah. So let me tell you who Sam is.
This is literally the guy I kept saying, I need you to make more money.
So give it to the team. I need you to, I need you to, you know, I need you to be rich, bro.
Like help me help you. He goes, I'm here to learn, not earn.
He would never, he would have probably waited another decade before he ever got himself the car.
He literally had the money to buy it instead he bought it home.
Cause he's at 22 at the time.
It's not good. Yeah. And I'll tell you, man, I bought myself some cool cars.
It's a hundred times cooler buying something else.
Like it was, yeah, it was special.
And I just think that that was a symbol as well to everybody else.
Like just understand your team's dreams and goals.
And just if you wake up every day to try to make bears come true, everything gets easier.
I've heard you say that you run your personal life like a business as well.
What does that consist of?
Every, like the comments when I talk about this, they're like, Hey, you should be so fun to be married to.
I would love you. You are so awesome.
I'm like, shut up. Like I just, for me, dude, I, again, I went through massive pain when I was engaged and she walked away.
Like that was one of the hardest 28 at the time, 27, 28.
And I realized I was good at business.
Like I finally figured out the rhythms of success of business, but I sucked at being in relationships.
Like I literally, I remember one time I saw an Elon interview and the interviewer was like, do you ever think you'll date again?
He's like, hmm, I know I need to allocate some time to dating.
Do you think five hours a week is enough?
And I was, I was just like, okay, he's worse than I am.
But I just, I just asked myself like, well, what's the point?
I just asked myself like, well, why am I so good in business but so bad in relationships?
And I started thinking about like what I do in business that makes it successful.
It's, you know, it's a relationship with my team and all this stuff.
And I just, I just got to a place where I applied some of those principles.
So for example, you know, every quarter we do an offsite.
Okay. And it's two nights, three days.
Initially, I didn't know what we were going to do.
My wife fought with me for it when we were dating at the time.
But I just said like, I just think that it's important that we build a rhythm.
So now we look forward to them.
They're incredible. We pick cool destinations and it's just for us.
We do weekly meetings, you know, every week we have lunch together.
We have an agenda structure.
One of the coolest things we ask each other is how have I been for you as a husband?
And I listen, Chris, I just sit there and listen.
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
Criticize, you did this on Monday.
Like I'm so fascinated by how good her memory is.
Like she can remember, you left this cup on this table.
Half on the corner. And then my only response is thank you.
And then she asked me the same question.
And I usually say, you are incredible.
There's nothing wrong with it.
Like dude, this is like natural selection.
Like, I mean, what, I'm not going to criticize.
But even on those meetings we talk about like, because I manage the finances.
I don't want me, if anything happens to me, I have a great team, but I want her to know.
So any big decisions I review it with or talk about the weekend.
So like we just figured out where the friction points in the lives were, and then we review them in that weekly meeting.
We do date nights every week.
We just, you know, we have core values as a family, Martell core values.
And those are really cool.
Like our kids are 11 and 12 now, but ever since they were young, we've, we use them because then it's like, here's what Martell stand for.
And when you're punching your brother, we're going to go to, we love and support each other.
So you tell me how punching your brother love and support each other.
So it's not, and it's an identity thing, right?
Have you got a family crest like Ben?
We didn't do the crest. No, I have a lot of friends, Ben.
And that's how I met Ben.
He put our family in a presentation he was given on his family stuff.
And I'm not going to send my kids in the woods at 13 years old to fend for themselves.
It turns out the world's hard enough if you just let it affect your kids.
But I do love that he does everything at the extremes.
But yeah, so I would say core values.
We have a scorecard kind of like we measure ourselves on different dimensions of like spirituality and hobbies.
And we just ask for a community service.
Like, are we living up to the core values?
So we review them, but it's just, it's gotten to a place where, you know, I think what happens with some entrepreneurs that are like growth minded and their partner's not is that the partner starts feeling scared.
They may never say it this way, scared that you're going to depart and wake up one day.
It's like when I go do like retreats, like spiritual retreats, my wife is always like, do you still want to be with me?
Like, of course, like yes.
I never worried that that's going to be the, I don't know, maybe I'm just weird, but she goes and does everything.
I'm like, are you going to be with me?
It's like, yeah, we're pretty good.
Like, so to me, it's the fear of the person going on a growth journey and then being such a big chasm.
And what this does, even the weekly meeting, right?
Cause a lot of my friends, unfortunately, you know, 50% have been divorced since, you know, last decade.
And it's usually cause there was a crack that nobody talked about some kind of resentment, some kind of moment, a fight that just never got resolved.
And it just kept breaking.
And eventually by the time it gets bad enough, it's we're talking grand canyon type scale.
