Unlocking Insights: Powerful Questions For Deeper Connections

Jeff Madoff: I'm with my friend and fellow conversationalist, Dan Sullivan, and we're gonna be talking about philosophy and psychology, and how does that help us look at entrepreneurship?
 
Dan, as you know, my degree was I had a double-major in philosophy and psychology because I wanted to make sure that I had two majors that would assure that I could not get a high-paying job.
 
Dan Sullivan: Immediately, that's right. That's right. But I must say that I'm really happy that I had those two majors, because it exposed me to ways of thinking that I would not have been exposed to otherwise. And I think there's a tremendous value in that.
 
You and I were speaking a little bit earlier about ChatGPT and how the people in in Strategic Coach are approaching you, not about how to use it, but how should they think about it, which led us to a talk about philosophy and psychology.
 
So explain to me why you think you're getting that kind of question and why you think the thinking about it is important.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think first of all that a lot of my Coach clients, in the Strategic Coach Program, have been in the Program for a long time, so it's not unusual to have somebody two0 years, two5 years, and I've seen them every quarter. And what Coach is about is thinking tools. We say that your best value to your clients and customers is that they think differently when you're with them. Okay? So they haven't experienced that they’re able to see things more clearly when you're with them.
 
And one of the things that triggers it is that I have two concepts, and one of them is the three-year question. So I'll say to someone, “If we're having this discussion,” and, really, I've practiced this right from the beginning, “if we're having this conversation, it’s three years into the future, and we're having a discussion-“
 
Well, just stop there. If they accept that we're three years into the future and we're having a conversation, they just bought the relationship.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because that's the first thing that anyone buys is actually a relationship.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Before they buy, then they figure out is there something that's really useful about the relationship?
 
My sense is that people pretty well make their mind about other people within the first ten seconds. And some people have said to me, when I asked the question, they said, “Well, I'm not gonna give you that type of information. I didn't even know you.”
 
That's wrong. They know everything. They don't wanna have a relationship with me. Okay.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hm.
 
Dan Sullivan: And therefore, anything I'm gonna say is just a waste of my time and a waste of their time.
 
So I'll say to them, “Well, thank you for clarifying that right from the beginning, because I don't even know what I can do for you. You know, I don't even know if there's some use I have for you. And in order for me to know that, I've got to know how you're seeing your future. And if you don't wanna tell me how you see your future, then you know, thanks for the time and that's it.”
 
And I'll get up and they say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No, no, now come-“
 
I said, “Nope. Nope. It's over. It's over. You don't trust me, and you just said you don't trust me, and so I'm on my way.”
 
And I've had people who phoned me afterwards and said, “Can we come back and start that over?”
 
I said, “No. One chance. You only get one chance.”
 
I've run into people five years later, and they said, “Would you give me a second chance?”
 
I said, “Nope. Nope. You're not a trusting person. I have to be dealing with a trusting person.”
 
Anyway, so the question is “If we're having discussion three years in the future and you're looking back over that three year period back to today, what has to happen in your life both personally and professionally for you to feel happy with your progress?” Okay?
 
Well, there's no way that they have thought through that before. Okay?
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they'll say, “Wow. Wow.”
 
And I have trial lawyers, you know, and they said, “That is just a great question because it uses the future perfect tense.” Okay? And it's not used in English very much, where you move the conversation into the future. And then they're in the future and they're looking backwards. So they're actually talking about the past. They've turned the next three years of future into past. And then the question is not “What's going to make you happy?” but “What's going to make you happy with your progress?” Okay?
 
And there's only one person in the world who can possibly know the answer to that and it's them. And until they answer the question, they didn't know they knew the answer.
 
Jeff Madoff: True.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay? And then they'll say, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”
 
I had one guy said, “Well”—and this is like in the first 5 minutes, he said, “Well, I'll tell you,” he said, “I'm a recovering alcoholic.” And he said, “I've been sober now for a year.” And he says, “I'm just in a deep hole. And in the next three years, I just want to get back to level ground.” And he says, “In order for that to happen, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this.”
 
And if they answer the question at all, they'll talk for an hour. And it pours out, and what they realize is “This may be my only opportunity with another human being to have a conversation where somebody's actually interested in me.” Because everybody's wondering, “Is this gonna be about you or is this gonna be about me?”
 
And most sales are about the salesperson. Almost all sales is about the salesperson. It's not about the customer. Okay?
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hm.
 
Dan Sullivan: They're trying to convince you that you should be really interested in what they're selling.
 
