How To Commit Completely To Your Passion

Jeff Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called “Anything and Everything” with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. It’s Dan Sullivan here, and this is another—I can’t almost wait to get into it—sparkling discussion between Jeff Madoff and me on the topic of “Anything and Everything”.
 
Jeff, you posed an interesting topic for today, and it was about how do you discover your passion? And once you discover your passion, how do you follow your passion, and how do you make the cash register ring from your passion? Because if you’re devoting your whole life to it, you do somewhere along the line wanna get paid for it.
 
I think it’s a general question for people particularly, but I think in the environments that you and I operate in, in the area of creative careers, and you have a famous book out on that subject, it’s something that I think occurs to people much earlier in life than it does to people who maybe are set on a conventional career where they’re going to be properly educated and get a proper degree and then get a job with someplace where they have a certain amount of job security, and the whole point is to have the degree. The whole point is to have the reputation that you got hired into a particular job by a particular organization.
 
But this is, I think, a completely different area, and I think it has to do with there’s an internal capability that you have that preoccupies you. You know? You can’t escape from it. You know? You can’t forget about it. That only makes you unhappy if you ignore it. And how do you navigate life with this on your mind?
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And I think it’s also, aside from how do you navigate life with all that in your mind, how do you scratch that itch? You know, how is it that you get the kind of fulfillment from what you’re doing that you would hope to get if you follow your passion.
 
But I also posed the question, “How do you discover what your passion is? How do you even know?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Why don’t we both go autobiographical here and talk about it in how you’ve come to understand your passion, from early, and my passion, really, from early. I mean, I’m I’m pretty well on the path that I set out for myself when I was about twenty years old. When I can remember looking back, there’s a direct line from age twenty to where I am right now, where I’ve had a single thing sort of on my mind that I was willing to guess that this was it, and I was willing to bet the last sixty years on it.
 
Jeff Madoff: What was that single thing?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I wanted to create an educational system where the subject matter was the individual’s own experience, taking what’s really subjective and making it objective in the world. You know, it’s something you feel inside of yourself, and then you manifest it. You have to package it to a certain extent. You have to package what’s going on inside your head in such a way that it attracts the attention of other people in such a way that they would pay you for it.
 
So my case is that I got on very early that if you could ask people certain types of questions about their experiences, and you could get them to say it, and then you would give them insights that you have. “You know, this is really important, what you’re talking about, and every time you talk about this, I noticed you’re a lot more excited about this subject than you are any other subject.”
 
So that would be one of my definitions of how you know what your passion is, is the way that you talk about it where there’s a lot of emotion attached, and it’s a positive emotion. It’s not a negative emotion. It’s very positive emotion. And that keeps coming back to, like, we all have to do other things in the world just to get a feel for what the world is, we have to get jobs, we have to experiment with this possibility, we have to experiment with that possibility, but you just keep coming back to this central thing.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, I happen to know that one of your early passions was theater.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: Did you ever seriously think about trying to make a living at it? Or—and this becomes a bigger kind of cultural question—are those pursuits not so necessarily respected? You always have to have a fallback position if it doesn’t work.
 
Nobody asks an accountant or a dentist or something if they have a fallback position. But if you try to pursue something in the arts, well, what if it doesn’t work out? What are you gonna do? And that sort of thing.
 
So with you, what happened to change your direction from that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, what I realized is I like performing. I like creating, and I like performing what I’ve created. When I was growing up in a very small town in northern Ohio, This was the 1950s. I kinda said, “You know, theater is really an interesting activity because you get to make up certain things.” I mean, you’re doing plays that other people have written, but you have a character, and there’s something you can do with that character. In other words, you can bring who you are to, you know, it’s fairly limited. You you’ve got lines, and you’re limited to the lines, and, you know, you’ve got your part in a much bigger production. And to what degree can you pour yourself into this role in such a way that it’s your role. You’ve actually done that.
 
And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the activity of getting inside of a character. And then I had the good fortune when I was in the army, through a set of volunteering experiences that I did.
 
The other thing, I’ll bring this in is that wherever you get a possibility to do something like this, whether you get paid for it or not, you volunteer to do it just for the experience of doing it. In other words, you don’t have to pay me to do this, but the opportunity to do this, even volunteering to do this actually plays a part in the growth of my understanding of what this is.
 
Seemed to me that two aspects of this is that you pick any available activity that’s going on that seems to resonate with where you’re going. And theater, high school theater, really struck me. So wherever there was a play, I would be one of the volunteers among the student body who would just always be there. And I didn’t really care that much what the role was. It was just a role that I could do something with. Okay? But I liked that experience of being on stage. I liked the experience of having an audience. I liked the experience of the teamwork with the other members of the cast.
 