And it's just too far to come back.
So like even the concept of having practices that are, you know, resentment inoculators, like how I, in my book, I talk about how to do clearing conversations, which is the same thing you do with your spouse that you do with your team.
How do you do it? I think it's probably one of the most important things in the book that nobody gives, cause it doesn't make them money, but it is, it will make them the most money.
It's essentially if you do something that I do it, and then it grows into this big thing, like the way that you slurp your tea at dinner, what all of the different, what a British analogy that is.
The idea that you had about sort of someone that's very high growth and somebody that's lower growth, made me think of one example and one idea that I've got.
So the example is Aaron Alexander, a big bloke that was outside that came to come and greet us.
When we first started playing pick-a-ball together about two years ago, I said, I'm friends with Zay Navratil, who's the current men's number two, and he's got this great coach in town.
He said that the coach could work with me.
And Aaron got nervous and angry about the prospect of me working with a coach when he wasn't working with a coach, because the concern in the disparity between us, because it's only fun when you're at the same sort of a level.
He also happens to be much better than me.
So I think he just, he's a bit of an ego boost for him.
You know what I mean? He really beats me.
The other one is I had this idea that I came up with actually while doing my live tour last year, which is personal growth velocity, which is what you're referring to.
So there is a pace that you move.
Imagine that you're Falcon 9 or you're the challenger, and you're taking off from the launch pad and you're moving at a particular pace.
And there's other people that are around you and they're moving at velocities too.
And there are some people that are ahead of you.
But if you're moving more quickly, you catch up to them and then you sort of strip past them.
And the goal is to find someone who is moving at roughly the same sort of velocity that you are, so that you can keep up together.
The problem is that a lot of the time we are friends with people who are still sort of on the ground and there's this odd unspoken about tension when you mention things, you don't feel comfortable talking about what's happening in your life, because you know that it's in some way sort of triggering to them.
It kind of puts them into a harsh light in retrospect.
I did a big chunk of time in my twenties not drinking as a club promoter in 2016, 17.
It was pretty radical and a sobriety low and no alcohols kind of super popular at the moment.
But that caused a lot of friction in many of the relationships I had, because the subtext was, oh Chris thinks he's too good for us.
Better than me. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, he thinks that because he's not drinking that it throws my behavior into sharp contrast.
And that caused me to see a lot of the friendships that I had as drinking partners rather than genuine compatriots.
Yeah, they were only happy to be friends with me as long as I was destroying my life along with them.
They were more happy to be around me doing something I didn't want to do, but they did, than being around me doing something that I did want to do.
And it just highlighted a bunch of different friendships that really I didn't need to go so, but to have this sort of be identified.
But that personal growth velocity thing I think is really important, especially in marriages, like so much in marriages and finding, especially as a guy, I think there is often a question, why so many of the top podcasters and the top nonfiction authors in the personal development world men?
And I think that it's the same reason that more men are CEOs, that there's this sort of obsessive need to fill a void inside.
Whenever I see something that I don't agree with, I then share it on social, I don't attack them.
I don't even tell them, but they inspire the content.
And I think it's the coolest, like I think it's a spiritual thing that we should all do where our inspiration from the way we see the world through our lens is actually our learning, then we get to share with other people.
It's a beautiful way to transcend things that have hurt you or challenged you in the past, which is to say you didn't stop me and I'm gonna make sure that you don't stop these other people too, to always treat it.
I'm gonna take the bad and turn it into a good.
I had a post that I wrote a couple of months ago after spending time with a friend, which relates exactly to what you're talking about.
I had a conversation this week with a friend about emotions, specifically jealousy, frustration and anger, about how they hijack even the most cerebral, cognitively sophisticated person.
It's highly annoying. You spend all of this time trying to be a rational, agentic beast, then a thing happens that disrupts your emotional state and you turn into a petulant toddler.
He explained that when he finds himself getting carried away by jealousy, frustration or anger, he asks a few questions.
First, out of all of the emotions that you could have chosen, why did you choose that one?
You have this huge library of emotions to tap into.
Why did that one get activated?
What is it about you, your desires, your assumptions about the world and your patterns that caused that emotion to rise to the surface so quickly?
It's not strictly two that you chose it, your body and mind just delivered it to you, but I love the language and framing for retaking agency over our emotions.
Second, and how's that working out for you?
What has been the outcome of that emotion arising?
Has it made your relationships, life, quality of mind better or worse?
I love this language again because it creates distance between you and your feelings, plus it assumes that you chose it, giving you a sense of power.
And third, do you want to be right or do you want to be loved?
Often when we feel emotions like jealousy or frustration and anger, it's because we feel like a boundary has been crossed.
