It’s A Mistake To Ignore Your Instincts

Dan Sullivan: Jeff, the last time I saw you, in between the last time we did our podcast and now, I had COVID. And I was hoping to say, gee, I mean, it’s been two years and we haven’t gotten it. And I noticed about half-time through a Tuesday workshop—we were here for the week—and I got a cough. And nobody said anything about it. And there was about 40 people, 45 people there. So that night, a couple of our team members said we’ve got more workshops this week, and we’ve got workshops next week, and why don’t you go to Walgreens and get their test and just test out. And both of us, both Babs and I were positive. It was just a cough, it was a head cold. And it never became anything more than that. But we would test every day. So, we had to make a fast decision, because I had a Thursday and Friday that week—this was a Tuesday—and they had to make really quick. And they said, if you’re positive, they can’t be seeing you in person. So, we made a quick switch to Zoom. And of course, we know how to do that. And everybody was cool. But they came, I was on the screen. And it’s really hard to do that. But I had a lot of energy. So, I never lost energy during the period, but I just had this cold. So, I went to Thursday, Friday, and then I had a really big one the following Tuesday. I still had it. And then that was it. And then we had a week off. We went to our cottage and every day it became less, and then we tested and we were both negative. But it was a COVID cold. That’s the way I describe it. But anyway, I never really lost energy to it. But the cough was persistent and then just went away.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Did I tell you I got it? Yeah, I got it the time before between our last podcast, the one before that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you mentioned it last time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I went onto Paxlovid right away. And fortunately, I was asymptomatic. I had two other friends that got it at the same time. Three other friends got it the same time. Two of them got a pretty bad, nothing anywhere near a hospitalization but like a bad case of the flu, that sort of thing. And then one of them got what they call the rebound. Even though they took Paxlovid—it went away, then they got it again in a few days. You know, it’s just, especially this new variant is apparently so contagious. I think it’s just going to be inevitable that people are going to--
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s going to be what they call endemic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. Exactly.
 
Dan Sullivan: We’re just going to have it. But in the Canadian papers, you know, my home home base is Toronto. And they were saying, we may have to go to masks and close downs. And I said, you don’t have a chance. It’s just not going to happen. You’re just not going to put us through that. And we’re going to go through it again, just because you’re worried? We’re just going to accept that you catch this. And, I mean, I wasn’t sick so that I couldn’t perform. I was sick that people couldn’t be near me. And that was the whole problem.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which was, the responsible thing to do. Now, let me before we get into our topic, let me share, because I think this is really nice. What I received the message I received from, I guess you mentioned he’s a Strategic Coach member, Shane Ross. And he was commenting on our latest podcast, and he said, “Beautiful, really piqued my brain, love the deep and vastness of the topics. It seems the majority of people have gotten lazy and do not like to put in the effort to understand our collective story as humans. Love the end about oral traditions and culture. The deeper we go, the more we grow. Keep it up.” That’s nice.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, you told him where he could send the check, right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I did.
 
Dan Sullivan: That’s a nervous thing, because it’s like buying a lottery ticket.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yes. And I’m trying to get them to do it so they subscribe to sending a check on a regular basis. That would be nice.
 
Dan Sullivan: Nothing like systematic, predictable cash flow.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. Something I’ve never experienced in my life, but that’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Heaven is really made up of our earthly aspirations.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I’m not sure where that will take me.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was just going to say, I ask everybody, do they believe that there’s an afterlife, and it’s binary. You either do or you don’t. And I said so, the ones who do believe in an afterlife, I said, “What do you think it’s like?” And then they started telling me, and I said, that looks like something that an entrepreneur could aspire for five years from now, with more teamwork and a little bit more capital, you could actually get there. I have this one thing, and it has to be, because I go first class, and I have ever since I was a kid. Even if I couldn’t afford it, I still go first class, because it makes you feel better about yourself. So, people were saying that Babs and I, when we live our life, we have a thing called the Four Seasons lifestyle. Because Four Seasons Hotel started in Toronto. It was an experiment by a guy who just bought a motel, and he had loved, sort of, boutique type of first-class experience. And he had traveled through Europe. He was an architect. And he came back and he bought a motel, which was in Toronto’s red-light district. So it wasn’t used to people who paid by the day. So anyway, he took it and he bought it, and he gutted it. And then he just fixed it up. And then he just hired people to say, we’re going to create a school here for running a boutique hotel. And it had maybe 50 rooms. But he picked it because it was right across from the main studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
 
Toronto is a big entertainment city, lots of actors come through, entertainers come through. And they’re always interviewed on CBC when they come through. So what Izzy Sharpe, who’s the founder of Four Seasons Hotel, he got the specifications for what a really good recording studio would look like. And he built one into his hotel. And he says, when they come here, why don’t you put your guests up at our hotel, we’ll give him first class treatment, we got great food. It’s a motel, but it feels like a luxury hotel. And they can do the recordings right in the hotel. The CBC was like a government warehouse, it had no flair to it whatsoever. So, the word started going through Hollywood, Nashville, and Broadway that when you go to Toronto, there’s this really weird thing, that the best hotel you want to do, because the CBC will want to interview you, is this motel right across the street. And that’s how they came on the map. And then, now it’s a worldwide luxury brand.
 
So, when Babs and I first met, if we go to New York, we’d stay on 57th Street, the 57th Street hotel, and everywhere we’d wonder if there is a Four Seasons Hotel. And what we came up with is that when we lived at home, we were never going to do anything that you wouldn’t do at a Four Seasons Hotel. So, we would have everything taken care of for us. And that really hit people. They’d say, “Can you afford that?” And you say, “You afford what you value, and we value that. And so, we make the money so that that’s possible.” Our clients aren’t big city people. A lot of them are small town people, they come from the suburbs, they’re not inner-city people. I mean, we have those, but they’re not the majority. And so, one day, they were saying, “I couldn’t get away with that in my town.” And I said, “Maybe it’s your town that you have to get away from."
 