But I was very interested in how the whole thing was put together. Like, I I wasn’t just participating as a player. I was participating. I says, “You know, this whole theater thing is a really interesting experience, and you only get there by volunteering.” It’s not a prescribed course. It’s not something you do, and it’s a lot of extra time after school that you have to do it, and it’s for maybe three or four presentations, but you would work at it for three or four months to just have three or four present-
 
And that just seemed to me kind of a a neat sort of thing. It’s kind of it was a creative experience that really wasn’t on the curriculum, And it involved other people who were kinda like-minded about this. I really liked that activity, but I also knew that the theater wasn’t the center of what I was doing, is that I was gonna create ‘something’ that was presented to the public, and it had an audience, and it would be a neat thing. It would be made up. You’re using a play that’s written, and you’re using characters that have been created by other people, but you’re getting a chance to do something with it and bring your, in my case, bring my talent, bring my personality to it. And, but at the same time, it was part of a fairly intricate teamwork. And I just liked the whole thing of living your life in an activity that is created, living your life in an activity that is kinda created from scratch that has a deadline to it. It’s got opening night, and it’s only gonna happen within the framework of one week. Just a neat thing.
 
Jeff Madoff: So that’s before you were twenty?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. This would be, I would say sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old.
 
Jeff Madoff: And what do you think it was that ignited that passion in you about theater?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it was out of the ordinary.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was out of the ordinary. You were using your time To do something that the vast majority of other people couldn’t imagine themselves doing.
 
You know, I mean, they say the two greatest fears that people have, number one, is dying, the second one is doing something in public.
 
Jeff Madoff: Living. Those are the two things that Let’s strike people’s hardest things, the dying and living.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
But how does that correspond to your own feeling about it? Because you’re more into theater in your seventies than you were any previous period of time. I mean, you’re having a full experience now in a way that you did other things that led up to—we’re speaking about the Broadway musical in the making.
 
I mean, the moment you talked about it, it just resonated with me when we were at lunch up in that lavishly wealthy part of the city that you that you live in, New York. We were at lunch, and there was just something about the way that you described the whole creation of the play. And I said, “What a absolutely neat thing that people just get together and just make something up that they’re willing to throw themselves into, at quite a bit of risk, you know, reputation risk, but also financial risk. And you have to enroll a lot of other people in your idea.” And I said, “What a what a neat way to go about life.”
 
Does that resonate?
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the questions that I ask my guests in the class that I teach is, “What did you like doing when you were a kid?”
 
So we grew up in the same era. My guess is you played cowboys or army or some of that stuff, which is basically, yeah, improvisational acting. You know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. You flipped a coin which side you were on. You know? I mean I mean, for it to work, you had to have cowboys, but then you had to have the adversaries. You know?
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. Or you just totally invented those adversaries, and they were never physically there. You know?
 
But when you got shot, when you rolled down the hill, you know, I mean, all that kind of stuff. You know, when you were doing it, what was cool as a kid, and I don’t know when this gets lost. You commit. I think it’s fair to say, on one hand, you commit to that nonsense as if it’s real. That commitment is what makes a great actor. You know, when they fully commit to what they’re doing.
 
So when I thought back that I love doing the movies, you know, I had a theater in my basement that I put together, and I would draw the posters and then print them out and get, post them around the neighborhood, do the sound mix for the films, and all this stuff for my neighborhood theater, playing cowboys, which was acting, if you will. I was in some plays when I was young, when I was quite young. So that lit me up. It was fun. You know? I liked it. And I was fortunate because my parents never discouraged any activity that I did.
 
And I think, you know, when you’re talking about what people fear we just happened to watch a movie, Nyad, the other night about Diana Naya, the swimmers, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. I think you would like it because the message was, you know, she was going after this record at age sixty-five, which everybody told her is “impossible, and you’re never gonna do it.” And I’m really simplifying the story, but It was really interesting how fully she had to commit to that. And it was actually life and death because she was in danger in terms of just the elements—sharks, jellyfish, the weather, all that kind of thing. And it was really interesting because the only way that you do these things is fully commit.
 
But somewhere, and I don’t know if it’s a part of our culture or if it’s a part of general psychology or what. But somewhere, we’re taught not to take that as seriously as becoming a lawyer, you know, or some other profession.
 
It’s interesting. I mean, you know, we’re taking the play to England. England, the government subsidizes theater, so it’s not as crazy-expensive to produce on the West End, which is their equivalent of Broadway. And there’s also tax incentives, you know, for investors. It’s taken more seriously there than it is here Theater itself. And so I I think it’s fair to say the two global destinations for theater or London and New York.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The West End and Broadway.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
But I wonder what that is in our culture that the arts, unless you become very famous and wealthy as a result, that they aren’t taken seriously. And so if you commit to those things, again, unless you get really successful, you know, it’s almost like, well I mean, “What’s your fallback position? You’re not gonna commit to that, are you?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But commitment you know, we have, process in coach that’s called The 4C’s, and that there’s a cycle that when you come up with a new idea, the first thing you have to do is commit to it. That’s the first C, which is commitment, and the second C is courage. And courage is where you decide to go forward lacking confidence. You don’t have the confidence yet because the capability is only in your mind. The capability isn’t real in the world. Okay?
 