Someone should have known that we would have felt this way if they did that thing and they didn't, so we need to get them to realize their transgression.
In our less gracious moments, we hope to achieve this through mistreatment, passive aggression, mean comments or distancing.
And in our more gracious moments, it's done through a calm, honest and open explanation of why someone did something that made us feel this way without accusing the other person of having done it on purpose.
Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.
We assume the best of others.
We assume that our friend or partner wouldn't ever mean to make us upset, but their impact, their actions that had on our psyche was done through ignorance, not negligence or malice.
Maybe their behavior does warrant the silent treatment.
Maybe we are righteous in our indignation.
Maybe they should have known better.
You may even be right for reacting this way.
But do you want to be right or do you want to be loved?
Because your petulance in response to a situation you wish hadn't happened is unlikely to create more love.
And if your partner or friend is incapable of hearing you gently and frankly explaining why you feel bad, then you have a good indicator that your interlocutor is a bigger problem than just their behavior.
Did you like encapsulated?
Cool, so good. It's cool when you arrive at the same sorts of insights.
The word you said is agency.
It's agency. It's when we get to a place where we can be aware that we control the meaning to everything.
Like my kids fight. Like Max said, I'm this.
I go, dude, all right, let's talk about, I teach this stuff to my kids and they're young.
It's if he's sitting there screaming at you saying, you have purple eyes, are you gonna care?
Well, no, because you don't.
Why? And he's, okay, perfect.
So whether he says you have a crush on a girl or not, like let it go.
And they're like, said you don't control what other people do.
You control how you respond and what meaning you associate to what's going on.
And again, I'd like to your point, I'd rather be loved.
I'm okay not being right.
I got to point guy literally this morning text message me, I gave him an emoji.
His response was some sort of a sentence that sounded like, I don't know if you realize how insensitive that was.
I sent you a heartfelt message and you replied with a thumbs up and I don't know why people think that's okay.
And I'm like, dude, that's okay.
If you don't understand that I, like I at least replied, haven't seen you in years, love you, hope you're doing well.
But like your feeling is what it is.
Like I don't need to be right about it.
I just replied and I gave him that one of those emojis.
Like what do you want me to do?
You can't do thumbs up. Oh yeah, I did.
I was passive aggressive 100%.
It was like a graces. Less gracious moment.
Yeah, I can't win them all.
I am human and I do enjoy a good, like I like the jokiness of it.
It is what it is, but I don't know.
I just, I try to go to a place where I don't need anything from anybody.
I just, I'm just a happier place.
And then I'm going to create and then if it works, even just the desire to making things work.
I had to like that. And this is, again, it's contradiction.
Like I actually, I think I wake up and I create and I, you know, like I'm very focused, but at the same time, if it doesn't happen, I'm not going to be sad.
I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to scream at anybody.
Try not to anyways. Just, just try to, you know, Buddhist ish, you know, mine like water ish.
But again, to your point about the past, this is where I'm going back to what Peterson.
Okay. Cause like, I was like, okay, I can get on board with this.
Don't react. Nobody needs to change from me to win, stop making people wrong.
But then I felt like life got really boring.
Like I literally- There's no stakes anymore.
Dude, I got on a call with them and I was like, I'm doing the thing and it's pretty flat.
Like it's, it's the emotional role.
Like if you're addicted to chaos, which a lot of entrepreneurs are, and I talked with them, my book, big time, cause I used to be that person and most people, it's normal.
So they're comfortable in the chaos.
Turns out chaos is a really shitty way to be a leader for a team.
So you got to get over that.
So if, if you go from like chaos is like super normal for me and then you go to like playing and there's no more chaos, it's actually a, it's a new place to get comfortable.
And he says, oh, he goes, you forgot the other part of the equation, which is you still have to create.
And I said, what do you mean?
He goes, so the way you create when you disconnect from a behavior is you actually, this is so bananas.
Okay. And I'll tell you a real example.
So I'm sitting on the couch and my wife wanted to go to CrossFit.
She's a hardcore CrossFitter.
So she's a better person for all of us when she does CrossFit.
55 spine bulging desk. Yeah.
I don't go to CrossFit anymore.
She loves it and we're happy.
I don't think she pushed it.
She just, she just likes to.
Takes over. Yeah. And she's like, hey, the boys need to be ready by eight o'clock because this person's going to pick them up for soccer practice.
Yeah. No problem. Like I'm a, I'm a man.
And I, I think I know how to handle stuff.
So anyways, 30 minutes later, she texts me, are the boys ready?
Now she writes, are the boys ready?
I hear you are a horrible dad, irresponsible and can't tie your own shoelaces.
So I'm telling this to Peter, but I, again, mine like water, I don't respond.