I don't even know if there's anything I can do for this person, but I know that if they answer the question, I've already done a lot for them, and they feel it. They feel it.
 
And then I have a thing called D.O.S. that most people spend psychologically and emotionally, they spend their day dealing with three factors: One of them is dangers. There's the possibility of losing something. Okay? Losing something. And that's fear. They have the fear of loss. And what can you fear losing? Almost anything. Relationship, money, opportunity, reputation. There's almost anything. And they wanna see that eliminated in three years.
 
They wanna see the dangers, a lot of them before that, but certainly by three years.
 
And then I say, what opportunities do you have that need to be captured? And opportunities is the opposite of danger. Opportunity is the possibility of gain. What can you gain? Well, everything you could lose.
 
And then the third thing is strengths. They have strengths already that got them where they were, and they have this sense that they haven't maximized their strengths. And so they'd like to be able to focus on where they're really strong and make their strengths stronger.
 
So the whole approach to clients and customers in the marketplace, for all of our entrepreneurs, is that you don't pay attention at all to what your competitors are doing. You're identifying for your best clients and customers: What kind of future are they trying to create that you can be useful to? Not necessarily you, but people you know could help them with their future. Okay?
 
And once you have them, you then have a monopoly because there's nobody else that they can have the experience of exploring and creating their future. You're the only person they've ever met… So you've immediately eliminated the competition And as far as your experience with them, you just created a marketplace monopoly.
 
Jeff Madoff: And how did you arrive at that question to ask?
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't know.
 
I’ll tell you, it started early. It started early when I was a kid, because I grew up without children until I was six years old. I had four older siblings who were already off to school. We lived on a farm and they were the farm workers, my siblings. I was the house-guy with my mother. Okay? And everybody I met until age six, till first grade, I never played with another kid my age until first grade.
 
So I had adults. And the adults were interesting because they had the experience… I was talking to people who had been through the First World War, through the Great Depression, through the Second World War. And they had enormous amounts of experience, and they had seen tremendous technology, you know, jumps in that time.
 
So I had a question that I nailed when I was about eight years old and I said, “When you were my age, what was going on in the world?” Boom! That was worth two glasses of milk and four cookies.
 
Jeff Madoff: [Laughs.]
 
And afterwards, they would talk to my mother and she said, “You know, I say things to Dan that I've never said—I haven't even thought about it. He asked me about things that I've never really thought about, you know? And I feel better. I feel better.”
 
And it took me 20 years, till I was 30, to figure out how you turn that into a business model.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which is Strategic Coach, because it started when I was 30, and everything else.
 
But I'm just intensely interested in other people's experience.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, yeah, it's interesting because when you talk about talking to adults, one of the classic adult questions is, of course, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But if you flip that question like you did essentially, consciously or not-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: …And say, “You're grown up. Looking back, how did you see your life?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, how did you get to where you came from?
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I always start entrepreneurs, “Tell me how you got started.”
 
First question I ask any entrepreneur. “How'd you get started in this?” And then I just keep pumping them with questions. “If you had to say between where you are now and where you were then, are there five big jumps that you took?”
 
Well, there weren't five big jumps, but their brain has to, they take all their experience and they break it into five jumps and they said, “Well, there was this and there was this,” and there was this and immediately they're seeing their past totally differently.
 
And I have a rule that somebody can't have a more successful future until they have a more confident past.
 
Jeff Madoff: Explain that to me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, entrepreneurs are unique in not giving themselves credit for what they've done.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: A lot of them, the whole thing about success is getting away from where they were. But they also get away from any learning about where they were.
 
I'm passionate about history. I had a double-major where I went and it was a degree in history of philosophy, and the other one, the history of science.
 
So I read the Great Books, you know, it was one of the Great Books colleges. The original Great Books college was at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and ‘30s.
 
They were now reading textbooks about Plato. They weren't reading Plato. They were reading textbooks about everybody who is a thinker, but it was somebody else's thinking about somebody else's thinking.
 
And what they said, “Why don't we just go back to the original source?” So it was all going back to the Greeks, not so much the Romans because they didn't have unique thinkers that the Greeks did. But one of the things you come to in relationship to their world, there were people 2500 years ago who were just as smart as anybody today.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And smartness isn't a function of what age you're living in. Smartness is “What are you making of the world that you're living in?”
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: So there's not a philosopher today who can match Plato.
 
Know, there's not a philosopher who can match Aristotle. They're interesting, but they build on everything that got built from Plato and Aristotle. People are standing on a lot of shoulders to get where they are.
 