And my sense it’s the combination of commitment and courage that actually creates the capability. They’re like the differential in electricity, you have to have a plus and a minus. You know? You have to have a negative charge and a positive charge to create the spark. The spark is the capability. And once you do it, you get a fourth C. So the first three are commitment, courage, capability, and the fourth one is confidence. And the confidence comes from having taken the capability from an idea to reality. Okay? You have witnesses.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: You have witnesses. You pull off the capability, but not only that, you can feel the skill. Okay? And once you get the skill, then it’s rinse, relather… You know, do it, and it’s endless cycles.
 
So what got you to where you are today is probably let’s say, I’ll just pick a number out of the air here, you’ve done this a hundred times. You’ve done The 4C’s a hundred times before meeting Lloyd Price saying, “This story is a play.” And you’ve worked up a lot of other 4C experiences that I think “This is the next big thing that I can commit to. And I know it’s gonna require a lot of courage to do it until we actually create the capability to do it,.” But that’s five years in the past now. You I mean, it’s the measurement of five, six years since you started the first time.
 
So I just like to do that as a framework. Is there something structurally different between now, right at the point where something that you’ve created from scratch is now gonna be on the big stage from the standpoint of theater, West End of London and the eventual Broadway. I’m just wondering if there’s that much different in anything that you’ve created, in the process of creating all the other things you’ve created over the last seventy years, that’s too much different between the one you’re doing now and the one you did to kick it off in the basement of your house in Akron, Ohio.
 
Jeff Madoff: I mean, in many ways, I think it’s marshaling all the same factors within me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And I’m a firm believer in everything you do informs everything else you do, if you’re paying attention.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. That’s a distinction of outlook that either happens or it doesn’t happen in a person’s life. And I’d like to introduce the concept of narrative here, that you have a choice in life between your narrative or other people’s narrative for you.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Yeah. Define yourself or be defined by others.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. There’s a Yogi Berra wisdom here: “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.” Take it.
 
But in fact, there’s a big difference which fork you take because I see great consistency about our conversations going back since I first met you, associated with Joe Polish somewhere along the line. And I see a great consistency in everything you’re doing, whether it’s the new seasons fashions for Ralph Lauren or for any of the other clients you’ve had where you’ve created a new theatrical production, whatever it was. It goes back to your fashion days where you were creating the, the actual product that then was going to be theatrically introduced into the world in the form of fashion. And documentary films that you’ve done and everything. But I see a great simplicity and a great consistency to the simplicity for your last seventy years.
 
Jeff Madoff: I agree with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was just your line: Everything you do relates to everything else you’re doing. All your experience matters.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. And I think that’s true for everybody.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it’s not.
 
Jeff Madoff: No, it’s not.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it’s not.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, I think it’s true for everybody, but maybe they don’t see the connection.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So seeing the connection was part of the capability.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, because that diminishes the fear. Yeah. When you realize, “Oh, this isn’t all that different from what I was called on to do when I made a film.” Or when I designed a line of clothing. You know? But I think, yeah, a lot of people are so siloed in their thinking that they don’t see the connections because they’re dismayed by the challenge.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, because it’s not their narrative. It’s somebody else’s narrative for them.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Well, that’s right. That leads us to an interesting place because, you know, I love The 4C’s. And, you you and I very much share the same beliefs about the relationship between commitment, courage, confidence and capability. But there’s another thing that I think affects a lot of people that fits into here, and that is impostor syndrome.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: That they don’t have the confidence, and when they’re lacking that, they somehow feel like they’re inauthentic or fake. They feel like they’re an impostor.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think it has to do with the collision or the contradiction in their mind between courage and confidence. And so people say to me, “Well, what’s the difference between courage and confidence?” I said, “Well, confidence feels good.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Courage doesn’t feel good. That’s why it’s admired in other people, but you yourself don’t want to experience it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well and I think that, you know, it’s interesting because oftentimes, the criticism that one gets or the caution one gets from somebody else has much more to do with their fear than you as the subject of who they’re talking about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Because if I might put in what the fear is, they don’t wanna be seen as abnormal.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. Right. Which that opens up another area here because being seen as abnormal, first, you have to have a sense of, well, what is normal?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: Because in order to be abnormal, you’re somehow violating those norms. And those norms, for most people, are to be fairly regimented In terms of what they do, their thought, and the things that they will put their time into that it diminishes the need or eliminates the need for courage.
 
You know, it’s the old “You won’t get fired for buying an IBM.” As long as you make the safe decision, they can’t blame you for it. Although, I think that’s a lot less true now than it used to be. But the idea of being an impostor rattles an awful lot of people. And what I have said in discussions with, actually, from very well-established artists who felt like they were impostors, my feeling is everybody’s impostor until you actually succeed in doing what you’re doing. But I don’t call it impostor. It means you’re trying to manifest those ideas that are important to you.
 
But, you know, Steve Jobs wasn’t Steve Jobs until he became Steve Jobs through what he did. But he was never an impostor. You know? I can now legitimately call myself a playwright because my play has been produced, but I never felt like I was an impostor before doing that. I felt like this is what I’m doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, going back to the topic of this podcast, how do you discover your passion? I’ll say, well, first of all, not outside of yourself.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And go a bit deeper into that.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s your willingness to go through the courage that your commitment requires that creates reality.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: There’s not an express elevator to being a non-impostor.
 