Anyway, so one day, I said, “How many of you here believe in the afterlife? You know, like, after we die, there’s another realm?” And my clients, about two thirds of them believe something. And I said, “How many of you believe you get rewarded there by going economy class here?” And they say, “No.” I said, “So what’s the reward for going economy class here?” If there’s no reward there, what’s the reward for going economy class here? And it’s had a huge impact on a lot of people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s funny. Good question, too. So, what I was thinking of us talking about, was sparked from a comment that was in our previous podcast. And that was when we’re talking about data. In a world where data is used to justify most decisions, it’s important to realize that data has one thing in common. And you answered what that one thing was. Do you remember?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, at the very best, it’ll predict what happened yesterday.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. And, in business, I started wondering about, in business with entrepreneurs in creative fields, how does our dependence on data affect how we interact with others and how we make qualitative rather than quantitative decisions? Because more and more decisions have become quantitative. And I think we’re losing the ability to make qualitative decisions, using our instincts, using our gut, and using the relationship with other people to help us form decisions. So, when we go to a website now, there’s often a test and the test is to confirm that you’re not a robot. So, you have to pick out the crosswalk, and the nine pictures and that kind of thing. And of course, once you get into the website, then you’re invited to chat with a robot in the website. And through machine learning and AI, they try to replicate human interaction, which of course, they can’t really do. So, I was wondering, you were talking about Strategic Coach, you had no data for moving Strategic Coach to Zoom. Yet, as a result of doing that you’ve enjoyed a bigger spike in your business upwards than you ever have before. So, what led you to that decision? And I want to go on from there about how we make decisions in terms of our business, in terms of what we do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we’ve spoken about this personally, but I don’t know if it’s ever shown up here on Anything and Everything. But I was a writer at BBDO, in Toronto, a copywriter. And I knew after three years that this was not going to be my career. I was good enough to get hired, I was good enough to keep my job. I was a fast learner, and why the management kept me, I knew the basics of why: you show up on time, you do what you say you’re going to do, you finish what you start, and you say, “Please” and “Thank you.” You may not be their best writer, but they don’t have to think about you at night and weekends. But I could tell right off the bat, knocking out ads really wasn’t my—commercials and ads, radio, mostly in those days, and I don’t think I ever did a TV commercial. I did a lot of radio, you know, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. But a lot of print ads and brochures and things like that. So, I had already known.
 
And what happened for me was that they took all the small fee-for-service clients, because every agency—it was BBDO but it was a Canadian branch of BBDO. And if you look back 25 years, there had been about six mergers where one agency had grown by just buying out other agencies and bringing them. And what comes along with that are fee-for-service clients, their friends, their small businesses, and you can’t charge them by the media placement, at 17% in those days. I suspect it’s probably something like that today. So, whatever the media placements, so they’re looking for Kraft, which we had, Chrysler, which we had, TD Bank, which we had. That’s where the big money is.
 
So, what they did is they pulled all the little businesses together in one group. And there were about a dozen, and almost all of them were family-owned businesses, some second generation. They didn’t even bother with an account executive. I was sort of the account executive as well as creative. So, I would meet with them and you could tell right off the bat that the problems they had as small businesses weren’t going to be solved by advertising. They had bigger issues. They didn’t even know what they wanted to do with their company. They didn’t know where their company was going. So, I created this sort of coaching process. And three or four of them requested to say, “Would your agency be okay if you came out—we were having sort of a meeting on a Saturday and we’re going to just talk about the future. And would you come out?” And I’m very good at hearing ideas and drawing a diagram of what they’ve just said. I’m a competent artist. I mean, when you have arrows and circles and squares, what more do you need? And I asked my creative director who is a co-owner of the agency, I said, “They want to do this, and you know, it’s fee-for-service. So, they’re going to pay the agency for my time.” And he said, “Sure.” He said, “Great.”
 
So, I did it. And I loved it. But it wasn’t about advertising. It’s just, “Three years from now, what has to happen for you to feel happy with the progress of your business?” They thought this was revolutionary. They had never thought about the future. It was, “How far can you push your past into the future?” was their strategic planning. How can we still be profitable five years from now by doing as little as possible over the next five years? And you began to see that they had a lot of possibilities, but they just didn’t have the habit of that having the future drive their present rather than having their past drive their present. And I said, “God, there’s a business in this, and I love it. And I don’t have to know anything; all I have to do is ask questions and draw diagrams.”
 
So I did this probably for about a year out of the three years that I was there. And that was one piece of data. So that was a piece of data I had. But, it was experiential data that I had—that people really love this, especially at the small business level. Now, you couldn’t do this with the big clients, because they have their own marketing departments, strategic planning, they have their CFO. You can’t do that type of work with a big corporation. And then there was another fact and it was a New York Times article around 1973. And the writer was saying, there’s now an invention out there called the microchip. And this is the first time I had heard the word microchip, because it had been called integrated circuits, or they were transistors. But a microchip was how many transistors can you get on a piece of electronic equipment. I must have read this article about 20 times. And he said, “There’s two things that are going to happen.” He said, “This is going to be the most remarkable invention so far, because you can take this invention and apply it to everything that already exists. You can take the microchip, and you can get things that are already there—systems that are already there, machinery that’s already there—and it will do it much faster, easier, cheaper, and you’ll get a bigger result.” And he said, “And over the next 50 years, this is going to change the world. And really large, rigid corporations, really large, rigid, hierarchical organizations are going to have a hard time, they won’t be able to change fast enough to take advantage of what this technology does. And the other thing is, it’s going to be an entrepreneurial age, because entrepreneurs who are kind of marginal creatures are going to have electronic means to act as if they have a lot of capability.”
 
They didn’t even have personal computers yet. I think DEC were creating these little, they’re about the size of the cabinet, computers. And that was going to be the future. And of course, it was all, you had to learn program language, and everything. But they said entrepreneurs will actually be more advantaged than corporations, and that all existing entrepreneurial activities will probably expand. And not only that, but new fields and new whole new businesses, whole new industries will be created out of this. And entrepreneurs are going to be the first ones to take advantage of it. So, I had two things, one, an activity that I really loved. And the other thing was almost a prediction, that if I could do this going forward, then it would almost be the tide was with me. And that those were my three data points, or two data points, that’s all the data I really needed to launch. And the rest of it is just testing your stuff on check writers.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: In a stricter definition, it’s not even really data that you had. It was an instinct you had that there was something there. Nothing that you could prove until you tried and got the check right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Prior to the transition from the fashion industry to your business of marketing and filmmaking, and everything like that, you just had a feeling that the tide has shifted. I can feel the tide, and this one isn’t going to take me 10 years down the road where I want to go. And I felt this one was.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so entrepreneurial businesses, which are in most cases, small businesses, relatively speaking--
 
Dan Sullivan: Mostly owned or operated.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. And so, once you get into larger businesses, you have to justify your decisions. And if you’re proposing something that in any way has a whiff of risk--
 
Dan Sullivan: Or originality.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is risk.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which is the same thing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes; innovation, creativity, risk.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it was like the story about the guy who created the electronic camera was at Xerox. And he just came up with this, and he said—because, Xerox machines are a form of a camera—but he said, “What if it’s all electronic?” He let it be known that maybe in the future Xerox would be in-- You wouldn’t need the paper, you wouldn’t need the ink. He would have been a real hit at a board meeting back then.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Where we make our living on toner.
 