So what should I have done in that situation?
Cause like I heard that and he goes, well, let me ask a few questions.
When did she say that? No.
Which was a big idea. Like, did she say those words?
No. Do you feel that way?
Yes. Why do you think she said those things?
Well, because she's, you know, sometimes she gets worried.
She thinks about the kid.
I mean, my wife put sons block on my kids at four in the morning looking at the weather, thinking about the rest of the day.
So like she, you know, moms do that.
And she go, he said this beautiful thing.
He goes, do you think that's because of who you are or who she is?
So because of who she is.
Was she that way before you met her?
Yeah, probably. Let it go.
Yeah, it's not a you thing.
It's a 0% you think this is who she was before she met you.
Then he said the cool thing.
He said, what would you have rather happened instead?
Well, I mean, I would have rather the message said, you're the most incredible husband.
Thanks for taking care of the kids this morning.
That would have been cool.
He goes, all right. So this is the creation part you forgot.
Next time reply to her and tell her how incredible she is for that.
And he goes, what do you mean?
And he goes, like tell her what you wish she told you.
So I replied to her, all good, kids are ready.
I love how much you care about the boys and always making sure things are done on top.
Set. Safe, I feel safe. I feel reassured.
Dude, I'm talking like ninja level relationship stuff.
I've been nonstop doing this.
Anytime I feel away, I don't respond.
And instead I take the opposite to create the future that I wanted.
And it turns out if you express, because somebody said once they say, what you were pressed gets expressed.
So if you masculine, feminine energy, like sometimes the wife starts acting like a man because you start acting like a wife.
You know what I mean? The masculine energy.
So the idea of expressing and creating a future state that you desire anytime you feel the opposite has been game changer for me in all aspects of my work.
There's two ways that you can get people's behavior to change sort of interpersonally.
I mean, there's probably a ton of others, but there's two big ones.
Where we celebrate failures and everything has to win, it would be impossible to your point.
It's impossible to assume that we're gonna be able to innovate because innovation requires a level of, like a massive level of uncertainty.
Cause if we just follow the blueprint everybody's got, we're gonna get what they got, which is not what we're after.
So I think that like Bezos' leadership strategies is one of the few that I study.
I think Netflix is another one, but yeah, it's like celebrate people doing the thing you wish more people would do.
It's kind of like in my buddy, Phil Jones, said this to me once, we're doing something and he's a speaker and I want to speak more.
And he said something so simple, yet so profound.
He says, take pictures of you doing the thing you want to do more of.
It's like, what do you mean?
He goes, you want to sell more copies of your book?
He goes, do you take pictures of you signing books for people?
No, you might want to do that.
So that simple concept of take pictures of you doing things you want to do more of is find the thing that people are doing you want more people to do and celebrate it.
And I just, those simple little mental cues are I think just the coolest.
But again, I gotta rewrite some beliefs cause there's probably some scary stuff around that.
What are you saying? I don't tell somebody they did something wrong.
So you can tell them, you just tell them differently.
And again, that's where you're not good enough yet.
That's the skill. It's like- Goes to a client.
Yeah, it's where's my gap?
Am I willing to create the space of my calendar to work on it?
Am I willing to hire a coach to look at the way I operate?
I mean, some of the coolest stuff I do is actually watching CEOs interact on meetings and giving them some feedback.
Cause they're so close to it, they can't see it.
And once they hear it, they're like, oh, I thought I was leading through transformational leadership.
I'm like, no dude, you told everybody what to do on that call.
So yeah, I think it's just like one of those things of just creating space to do the work, to become better.
There's a Kevin Kelly quote from his most recent book where he says, you lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they expect of themselves, provide them a reputation that they can step up to.
Dude, Kevin Kelly's a stuff.
He's a beast. Let's go. He's a beast.
That was awesome. The one thing I wish he'd done in that book, that most recent book of his that he did, it was, you know, fucking 300 pages of aphorisms.
Yeah, brilliant. I just, you know, I just want him, I wish that he'd done it over 10 volumes and I'd got like a daily stoic.
Yeah, I just, I want to hear, and you know, that's, it made it for a very easy episode for me and the whole Mosey stylistical thing that we've, I guess kind of owned cornered the market a little bit for.
But that's my favorite thing.
Okay, here's a lovely aphorism and what that, that's like a, it's a compression fight.
You remember Winnzip? It's like, you're zipping this sort of.
Dude, it kicks the llama's ass.
Winnzip. No, no, sorry, I'm thinking of the MP3 player.
Oh. Winnamp. Do you remember Winnamp?
I fucking do remember Winnamp.
It kicks the llama's ass.
Remember when it starts?
It says that. What was the one that's got the...