But the big thing here that I’m sensing is that it was always your judgment about yourself that mattered. It wasn’t other people’s judgment. I mean, we need other people’s judgment because we need their money. We need their applause. But that’s just part of the validation that what was real inside of you is also real outside of you in terms that other people are picking up on it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. I think that’s true. True to a point, because I think that there are, if you’re fortunate enough, and I am fortunate enough, to have people whose opinions I value and trust… I think a big problem is certainty, and I think you have to leave open that door for that uncertainty. And that’s back, of course, to courage, where in a collaborative situation, where Sheldon the director and I might be talking about something. If he brings up an issue, I respect him. I may not end up agreeing with him, but I will give it a hearing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeff Madoff: And that doesn’t threaten me, and we will have informed, animated, and respectful discussion about that particular execution of an idea.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: But, you know, that’s interesting because I think, you know, as the saying goes, “No man is an island.” But I do have to be convinced that what you’re suggesting is right. Being convinced may be the history we have together, that I am always open to what that person has to say.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But let me ask you a question about people whose opinion you respect. Does that not not have to do with the fact that that person themself is going through the same process that you’re going through? They’re committing, and they’re exhibiting courage.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: People who aren’t courageous, I don’t take their opinion seriously.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. How do you know they’re not courageous?
 
Dan Sullivan: Because I don’t see any evidence in their life that they ever took a risk on what they were committed to.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
 
A dear friend of mine who is in theater and has been a friend for over thirty-five years or so, Steven White, Acting teacher at ACT, Stella Adler, NYU. And we were actually talking about this the other day, the capability, the courage, the confidence, and all of that sort of thing. And I respect his insights because over and over again throughout his life, he’s been there. So I know he gets it. He knows I get it, which brings up the other really important thing is trust in the people that you listen to.
 
And one of the things he said to me—this is really cool because so far he’s been prescient, and I hope it continues to be the case. He was at the twenty-nine hour. And as we got that spontaneous standing ovation at the end of the reading, which was a very informal reading, he turned to me and said, “You know, you’ve got a hit here.” And Steve is as blunt as a ball-peen hammer. So, you know, he said that to me, and then we talked a bit afterwards. And he said, “Look. You’re gonna get a lot of people’s opinions. The more your play is out there, the more it’s exposed, the more opinions you’re gonna hear. Listen to your director. He’s really good, and you also need to learn who to ignore. And so you can nod your head and be polite if they’re gonna write a check, and say, oh, that’s an interesting idea,” if they’re going to write a check. But otherwise, you’ll drive yourself crazy with other people’s opinions. So you really need to vet those that you will open that space to. You know? And that comes from trust.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
You know, I’ll just throw in another dimension here. I think there’s a lack of discernment on the part of people who wanna follow a creative career, okay? I’m just gonna use the title of your book here, Creative Careers. You don’t realize that the world is fifty percent of your creative team. In other words, I always start a new idea because my product, if you will, in the coaching world is thinking tools. I come up with thinking tools like The 4C’s is a thinking tool.
 
And I said, if you look at everything in your life where you had an idea and you stayed with it and you went through good feedback, bad feedback, and you kept fashioning the product until the point where someone like your friend could say, you got a hit on your hands here. If you’re not willing to commit yourself to that process of getting both negative and positive feedback and then learning to discern which of the feedback is really valuable to move the project forward, you can’t follow this career.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you’re right. And I think in most cases, when I’ve gotten criticism, when it resonates, I know I need to listen to it because it may be often echoing a doubt that I have anyhow. And that amplifies that doubt. “Yeah, I do need to pay attention. I knew that.” You know?
 
Like, I would say to my editor in my film company, he would say to me, “You know, I don’t know if this works or not.”
 
And I said, “Don’t show it to me.”
 
He said, “What do you mean?”
 
And I said, “I want you to show it to me when you think it works, and I’ll respond to that. Now if you’ve hit a an obstacle that I can help you with, happy to do it. But I want you to present what you feel is ready to be seen, and then we’ll talk about it.”
 
And I know that I really didn’t like it when a client would wanna be included too early in the process when it wasn’t ready for approvals or criticisms yet. We’re just getting it out. And so I don’t want to inhibit that process because now I’ve got a second-guess because I won’t do that, you know, their likes and dislikes.
 
I had a friend, a colleague that I worked with. It’s really interesting. She came from network television. She went to work for a very large global designer who was a client of mine. And I was presenting, what was a very important edit. And “So what do you think?”
 
And she said, “Well, I don’t know if so and so will like it.”
 
And I said, “I didn’t ask you that. I said, what do you think?”
 
“Well, you know, I know that he doesn’t like edits when they’re fast and this is kind of fast editing.”
 
And I said, “I didn’t ask you that. I said, what do you think?”
 
And she goes, “I just I don’t think he’s gonna like it.”
 