Dan Sullivan: Same thing with Kodak. They make their money on film. They might as well give the cameras away for free, which they almost did, because they make their money on the film. But what if there’s no film? What if there’s no toner? Yes, somebody mentioned last week of fax, and we have a 23-year-old person that we just hired and she says, “What’s a fax?” I said, “It’s a good question.” I said, “It’s like a PDF.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, in entrepreneurship, in creative fields, to me, data can be a huge limiting factor. Because it represents risk in most businesses—which are made up of people who are risk averse—especially if you have to justify your decision to somebody else. So, this also means, and I’m wondering if you agree with this, this also means that great opportunities are going to be missed.
 
Dan Sullivan: We’ve talked about intuition before on this. And you get a gut feel and basically, I think the future is unknowable, period, for anybody. Large corporations, entrepreneurs; the future is unknowable. But, I think that entrepreneurs have to be very, very alert and curious about what’s happening to the actual customers and clients that they know, and get a feel. And I think a lot of the data comes, “What are my own clients telling me about how they’re looking at the future?” That’s the data—how my clients are looking at the future is data that I take very seriously. Okay, but that’s human data; that’s emotions, that’s fears, excitement about opportunities, confidence about existing strengths, desire for greater capabilities, that’s all human stuff.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is qualitative, as opposed to quantity.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s qualitative that you have to find some means to put a number on it, or, in it. And so I think it’s totally opposite, the big data world is totally opposite from what entrepreneurs do. That entrepreneurs grasp and an entirely new qualitative future and they say, “How can you put some numbers to that?” Whereas the big data people, they have, enormous amount of quantity. And they say, “How do we create a qualitative experience out of all of our data?”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it’s interesting, because if you’re doing a play like I am, yeah, or if you’re doing a film or something like that, you can put together a business plan, you can put together the recoupment and how long it would take to recoup if you sold X number of tickets at` X number of dollars over X amount of time, and all that. That’s probably as creative an act as writing the play in the sense that nobody knows you’re making it all up. But until you put it out there for sale, as you said, the check writers, you don’t know if you’ve got a business.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And you need other people’s excitement and participation, literally, to create the venture. It really struck me in the early days before you had done the documentary with Lloyd Price. So those who were tuning in for the first time, Jeff, and a wonderful team that he’s put together, are in the, I would say—what would you say this is? Step number two, of having the play out in the world. And if it really works, at step number two, step number three is Broadway. That, you opened on the road, and it was a hit, and now you’ve got a longer run in the second biggest theatre city in North America before you get to New York, which is Chicago. And step number two is reality, it’s soon to be a reality. And step number three is New York or London or whatever is after that. My sense is because, for the last 10 years, I’ve had a collaboration with someone who’s deep into the high-tech world, Peter Diamandis. And I said, “There isn’t any difference between what a start-up is in the tech world and what Jeff is doing.” And its belief in yourself that they’re really looking for. I mean, first of all, you have to have a little bit of track record, that this isn’t an amateur venture.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and that track record can manifest itself—and I think this is good advice for entrepreneurs, too—is in putting together the right team of people to execute.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you knew that from decades of experience.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s very interesting. In Canada, we have a district, it’s a region that’s west of Toronto, and it’s called the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and they have universities there. But it’s the most critical mass, high-tech area of Canada. And they said, “This is our Silicon Valley.” And I said, “No, it’s not. There’s only one Silicon Valley.” And they said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I said, “Because, tell me how the Canadian culture treats bankruptcy.” Well, I’ll tell you it, if you go bankrupt, you don’t get your next credit card for five years. But you have no credit rating for five years, because I’ve done it twice; and I have the experience. And so, Silicon Valley, if you’ve gone through a bankruptcy, it’s like you have a master’s degree. They say, “Well, that answers a lot of questions. You’ve been through this and you’re back.” Yeah. So, we’re taking that it was an education. And you have some experience, now, in not falling in love with your idea.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s true. A story that struck me was told to me by a friend of mine, who unfortunately passed away, but her name was Dawn Mellow. Dawn Mellow was the first woman CEO of a major store chain, which is Bergdorf’s. She was an incredible person. And she left Bergdorf, she was recruited, and she started, she discovered Tom Ford and built his business. And she was amazing, a wonderful person. We would go to lunch every couple months. And she was incredibly humble, and with her resume, you would think this person is not going to be like that. But she was totally humble. And she said, let me tell you something that happened to me back in 1961. She was working for May Company, which I believe was based out of Cleveland wasn’t it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes, right on public square in Cleveland.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, what they used to do back then, and this used to happen up until the 1990s or so was, that there were people that they would hire, Dawn being one of them, that were kind of the canary in the coal mine for trends. So, the major stores—be it Bloomingdale’s, be it May Company—they would put these people on staff who demonstrated great instincts, who were very creative, who found what was happening in the pulse. So, she was in London. And they were already the percolations of what was happening on Carnaby Street, and all of that. But this was like 1961-62, something like that. She went to this club, and heard this band that she thought was terrific, and invited them to come sit down with her. They did. And she said, “Tell me—now, I have to get approval on this, but have you ever been to the United States?” No. “Well, would you like to, because we have stores all over the country, and in major cities all over the country. So, what I’d like to do is sponsor a tour, we could sell your record. And I think it could create a whole new kind of excitement, and we’re ready for that. This could be great.” So that sounds fantastic. “So, do you have a recording, something?” Well, we’ll make a recording. And they gave her a record before she left London.
 
She goes back and talks to the CEO. She says I have something I want you to hear. She plays the record, and he goes, “That’s horrible. What is that?” And she said, “It’s this group I heard, and I think they’re going to be amazing. And we can get in on the ground floor. We can sponsor their tour—that can be profitable. This is going to position us at the front of popular culture. This is great.” He says, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That song is terrible. I have no interest in putting any money in that.” The group was The Beatles.
 
Dan Sullivan: That’s funny with Cleveland’s--
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Rock ‘n’ roll history.
 
Dan Sullivan: Rock ‘n’ roll Allan Fried, who was a little too adventurous in too many areas. We’re both from northern Ohio. And this is the start of rock and roll. And then of course you have The Beatles a decade later. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The British Invasion.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Babs went to their first trip to Detroit when they came over the first time. And she says, “It’s the only concert where I’ve heard nothing.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Just the screaming of the crowd?
 
Dan Sullivan: There was just screaming. She was in a balcony. She says, “I was afraid the balcony was going to collapse.” Yeah. What’s that nose? I mean, you’re talking about a nose for the future. And of course, he just died about six months ago, the first record producer from Los Angeles who spotted Lloyd?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Art Rupe. 104.
 
Dan Sullivan: Art Rupe. He just died I think in February or March, and he was like 104. And you have this right in the script. And he said, “You know? I’ve got a feeling something new is coming and this sounds like what I feel is coming.” So, she must have had that too.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, it’s interesting you mentioned that because I hadn’t thought about it in that way relating it to data. But what Art did when his acting career—which is why he went to LA, was as Arthur Rubenstein, but that didn’t work out going to LA to become an actor. And he lived near a Gospel Church, loved the music, and bought some gospel records and really analyzed the structure. And what he realized, which was unique for the time, was that he didn’t care about their technical ability. What he cared about was the emotion the music caused. And he felt there was a market for that kind of-- Look how it engaged people. And earlier on, not too much earlier on, but Fats Domino put out “They Call Me The Fat Man,” and he saw how many records that sold was just 27-29,000. Dwarfed by the over a million records that “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” recorded by Lloyd Price sold. But the point is that everybody thought you had to be opera, you had to be classical, and that kids would not buy records. Well, kids wouldn’t buy records because the record players were a big piece of furniture. So, our grandparents’ age, that record player was nothing you could carry around with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they broke.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But when portable record players came out, which was a result of the youth starting to buy more and more music, it made it much more portable. You could go on a picnic, and you could take it with you. So, the point is that I looked at the, from when you were talking, I was thinking, “Yeah, well, it’s kind of like opera and classical music are like the data points. Those have survived for a couple centuries. They know that there’s a market for it, but they had no idea how huge the market was for popular music, because everybody was afraid to experiment with that on a large scale. Lloyd changed that. Art Rupe’s thinking that led him to sign Lloyd because, not unlike you, he saw an opportunity—and there was a market there whose needs weren’t being met, and he loved the music—that he did that. So, it is like that. I think it’s just really fascinating. Whatever that nose is, you’re never going to be able to quantify that.
 
And that brings me to, going again, back to data. We’ve become increasingly disenchanted with intuition and gut instinct. The business community I’m talking about in particular. So, what is disenchantment? Enchantment means you’re kind of under a spell, your charmed, it’s magical. Disenchantment means you’ve disengaged from it, you’re no longer happy or satisfied, you’re in fact disappointed. By the way, Dawn, the person that I mentioned to you, that position no longer exists in the stores. They did not want to continue to finance it.
 
Dan Sullivan: The way we got on this topic in the last podcast is that you had just been in the presence of some great global marketers. And they were just saying, “We’ve got to rethink the whole thing. Because we’ve sort of maximized the usefulness of numbers, they aren’t producing the results. They’re not creating breakthroughs. They’re not creating revolutions.” They’re not creating it because those are the by-product of emotional shifts, huge emotional shifts.
 
I write a book a quarter, a little book, a 50-page book, it’s a one-idea book. But the one I just finished, I just put the finishing touches on last week, it was called You Are Not A Computer. And I said, I’m going to give you a simple proof right up front. It’s called the 10-versus-100 Test. You have a message and you have 10 human beings and each has to whisper the message in the ear of another human being, who has to pass it on until it gets to 10. And then number 10 comes back and tells number one what the message is. And there’s no similarity because each human has missed part of the message. And they made it up to pass it on. And they’re just passing on a developing story, which comes back. And I said, “With a computer you give the first one the message, the hundredth’s, it’s the same message. A thousand, it’s the same message; million, it’s the same message. And we love computers because they’re predictable. And we love human beings because they’re not.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And you were talking about what we used to call “Telephone,” the game we played at birthday parties when we were kids. Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s the telephone game. It’s hilarious. And this is the Silicon Valley religion: that humans are just information processors; computers are better information processors; therefore, at a certain point, computers surpass human beings in all ways, except for the fact that they can’t make things up.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that’s right. So that takes me to a couple places. One is, there’s always, seems to be, that public fascination with the computer that can beat the chess master. And so how “smart” computers are. Well, that has nothing to do with intelligence. What it has to do with is-- A lot of people use the term algorithm, and they don’t know what an algorithm is, but an algorithm is essentially a set of instructions. A recipe is an algorithm; a recipe for chocolate cake is an algorithm. So, the algorithms are instructions. So that’s the rule set down to reach a result. So, the thing that a computer can do, is be a lot faster at processing algorithms than a human can be.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it can guess new algorithms.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, there’s that anticipation through the machine learning for that, which we call AI, ultimately. But the point is that, which raises another question is, does having the data necessarily mean do we actually understand what it means? Because you also have to ask the right questions of the data and therefore collect the right data. And I think that’s an art form in and of itself.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. You see the siren in the background right now? Can you hear the siren?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I sure can.
 
Dan Sullivan: They’re not responding to a big data announcement. They’re responding to a very emotional situation.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Alarms go off when there’s risk. And if an ambulance is coming, chances are, you’re the result of a risk of some sorts, that necessitates an ambulance taking you somewhere else.
 