I said, “I’ve asked you now three times. Do you even know what you think, or have you become so into the quicksand of this corporate mindset that you’re afraid to have your own opinion. And you’re just mirroring the criticisms you think you might get?” And she was silent. And I said, “You know, when we started work together four years ago, you were fabulous. You had really good insights, really good opinions. And slowly over time, you’ve become a corp-thinker.”
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeff Madoff: “…And all of your thoughts are based on what you think will fly or not within the business. You know that totally cripples creativity. That totally cripples innovation. It’s just about getting approvals from others so you can keep moving forward. When did you lose the ability to think on your own? Because that’s a really dangerous place to be.”
 
And tears started running down her face. And she said, “I never experienced this before. Nobody’s ever challenged me on this before.”
 
Anyhow, she left the company within a month. Because she realized she had lost herself, that the pinballing around for corporate approvals and all that kind of thing, which is why I never… I had opportunities to become parts of well-established companies. And that just had zero interest to me because I’ve seen so many people who become just lost. They don’t know what they think anymore. They don’t know what their opinions are anymore. It’s like in a great movie, the, Preston Sturges movie called Fourth of July where he says to one of the advertising people in his company, “When I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you.”
 
And it’s interesting to me and sad how people are afraid of new ideas and afraid of the risk of putting that forward because that opens them up to blame or criticism.
 
Dan Sullivan: The big thing there is your relationship with failure, and that is that I don’t like failing, but I know that if I don’t have the experience of failure, I don’t really know what success is.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
 
No, I agree. And I also think that when something is out there the interesting thing is about, you know, when you’re in a creative field, and depending on your position, in my case, being the writer, my work is going to succeed or fail on a large stage. No pun intended. The public will know what the critics thought of what I did.
 
I know some very well-established actors that truly never read their reviews because their feeling is “I can’t just take in the good ones.” You know? “I’ve gotta take in the bad. And if I’m gonna believe the good, I gotta believe the bad. And I don’t want any of that interfering with my process or what I’m doing.”
 
Now it doesn’t mean she won’t listen to the director or anything like that, but what that means is that the criticism that she gets in the press and and so on or online, she doesn’t wanna listen to it. And I understand that and respect that because it’s hard not to wanna see what’s said, but I think it’s also important to keep your true north going and that your compass is ultimately your own.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But it’s all guessing and betting. You know, I mean, I guess that I’ve got a really good idea here. First of all, I’m willing to bet my reputation in other people’s eyes to keep the idea going here. You know? And look, you don’t have theater unless you have an audience. You don’t have theater—I’m using ‘theater’ as a generic term for the whole subject that we’re talking about here. And I think that’s why theater is so fascinating to people, that it’s laden with risk.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. Every performance is a risk.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Tonight’s play is not last night’s play. We’ve got a different audience. And, is everybody up to it? Am I up to it again to fully commit? I mean, do you get a point where you don’t have to do this anymore? And I said, yeah, but that’s the end of it when you don’t wanna do it anymore. And I said, you know, let’s be risking on the last day.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. I agree. And I think it’s, you know, risk is kind of the subset of courage or parallel to courage. Right? Because you’re aware of the risk, because because if you’re not, you’re just a fool.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: You better be aware of, you know, what’s going on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Otherwise, I mean, courage means that you’re willing to consciously take on the risk. I mean that’s, yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: But you don’t dive headfirst thinking it’s the deep end and it’s only two feet. You know? Okay. So you wanna have some kind of assessment of what that risk is.
 
Dan Sullivan: So I would say that’s part of the growing capability.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. To be able to assess that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Your nose for who belonged in the backstage of your play and who belonged in the front stage of your play and everything else. And I remember the conversations we had during the Chicago run, that you were so amazed at the sheer courage of the actors.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. That’s right. Because what you-
 
Dan Sullivan: And even when you told them that the run was gonna be abbreviated, they did their best work in the final week.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. I mean, one could say, “Well, that’s part of being a professional,” which it is, but it’s hard unless you have that courage and that capability to overcome the disappointment or whatever and not put that on the stage. Which made that very bittersweet for me, because, you know, seeing the audience’s reaction and all of that, and I know we made the right business decision.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Because there was a bigger play that had to be guaranteed.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: “We gotta hold on to our cash if we’re gonna jump to the next level.”
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, we’ve succeeded here. We’ve got reviews like we’ve never gotten before. Okay? We’ve got footage that, there’s dynamite footage that we can take to the next level, because you’re always packaging where you are to get ready for the next jump.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. And, again, the more you experience, as you were saying, the more that not only builds your confidence because you’re developing that capability, it allows you to take greater risks and exhibit that courage. Again, not being foolish, but doing that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you’ve done your requisite number of foolishness. Huh? I’ve done my foolish. You know? Yeah. But I don’t see it as negative. But, I mean, I don’t see it as destructive. I see it as constructive. I mean, I’ve wasted money, wasted time, wasted talent. I’ve done that, but it’s all part of the game.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
You know, so to circle it back to the idea of following your passion and recognizing your passion, I think that a part of that is what you talked about. The money was, at best, secondary. Your desire to do it was primary.
 