Dan Sullivan: They’re either responding to an extreme emergency, or there’s a new batch at Dunkin’ Donuts.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: One or the other.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it’s highly emotional.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But you know, I think that oftentimes, questions aren’t asked about the data. How do you form the questions that you are asking? What are the responses you’re getting? And how do you interpret it? And I think that, again, my data for the play is ticket sales. And, along with the ticket sales, it’s audience response during the play.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and it was also a profound story, where you interviewed somebody and caught his life on video, and you were blown away and saying, “This is a very important human being from the 1950s that very few people know who he was and how important he was.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that’s right. But, not to diminish that because I certainly don’t want to diminish it, but you know, you making the decision, as you were the work for hire from the agency, the fee-for-services, you realized that there was something there. Now, since then, you’ve had a 50-year career, because you were right. And the interesting thing about that 50-year career is it’s in fact, gotten bigger. Most recently--
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. The future is incredibly bigger than the past.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which is amazing at this stage of life. That’s phenomenal. But there’s no data to support any of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the thing is, that we essentially don’t have any answers. Okay. But we have very structured questions, the answer to which, the question’s only the person that we’re asking actually knows the answers. That they have experiences, and they’ve had things that they thought about, but they’ve never had the means inside their own head to actually ask a question, “What’s this experience mean? What value did I get out of the experience? What did I learn out of it? And how is it useful in the future?” So, we just asked them that.
 
I just had one last week, and I’ll give you an example. I said-- And they’ve all been in business, at least five years at the minimum, and some of them 50 years. And I said, “If you go back, and I’m going to give you two minutes to think about this, I just want you to write back which are the best skills in your company—so that would be your skills and other people’s skills—that have just grown and grown and grown for as long as you have been in business.” And I only give them two minutes because human brains are very fast when it’s asked a question. And they do a survey of their experience, and they come back and they said, “You know, I always know who the 10 best customers are going to be next year; that’s your strength. I can just tell it anytime by putting together top 10 lists, not who’s been the best customers, but the ones who will be the best customers next year.” And I say, “Okay, write down some proof of that, where you’ve really guessed right on this, and you’ve really proven this point.” And they said, okay, and they write that down.
 
And I say, “Now, so how many of you have been doing this 25 years?” And they raise their hands; I have a lot of 25-year people. And I said, “Now take it another 25 years. It’s done nothing but grow and get better for 25 years. So, project it out 25 years.” And they said, sum total of the exercise, they get there. And they said, “These are three things that I’m doing and I’ve always done. And I’m doing a whole bunch of other stuff; what will happen if I just get rid of the other stuff and just focus on these three things?” And I said, “Is it worth betting on?” And they say, “Yeah, of course, it’s worth betting on.” Because it’s all guesses and bets. That’s all life is, is guesses and bets. I’ve made a lot of bad guesses, and I’ve made a lot of bets, but I’ve gotten better at putting the two together.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: A bet is a risk. So, you’ve probably gotten better assessing risk.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it’s never guaranteed. And that’s where you get into the teamwork. And I mean, one thing that I’ve just so thoroughly enjoyed, is just the sheer amount of production talent that you’ve put together on this. And you caught them at a good time. If we hadn’t had COVID, you might have not been able to put that team together. But they had some time to think. And they had some time now to listen to their agent.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: In fact, I had that team, most of the guys in place, and then we hit the COVID.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they loved the stories. The truth is, the loved-- And they had the same nose for something, because that’s what their business is about.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: The director, the choreographer, the scenery guy, the costume guy, their business is having a nose for what’s the next big 10?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think it’s that. It’s also interesting-- I wonder sometimes—tell me if you do—I wonder sometimes when I see a celebrity in a particular movie or doing a commercial, and thinking, “Now this person makes scads of money; why are they doing that?” And it could be because it was just a whole lot of easy money. It could be that they own the part of the company that they’re promoting, and we don’t even know that. But what I found is that when you give people and engage people in a project that they are really into, and they feel present, acknowledged and heard, they really get into it. And they bring others along with them.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s life at its best. And everybody’s taking a risk.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. As well, as things have gone so far, does that mean they’re going to continue to go well? I think so. I believe so. Do I know so? No. A good friend of mine, Josh Sapan, is CEO of AMC Networks. And every time they do a new program, it’s a big deal, it’s a big expense. So, I’m going to just tell you two quick things, because I think this is interesting. We were having breakfast together, this 20 some years ago, and he pulls out a VHS and he said, “I want you to take a look at this.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s a pilot. It’s a show we’re considering.” “Oh,” I said, “what is it?” And he said, “It’s called Mad Men.” And I said, “Oh. So, it’s about people insane? Or people on Madison Avenue? Which some are insane.” And he said, “No, it’s about the ad agency business.” And I said, “I’ll be happy to look at it, but you’re going to do it.” Then he looked at me and kind of smiled and said, “Now why do you say that?” I said, “Because your dad.” His father was in the advertising business.
 
It had been turned down by every network: HBO, Showtime, all the networks. And at that point, AMC was just American Movie Classics, showed old movies and it was not a player in original programming. Josh’s charge was to make them a player in original programming. Look at what The Sopranos did for HBO, once they realized that first-run movies were not going to be enough. So, he went for it. And of course, we know that Mad Men was a phenomenal success. Well then, his next venture was Breaking Bad. And as he told me, he said, “Look, before you put me on too high a pedestal, I also okayed Bridezillas because that makes a ton of money, and I’m responsible for that.” But I said, “So how did you pitch a story about a high school chemistry teacher who thinks he’s dying of terminal cancer? So, with a former student, he partners up and starts a meth lab? What was that pitch on that one?” He said, “Vince Gilligan, the writer had such a passion and such clarity about the characters, the story, the arc. He said that it was incredibly contagious. That, too, had been turned down everywhere. And Josh thought there was really something there because of that enthusiasm, how well Vince could articulate what the story arc was and who the characters were. And of course, it’s become one of the landmark shows of television for all time. They put it in front of audiences.
 
I said, “So Josh, you’ve named two shows that became tremendous successes. What about all those that fail?” Then he kind of laughs as I’m asking the question, because you put all of these shows up in front of an audience, and they’ve got dials: interested, not interested, all these kinds of things. And they all do their, what they think is their due diligence at focus groups and audience testing. And I said, “So if that all worked, there’d be a hell of a lot more successes than there are. So, what is it about the data that you’re gathering that’s not working?” And he goes, “I’m glad you asked me that.” He said, “It’s the magic part.” “So, what do you mean?” He said, “There’s a magic that happens with some shows that doesn’t happen with others. There are shows that test horribly, that end up doing really well. And other people tested Mad Men. I knew there’s a lot of story there. And there are stories that test poorly that do tremendously well.” And he said, “The difference is that magic. And I wish I could tell you that I knew what it was. But it’s something you feel.”
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think part of the magic is the people you’re asking, are you asking them to put skin in the game? I remember, we had the Saturday lunch where you were telling us that you were just at the start of the first funding round for Personality. And Babs and I were there with you. And we’ve always been great conversational partners and who we’ve had-- And then frequent, but a very, very enjoyable social relationship since I first met you. And you are telling us about this. And then you took a trip to the loo. And Babs said, “You know, let’s invest in this. This is really good.” And I agree. You came back and we said, “Well, we’re really going to support you on this.” And he said, “I really appreciate that emotional support.” He said, “But right now I’m looking for money.” And I said, “Yeah but--” “I appreciate-- I mean, you don’t want bad reaction, but actually, what, I’m looking for is dollars right now.” And there was a minimum. So, we met the minimum, and we’ve met the second minimum, and we’ll meet the third minimum. And for me, it was an early infatuation with theater that I had when I was a teenager, and I thought I would go into it. And I had enough theater experience to know that that, like advertising, I wasn’t good enough that it could be a great career. I was good, more than most people, but I didn’t have the passion to actually persist, you know. And that’s what you really need in any field is you need the passion to persist. That not doing it is harder than doing it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. And I think you hit on the term—this has been my mantra with my students, and we’ve talked about it before—but I think if you are an entrepreneur, but you lack that quality of persistence, don’t start down the path. Because you’re going to find it too hard, too frustrating. And it’s going to eat you up. Persistence is critical.
 
Dan Sullivan: Do you know the name Steven Pressfield?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: He wrote [The War of Art]. Yes, I’ve spoken to Steven.
 
Dan Sullivan: So anyway, about four months ago, I was talking to Joe and he said, “I just got a note from Steven Pressfield.” And I didn’t know who he was. There’s lots of genres of books I haven’t gotten into; that’s one of them. And he said, “He wants me to tell you that he just loves Dan’s little books.” And I said, “Oh, well, I’ve got to meet this person. Someone who loves my books? I’ve got to meet this person.” So we did three podcasts—well, we did enough for three podcasts—Friday. He’s 78—we’re the same age—lots and lots of common topics, right off the bat. And it was really great. And it was Joe and Steven and Dan, and it was a third, a third and a third. And, it was a terrific two hours. The one thing that he said is that what makes a great career is that there was no other possibility. He said, “It never occurred to you that there was an alternative to what you were doing.”
 
And I remember the second time I went bankrupt, I had gotten someone to underwrite a loan, go to the bank with me and underwrite a loan, and I had to go-- And when you declare bankruptcy, you have to include the banks. You don’t get to select who you’re going to pay and who you’re not going to pay when you go bankrupt. I mean, for a major bank, in Canada, the banks, the smallest of them has 800 branches. They’re monstrous banks: TD, BMO, these are in the United States right now. So yeah, he was a nice guy, and he said, “This is the second time you’ve done this, right? Gone bankrupt?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “I would take that as a message, that you go and get a really good job as a writer and an ad agency.” And I said, “No, no. That’s not the lesson.” I said, “The lesson is, I’m not smart enough yet. And so I need more experience.” And I said, “So there’s no possibility of me not.” And he says, “Well, that’s the difference between you and me.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he was very nice. But there was just no possibility that I wouldn’t keep doing what I was doing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I’m laughing because I’m thinking of this meeting I had. A friend of mine—this is even before the script was finished or anything—and this friend of mine wanted me to meet this friend of hers who was a producer and thought he might be helpful. So, we’re in his office. And if you’ve ever been in a producer’s office, they have posters of all the plays, that they’ve been involved with.
 
Dan Sullivan: And pictures.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, yes. And he wasn’t there yet and we’re sitting there. And then he comes in, and he goes, “I understand that you’re thinking about doing a play. It’s a very difficult road. It’s an uphill battle all the way. It’s expensive. It takes a lot of time.” Then he’s like going on all the different obstacles. And I go, “Timeout, timeout.” And he was surprised and he stops. And I said, “Despite my youthful appearance…
 
Dan Sullivan: You are then, what, 69 or 70?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was actually probably 64, 65, something like that. And I said, “I don’t need the Theater 101, Here’s-how-hard-it-is lecture. I’d love to talk to you about what you do. But I don’t need that part.” And now, what I didn’t say—because I still have a little bit of a filter left, it’s probably gone by now, but at least then I still had little bit of a filter left—and I’m thinking, “Well, you’re not that impressive. Huh, look what you’ve accomplished. You’re telling me I can’t do it?” And probably, knowing you, you’re more polite than I. But when you’re talking to the guy at the bank, you’re thinking that’s why you’re sitting in a stupid hole in the bank. Because of the way you think. And there’s nothing the matter with that, by the way.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was an altar boy, when you’re selling shoes, Jeff. I was completely different. Completely different educational background.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was selling shoes. You were selling religion.
 
Dan Sullivan: And probably still am but…
 
Jeffrey Madoff: A different religion.
 
Dan Sullivan: Wholesale. I used to-- That was retail, I didn’t want to do retail.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Can’t sell your own product. That’s right. It occurred to me, by the way, just going back to the data and the computers and all this kind of thing, that I thought about when automobiles first started, they ranked them on horsepower. Right? And that, how fast a horse, how many horses would it take to achieve that kind of speed, pulling that kind of load and so on. And then I think about the ongoing debate, as you know, “will computers become smarter than we are?” And again, because they’re processing things faster. So, there’s the muscle about the rapid motion that-- You know, we can’t outrun cheetahs. That doesn’t mean cheetahs are smarter than us. And we can’t process as fast as a computer and that doesn’t mean that computers are smarter than us. There’s the physical and there is the mental.
 