And it’s almost, I think, has to become in a certain level an obsession. You know? Because when you fully commit to what is inherently a risky proposition and you have some awareness of the risk involved and a strong belief in your ability to execute on the promise that you’re putting out there. You know, the passion to be firing on all cylinders, as they say. And I think passion to me, now that I’m thinking about it, is being fully engaged in what you’re doing. I think that’s passion.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Not half-committed. Save yourself the bother, o not be half-committed. You know, it’s Yoda says “Try, do not try, do or do not do.”
 
And I think that the great unhappiness of people, when I see people who have stopped, like the person that you told the story about, they realize that they can’t give their full commitment anymore. Or they haven’t really truly given their full commitment before. And I think to live half a life is being an impostor.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well and I also think that, as humans, we have a remarkable ability to rationalize. And I consider her and she considered me a friend, and that’s why I spoke to her so bluntly because I was concerned about her as an individual. “What happened to you? Do you realize what’s happened to you?” And that’s why she left, and, actually, she left and then started her own business. You know?
 
Because we can all rationalize. “Well, look. You know? I’m being paid do this, and this is what they want. And so my first job is to satisfy them and blah blah blah.” But if it’s also eating you up inside, and although that’s your public face, you require another couple extra drinks after work because the pain of what you’re doing has taken over, or the hollowness because you’re just not engaged. And to me, those are the worst people to work with.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know where I see this most is in the professions because, you know, I’m coaching fifty years next year, August, it’ll be fifty years since I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs.
 
The ones who I see who are most tortured by their entrepreneurial career are the professions. Okay? So doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects. And that is where they have a very proscribed period of life where you have to learn the craft, the way the craft is set out. Okay? But these professions are guaranteed, almost, to give you a good income if you do it right. Okay? I would say that’s less so today than it was…
 
Like, when we were growing up in Ohio, I mean, “Oh, my son’s becoming a doctor.” Well, that future is guaranteed. It’s a very interesting… it’s an immigrant thing. If you watch what immigrants do when they come, I’ll use the United States. They come from someplace else to the United States. And immigrants say, “My son’s gonna become a lawyer. My daughter’s gonna become a doctor” and everything else because they know that those have credibility, they have respect, there’s a certain path that you go through. It’s just a lot of hard work. Put in the hours, you know, get the degrees stage by stage by stage, and you’re guaranteed a sure lifetime.
 
So I’ve had a lot of people… I always say to the professionals, you gotta make a decision right here in the very first workshop in Coach. Are you a lawyer, or are you an entrepreneur who has a specialty in law? Are you an engineer, or are you an entrepreneur who has a specialty in engineering? Because if you say the former, if you say “I’m a lawyer,” “I’m an engineer,” “I’m an accountant,” you’re just a highly paid factory worker. And with, with artificial intelligence coming on the scene, not so well-paid anymore because there are programs now that can probably do in a matter of an hour what it takes you three weeks to do and at a lot less cost. And I think that we’re going through a period right now where those supposedly guaranteed, secure future activities are no longer guaranteed and secure.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, well, I think you’re right. I mean, you know, careers are not what they used to be. You know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Remember the old days when a career was really a career?
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. And just the future is not what it used to be.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. Everybody’s in theater now. Maybe that’s why the impostor syndrome has come up. I’ve seen more use of that word over the last ten years than I ever saw In the first seventy years of my life, the word ‘impostor’. So what’s causing that phenomenon? You can’t just read it out of the manual.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right, right.
 
Well, I also think there’s something else. This is a topic for another time, but I think there is such a thing as toxic productivity. Mm-hmm. And that what social media has fostered is people leaning against the Lamborghini that isn’t theirs.
 
Dan Sullivan: Having a picture taken and sending it out on social media.
 
Jeff Madoff: And saying that they started making a million a month in real estate with no investment.
 
So I think there are new platforms just like, you know, the snake-oil salesman that showed up in the pioneer town, you know, with the miracle cure, it’s just we’ve gotten more sophisticated in terms of how to deliver the message into a larger crowd.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: But it’s the same human bullshit. You know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it was interesting because I followed the recent court case with the FTX, Sam Bankman Fried.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the lead prosecutor from New York, because it was a New York case. They asked him the question, “Well, how did you sort off this whole cryptocurrency thing? I mean, how did you get to the bottom?”
 
He said, “It didn’t have anything to do with cryptocurrency. It had to do with fraud.” And he said, “This is as old as human history, is fraud. And he said it’s just fraud.” I mean, that was It was the shortest big fraud case deliberation on the part of the jury in history. It was four hours. I mean, Bernie Madoff took seven days. This was four… Because what was the problem here? The problem was fraud, you know, and somewhere in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago…
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Somebody had just followed, “How do you be a really exciting fraud?”
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And a fraud is an impostor. That’s the whole basis. You’re being an impostor.
 