Dan Sullivan: But we think in metaphors.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly, exactly. Yes. Now go with that--
 
Dan Sullivan: I remember in the 50s, when you had the ongoing series, like [Four Star Playhouse], you had Lux Video Theatre, you had all these, they weren’t a variety show or-- They were actually presenting-- [Four Star Playhouse] was David Niven, Charles Boyer; there are four of them, and they actually put on plays. I mean, they were movies, but it was a half hour, it was an hour. When they opened, they always showed the curtains opening up. It wasn’t theater, it was television. But they had the metaphor that we’re going to put on, like, a play, but it’s on your video. And I had never thought of the connection you just made. Yes. You do what is predictable from what you’ve known. My feeling is that nobody knows what creativity is. It’s like energy—what’s energy? Well, we know how to capture it. And we know how to send it and everything, but nobody actually knows what energy is. We know how to use it. We know what you can do with it. And I think creativity is the same thing. Originality is the same thing. It’s not something that you can teach with an algorithm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. Imagine in the early days of television, and I love the metaphor of the curtains, because that’s how the Jack Benny show started, the Jackie Gleason show started, they all started now as a convention of either theater, or vaudeville, which is also theater. And I’m wondering if in those early meetings, they think, “Well, how are we going to start the show?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, we just start the show? What are we going to do?” “Uh, curtains, there is the curtains. Give them curtains.” And it wasn’t until later on that it got to you would do titles, and no curtain. And then after that, you had to get the people’s attention faster. So, you would tease what the show is going to be like; for 30 to 60 seconds something would happen—like Law & Order is brilliant for that. They start off with a couple talking and they’re arguing about something, and it’s got nothing to do with anything. And then as they’re walking out of the restaurant, still arguing, one of them trips over a body on the sidewalk.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. The interesting thing is that, so often with Law & Order, the two people who are shown to introduce it don’t play any part of the plot. Somebody’s walking through Central Park, but it’s not happening to them. They’ve come across where something’s happened, and then the two cops show up.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it’s total sleight of hand, if you will. You’re looking over here, but there’s--
 
Dan Sullivan: Think of the repetitions before they could get to that point, from the opening curtains to “we’re so confident what we can do, and we know how to grab their attention.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think that the grabbing the attention has become-- There’s two things that are really tough these days; grabbing attention isn’t as hard as holding their attention. I don’t know if I ever told you this. I was going to be doing a second day of talking about marketing and advertising in that class. And I walked into class and all the students are just talking amongst themselves and so on. And I picked up one of the plastic chairs and threw it across the room. And when that kind of molded plastic hits terrazzo, it’s loud. Kids jumped and it was really something. They’re shaking. And I said, “So what did I just do?” Some are still shaking. And I said, “No, think about our last class on advertising. What did I just do?” And then I saw this guy’s, lights up and he goes, “You got our attention.” I said, “That’s right. And it was a cheap trick. But I got your attention. But in order to consummate a deal, what do I have to do?” And somebody else said, “Keep our attention.” And I said, “That’s right. That’s right.” So, I didn’t know I was going to throw the chair across the room when I walked in. But then it seemed like the appropriate thing to do a teaching moment, if you will. It was kind of cool but I think that, again, there wasn’t any data that had told me, here’s the way I get students’ attention.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I’ll update you on something with the AI program that beat the chess master. So, all the really top chess players around the world kind of got together and they’ve kind of said, “Well, this is a kind of the wave of the future. So why don’t we start a class that’s master chess people with an AI companion, and we all compete. You got your AI companion; I got my AI companion.” And they’re uneven, they’re unequal in what they can do, just like they were unequal when they were just playing chess, they’re now unequal where they’ve added this other dimension. Then that’s what humans do; humans say okay, new game. Okay, let’s just take it to another level. But I mean, the chess is doing is that they’re just kind of telling you all the games that have ever been played before and kind of what happened. You know, if you’re in this situation, this happened. But they’ve still got to guess and bet.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, again, I think that’s where the computer’s ability to process faster comes in. But you know, there’s another thing, as you were talking about, that lots of people now, of course, are playing games online. There’s a term I’m sure you know, called “poker face,” right? What’s that? It’s when you’re sitting across the table from somebody and the stakes are high, but you don’t want to give any indication of what it is you’ve got. Or you want to give a false indication, so they think that you have a better hand, or a worse hand or whatever it is, but the point is, all the human coding is out the window when you’re playing against the computer. And I would say that when you are involved in, whether it’s in negotiation in business, a gamesmanship situation, or presentation, whatever, part of what informs what we as humans do is the way that other humans respond to us and how we respond to them. So then what lack are we fostering in terms of decoding social cues, so that we can understand things better, or somehow manipulate things or whatever?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think the thing is that people are looking for confidence wherever they can get it. And if it doesn’t come from their own thinking, they fall back on numbers.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and also, on the other fear, the biggest risk…
 
Dan Sullivan: Making a mistake.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And getting fired. Because most people’s primary goal is holding on to their job.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. And I would say, the average CEO, right now it’s about six years. And what I realized, because at the top level of Coach, it’s called the Free Zone, and you do collaborations with other people. But what you have, what holds it together is that you’re doing it for the same end target. It’s just that that person has a 360-degree world, and you’re just a slice of their world. So, you find out what the other slices are in this person’s world is, and you collaborate with the person. I’ll give you an example. Through doing the collaboration with Hay House with Ben Hardy, we brought on Tucker Max, because Tucker’s the one who actually negotiated the agreement with Hay House. And Tucker is a strategist. He’s a book strategist. So, we got talking.
 
And, along the way, when we were developing the book—books, now—I just got really interested in Tucker and his vast empire that he’s put together to help people write books. And I said, I’ve been missing this capability for 30 years. And people say, “You just knocked books out like that. How do we learn how to do one book?” And I said I can’t be any help to them, because they said, “Can we use your people?” “No, you can’t use my people. My people are for me; you don’t get to use my people.” But I don’t have any useful advice. And I said, “Tucker, why don’t we do a Zoom call, where you come in and you just talk about how you do books?” And he’s done about five of them now. And he’s gotten 130 clients from my people. And people say, “So what’s the split that you have with Tucker?” I said, “Nothing. I’ve got his capability. All I wanted was the capability. I didn’t want the money.” I said, “I know how to make money my own way. I don’t need his money. But I do need his capability.” And that’s collaboration.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And that’s your, also your “Who Not How.”
 