There was a great article written in the New York magazine. The writer spent time with Sam’s parents. And they said, “Oh, we raised him right from the childhood to be an adult because he was so smart. Sam was just so smart.” This is about last week. I think it was last week in a New York magazine. And she said to the mother, she says, “Is there any time over this period where you went to him and you said, ‘Sam? Is there anything to these accusations?’ And she says ‘No, because I knew right from the beginning the way that we raised Sam is that he would never be unethical. He would never do anything dishonest. He would never lie.’”
 
And I said, “Hmm. Note to self. Note to self. Maybe you should have started asking him that when he was about… six?” Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. The fact that your kid has Hitler posters on the wall and collects Nazi memorabilia might be a red flag for your kid. You know? You know? Charlie’s a good boy. He’s a good boy.
 
Dan Sullivan: He’s a good boy. But but it was really interesting because his passion was fraud. And he pursued it at a very high level. Now he got this multiplier called cryptocurrency, but it could have been-
 
Jeff Madoff: Absolutely.
 
Dan Sullivan: Could’ve been anything else, but right at the center of this, what we have is an old-time human being.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s why I always love the category of rock called Fool’s Gold because it takes a fool…
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s very interesting, the word ‘sincere’. It’s a Latin word. The word is sincere. I was just thinking of Sam Goldwyn. Sam Goldwyn said, “You know, in Hollywood, the most sincere quality you have to have is sincerity.” He says, Once you can fake that, you can get away with anything.” You know?
 
Anyway, but sincere comes from silver, the silver merchants, they would make statues, you know, statues of the gods or statues of the emperors. And what they discovered, some clever ones, said if you had the minimum of silver on the outside and you took wax and you created an inner part of the statue, and you packed it with wax, and you weighed a real silver statue against that, it would be exactly the same. The weight would be the same. So the word for wax in Latin is cere, and sin is without. So it’s “without wax,” and so they would hold up their statues and say sin cere, sin cere. As you indicate that there was no wax.
 
Well, Sam Bankman Fried was just wax. It was silver-plated wax.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. I love that because it’s of course, the opposite of that is that it’s pure through and through silver. Yep. But you gotta penetrate the surface.
 
Dan Sullivan: Every everybody’s having these exotic dreams about, “Yeah, but cryptocurrency changes everything. You know? I mean, we’re into a new realm of human experience.” Yes. But right at the foundation is fraud.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. I remember in the, I guess it was maybe the early or mid Seventies, what was going to take over human discourse was Esperanto. Remember that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yep. No more need for all these weird idiosyncratic languages. You know? No. I had a professor at the college I went to, and he was a big Esperanto guy. He says, “Can I give you a tip on the future? Learn Esperanto.” I remember I was talking to him, and he said, “Learn Esperanto.” And he says, “In fifty years, this is gonna be the universal language, Esperanto.
 
And I said, “It’s kinda boring.”
 
He said, “Oh, no, no, no. That ,you’re just attaching your you just have your things about your own language here, but this is gonna be the pure human language. This is not an accidental language. This is a created language.”
 
And I said, “Go for it.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I I think there’s groups to still get together, and they speak Esperanto to each other, but…
 
Jeff Madoff: I’m sure there are. I’m sure there are.
 
Dan Sullivan: The hotels actually don’t want their conventions.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. And there are groups that get together and discuss how the Earth is flat. And how the moon landing actually was set up in the desert somewhere in the United States.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I’m a great believer in Occam’s Razor. Do you know Occam’s Razor?
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. Yeah. Go ahead.
 
Dan Sullivan: Occam’s Razor says “Whatever explanation is the simplest is probably the truest.”
 
But speaking of someone, on the passion subject was this man, Palmer Luckey, who I met for the first… I didn’t really meet him, but he I was in an audience. He’s about thirty years old, and he created the Oculus. When he was seventeen years old, he created the… It’s the first and most popular interface for going into virtual reality. When you put it on, you can be in a three-dimensional world.
 
And when he was twenty-two, twenty-three, Mark Zuckerberg purchased it for two billion dollars. So he got his two billion, but he had a falling out because of his political inclinations. And he was fired because when he sold out, he became an employee. He was no longer the entrepreneur. He was now a worker bee, and he was fired. And now he’s at thirty years old. He’s doing an enormous amount of work for the defense department in sensing equipment to sensing systems and everything else. And somebody in the audience there, Peter Diamandis, asked him the question, “Well, what’s your passion? You’re following your passion.”
 
And he says, “I don’t follow my passion. I follow my talent.” And he says, “Wherever my talent seems to be really useful somewhere, and people really want me to use my talent to create something new.” He says “I’ve discovered it just makes me a lot happier than following my passion.”
 
Really funny. I mean, he’s very funny, and he’s very articulate.
 
So Peter said, “Well, you know, with your experience, you know, with Facebook and with Mark Zuckerberg and everything on that experience in, you know, you’re discovering new things you wanna do in the world. What motivates you now at thirty? You know? It’s a good question, you know? “What motivates you?” I mean, you’ve got a long life, you know? What motivates you at thirty?
 
And he said, “You know something? Since I had that experience, I’ve never appreciated the almost unending motivational power of just revenge, just pure revenge.” And the whole audience just went crazy. Oh, yeah. Revenge. You know? That goes way back in history too. That’s... I mean, he said it with a sense of humor, but not really.
 
You know, coming full circle here with our question about the passion, But I just did a podcast with Mike Koenigs, and I dropped a line. We were at a conference together. And I said, “You know, if you know who you are, you don’t need someone else to tell you.”
 
Mike said, “Oh my God.”
 
And I said, “You make a decision in life about who you are, you know?” And I think there’s an ownership at a very early age of just exactly who you are That you don’t need other people’s opinions.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay? So the story that you recounted, Jeff, about that, she didn’t know who she was.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you go through all the people whose opinion that you trust, you know, whether they give you negative feedback or positive feedback, the one thing you go on is that person knows who they are.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: So maybe the answer to “How do you discover your passion?” is that you take ownership of who you are.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And the courage of that conviction, and the courage of that commitment.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup. Yeah. And the courage of that capability and the courage of of the confidence that comes with that. So, yeah. And I think that social media hasn’t done the world any good from that perspective.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And that’s what I look at it as, is that’s the snake-oil salesman that rides into town. You know?
 
It was funny when my kids were, this was their senior year of high school, and there was a party for the parents and the kids. So I was spending my time talking to the kids because, you know, I like my son and daughter’s friends. I wanted to hear, you know, so now they’re leaving high school. What are their dreams? What do they wanna do? What are they after and all that? So one of the fathers came down, and he said, “You know, you’ve been here talking to all the all the kids. Why don’t you come over and talk to us?”
 
And I said, “Well, you know, you already got the script for your life, and these kids are just, you know, in the process of writing it. I find it a lot more interesting. So I like hearing what their dreams and hopes and fears are. That’s interesting to me.”
 
He goes, you know, “You’re an interesting guy, Jeff, but I have to say that—“
 
And I’m thinking, “What’s coming after that?”
 
And he said, “…but I have to say that you put your personality right out there. And if you just gave people a bit more time to get to know you, you know, they might discover that you’re really an interesting person, but I think some people are just put off. Could you just put it out there? And I think some people are put off by that.”
 
And I said, “You know, I do that out of respect for their time.”
 
And he goes, “What?”
 
And I said, “I figure I might as well offend them now as opposed to waiting six, eight months a year until we find out that we don’t wanna be around each other. And that way, we don’t waste all that time.”
 
So I don’t believe in a slow reveal. This is who I am. You like it, you don’t like it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Very interesting. I mean, I sent you a couple letters regarding the Israeli-Palestinian thing, and we came right out. I think It was written two days, the one to our staff, and we said, “We’re giving money to the United Jewish Appeal, and we’ll match any grant that somebody wants because Israel’s gonna be in need of money right now, the Jewish people.”
 
So we put it out to our entire team, and one of the people came up and said, “You’re taking a total stand on this, aren’t you?”
 
And I said “Yeah.” I said, “I strive to not be neutral on anything.” And I said, “People who are neutral after a while don’t know who they are. You know?” And I says, “You know, if it’s on the one hand, this and on the one hand, this, after a while, you don’t have hands.” And I said, “You know, it’s very important to know your friends from your enemies and say so.”
 
But we put it out to nine thousand clients and former clients, and we had four negative reviews. A lot of people didn’t get it because they didn’t even read their email, but the big thing is that you lose nothing by showing up.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. But in order to benefit, you have to show up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And since you have a choice of showing up of who you actually are or faking it, I just find over a long time, faking it doesn’t get you anywhere.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And the thing is that you have to remember what lie you told that person so they the more the more you, I’m also calling.
 
Dan Sullivan: Harry Truman said, “Always tell the truth. It’s much more economical. You only have to remember one version.”
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So what have we explored today? Is this just another Jeff and Dan jabbering? Or-
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, every episode is Jeff and Dan jabbering. Okay?
 
Dan Sullivan: That’s the medium.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s correct. You know, that’s the medium. But, hopefully, we have set out, I think, some important identifiers in terms of passion and what it takes, your 4C’s of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence, and how to tell something that’s genuine from something that isn’t. And, of course, we throw in a bit of anything and everything, stir it all up, and, hopefully, we’ve hit on some messages that are valuable to the people listening.
 
And if nothing else, I had fun.
 
Dan Sullivan: I had fun.
 
I mean, this is an infinite onion. You keep peeling away layers of it, but I think the answer to everything related to how you move through your life starts with courage. I mean, it’s a commitment first, and then you have the courage of your commitment. As long as that’s always an active operating principle, I think it’s a good life. I think it’s a happy life. I think it’s a productive life, hopefully, a profitable life, but the alternative has nothing good to be said for it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, I agree. And I think one of the areas that’s so important to, I think, both of us is the notion that you can’t have passion without engagement, And that fully engaged life is a more passionate and I believe, therefore, a more fulfilling life.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup. I think that’s a take.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s a take.
 
Dan Sullivan: Anyway, this is really great.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks for joining us today on our show Anything and everything, if you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.