Dan Sullivan: He’s my “Who Not How.” And then they were going along, and his general manager comes to him and says, “Is there any way in the future, we would just have Strategic Coach clients? They’re very coachable.” He said, “They’re all prepared. They tell me very clearly what the book’s about.” Because our Program is about people getting clear about any project, and a book is a project. So, we just get them clear about the project. And they say, “We’re already a month or two months ahead in dealing with them.” Because most people have a book in them, and it’s about every experience they’ve had since they were born. Okay, they’re now on chapter 35. Okay, and it’s for everybody in the world. It’s longer than War and Peace. And on their gravestone, had another chapter before the book came out. And I said, “Why don’t you just take the best chapter you have in the book and write a 50-page book on the best chapter in your book, and get it out so that you’re having conversations with the world?” So that’s what I’ve done. I just knocked out these little 50-p[age]-- It’s one idea. One idea has more than one dimension. So, it’s got eight dimensions, eight chapters. Knock it out. Put some cartoons in and do a video, do an audio, nice little package.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s a great package. And I’ve read a number of those books. So, to circle things back around?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, this is a major, major global issue that we’re talking about today.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh yeah. We’ve just dipped the toe in it. But it’s interesting because when you understand that algorithms are essentially, they’re not essentially, they are instructions. And the earliest algorithms were probably people saying, don’t go that way, because you’re going to get killed. And algorithms were initially two things, it was either survival or death. So, people learned to follow instructions, because they wanted to survive, not die. And that’s what kept early humans, before we became hunter gatherers, they didn’t venture far from home because you’re afraid of getting killed. Now, I think a lot of it keeps businesses from doing things that could be a lot more innovative and a lot more beneficial to a lot more people.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then there’s how fast people move on and in corporate, and I’m talking about corporate life here: “I’ve only got another year to go and I don’t want to make a mistake. So, I’ll keep everybody distracted with the numbers that we’ve got to figure out before anyone has to make a decision. And I’ll be on to my next thing before they’ve realized that they don’t have any ideas.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, Dan, once again, I think we have looked--
 
Dan Sullivan: I just got to finish off with this story, and that’s Mel Brooks when it comes down—I forget which movie he comes down from Mt. Sinai to destroy--
 
Jeffrey Madoff: [History of the World, Part I].
 
Dan Sullivan: [History of the World, Part I]. He says, “I’ve got these 15--”—koomph! and one of them drops and collapses—“…these 10 commandments!” I wonder what the other five were?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Right. That’s one of my favorite moments in the movie. That’s, by the way, that could also be, like, the birth of marketing. Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Anyway, but the 10 commandments are an algorithm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. A lot of these things become mystified through jargon.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they become magical, because people follow them for a long time. And, you know, they’re not bad.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, my grandmother had a phenomenal algorithm for banana bread. It was really good. And that was her version of banana bread. And I’m sure there’s many other algorithms that at least-- I mean, the thing is so interesting, so much is a metaphor and is standing in for something else. And I don’t think that people necessarily understand that, in terms of what that truly means, in terms of our perception. It’s quite profound.
 
Dan Sullivan: The thing is that all the data in the world doesn’t tell a story. One of my future quarterly books is called Technology–Coaching–Teamwork. And they have a line between each of them as three levels. And I said, technology doesn’t work until there’s teamwork around the technology. And technology doesn’t coach how teams are supposed to use it. So, you have to have coaching. And IT is the number one fastest growing in the world for the last 20 years, IT.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh really? Well, makes sense.
 
Dan Sullivan: And coaching, of anything, is number two. I mean, I’m not talking just about the coaching that I do. I’m talking about any kind of coaching. It’s kind of like Steven Palter, a friend of ours from Long Island. He’s an IVF doctor and a great one. He has three sons, but his youngest son, when he was 10 years old—he’s about 14 now— he said, “Dad, I figured it out for the rest of the way.” And he said, “What are you saying?” He said, “I found whatever my teacher brings up as a topic that day I come home and I find five YouTube videos on it and I watch all five of them. And tomorrow I know a lot more than she does.” “Well,” Steven said, “You’re really smart.” And he said, “No, I’m not really smart.” He says, “I just know what the method is.” Anywhere in life, any topic that comes up, YouTube’s got it. And that’s coaching. YouTube basically puts it together, kind of shows the coaching.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: My early, as they now call it, hack—although back when we were younger was cheating, or a shortcut—was Classics Illustrated.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yes. I loved Classics Illustrated.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Me too. Especially if I didn’t actually end up reading all of A Tale of Two Cities or whatever.
 
Dan Sullivan: Now, it’s This Topic For Dummies.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Great pleasure. Anything you pulled out of this, that’s pa-- I think the metaphor thing is a thing. If we think of that, I’ll find five metaphors, and you find five metaphors, and we’ll just say--
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s like that.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s like how a word like “blitz”—right, I think it’s a war time, it’s blitzkrieg was the German word, that did it—but people have talked about blitzes. You know, “we’re going to blitz this, we’re going to blitz this.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it’s a term in football, that you’re going to full force attack through the line to get the quarterback.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I didn’t know that you see. But when people say the word blitz, everybody kind of has a sense. But it’s not the actual thing. It’s just kind of know what they’re referring to.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. And I think there’s something, because it really hit me thinking about computers processing faster, which doesn’t mean that they’re smarter. But there’s the mental end, which is that we compare ourselves to comput-- The brains, the brain is not a computer. It’s useful as a metaphor for the computer, but it’s not a computer. And then horsepower, which is a metaphor that’s lasted to this day, when they’re talking about engines and so on. And we can’t run faster than a cheetah. But that dichotomy, why does it break down when there’s a mental and there’s a physical? How did that come about? Well, we’d found machinery that could overcome the physical limits of speed and carry capability. And do you know, what made skyscrapers possible? Do you know what invention it was that made skyscrapers possible?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, elevators.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. And it used to be basically, for manufacturing, when they got higher than a few floors, it was a pulley system on the outside of the building, that they would load up a platform. And, they would haul it up that way. That led to Otis doing the elevator. But it’s interesting, because when I posed that question, people say, “Well, reinforced steel? concrete?” No, no. It’s the elevator. You wouldn’t want to walk up past a certain amount and you couldn’t carry the equipment up there. I just find all that stuff fascinating because I think, although it’s looking back and informs going forward.
 
Dan Sullivan: The thing is, it relaxes you that this is-- I mean, Shakespeare, all of life is a play. That’s a metaphor! And then he describes the various acts of the play. They are metaphors. We never are dealing with the actual experience; we’ve created a story about the experience.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s why it gets me when I go to things, if you go to a concert or sporting event, or whatever, and you see people looking through their cell phones. So I’m thinking, you’re here in person. Why don’t you just be present? Why do you put something between you and that because you could stay home and watch it on television, so to speak? And I think that, that presence is another thing that is going away, which I think is dangerous. And I think that leads to all kinds of negative aspects of social interaction. It’s easier to create the “other” when you don’t ever ask to actually meet anybody. No, it’s fascinating.
 
Dan Sullivan: But that’s not you and me though.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, it’s not.
 
Dan Sullivan: That’s not you and I. I mean, other people’s bad news is our good news.
 
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.