Jeff Madoff: In every field.
 
Dan Sullivan: In every field. In every field. Yes. In every field. Yeah.
 
So that's my story. My whole thing is that people are woefully ignorant and woefully lacking in creating lessons for the future that they've already done in the past. So I just get them back and do a history lesson. I make them into historians of their own entrepreneurial career.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you do something else. And that is-
 
Dan Sullivan: I charge ‘em a lot.
 
Jeff Madoff: [Laughs.] And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's the key. And I always charge more.
 
One little tip, and then over to you because we've got a short one this time. But during the ‘08, ‘09 downturn, some of my salespeople came back to me, and I said, “Would we ever discount?” Because we've never discounted. Okay?
 
And I said, “We wouldn’t discount, but it might be a good time to double.” So we doubled our fee, and it just filled up like that. Because there was a lot of people who wait because they want to know who's not gonna be in the workshop with them. And if you double, you eliminate a whole group of people. And so the moment that you double—and I think it's elastic. I don't think you ever reach the point where you can't double again.
 
Jeff Madoff: I remember the first time I interviewed you at Genius Network, and I asked you about “So how do you price yourself?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Sullivan’s Pricing Formula.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. Yeah. Which I think at that point you hadn't been asked that before. And you were then talking about, you know, how you did it. It was a really fun thing, because you were processing it as we were going, which was kind of interesting to hear.
 
But, you know, what I was gonna say is that I think what you force people to do if they're going to get value from Coach, or even if you allow them to join Coach, is they have to start constructing a narrative. What is their story? And, you know, to me, it's interesting because it's their story.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hm.
 
Jeff Madoff: So, you know, you're looking from the future.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's original. It has to be original.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. That's right. So you have to learn how to talk about who you are and what you do in a unique way. And you had mentioned the term, you know, having the courage before.
 
Well, let me ask you, what is the distinction between confidence and courage?
 
Dan Sullivan: Confidence feels good.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Courage doesn't feel good.
 
Jeff Madoff: And why is that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, confidence, you're confident because you have a capability. Courage doesn't feel good because you want the capability but you don't have it. But you commit yourself to developing the capability. The commitment and courage I think actually create the capability. I don't the capability exists.
 
I mean, if you go back to Personality at the beginning, you had never done a Broadway musical.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You’d done a lot of things, you created a lot of things, and produces a lot of things, and you know how to stage things and, you know a lot of the skill sets that go around that and your avid theater-goer going back 30 or 40 years. So you've seen good and bad, and you know the difference between good and bad. But you'd never actually done it. And you just committed yourself that you're gonna do this.
 
And this was actually a personal commitment to an actual person. You know, who the play is about, Lloyd Price, and that carried extra emphasis because you were saying, “I'm gonna write musical about your life,” and everything else. But you didn't have the capability to create a a musical, Broadway musical, because you had never done it. You had no experience of creating that.
 
So there was a long period, and I still think you're at it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Every time you get to the point where, I mean, first, you had the reading, and that required, and then you had the workshops, and that was way down the line from the what I saw the first time, you know, on the west side, they're the little presentation theater that we saw it in. And then the opening in Philadelphia, that was a big jump.
 
Every time you take a jump, it requires commitment and courage. Because you don't have the capability of that jump yet.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay?
 
And I think that's the big thing, and pricing is the first way that you take a risk in the marketplace. I think it's the first step of entrepreneurism, it’s first step is, what are you gonna ask someone to pay for your time and talent?
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And you introduced a word into our discussion: ‘risk,’ because I think the confidence one has, if it's well-founded confidence as opposed to arrogance.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: You've got confidence comes from the ability to repeat what you have done. You know, you've done it, then you can do it again and you can do it again.
 
Courage means that there's a risk factor involved, and you don't know what the outcome is gonna be, but you do it anyhow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You could fail.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And in failing, as soon as you get the start and involve other people, you're not only failing yourself, you're failing other people.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: So there's a responsibility that immediately comes with the commitment. Yeah. “We're gonna create this. But I need you to be part of it.” But they're giving up their time and talent to bet on your bet.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. That's right.
 
So I think it's interesting because also the difference between confidence and arrogance is arrogance there's a certain lack of awareness. Lack of awareness, I think, in terms of how you approach something, in other words, thinking you might be infallible, which we know is not the case for anybody, then it takes courage to challenge your own confidence, if you will.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, in a sense, you're betting the ranch.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You're betting of what's made you successful before.
 
I mean, we had the mayor of Toronto just had to resign because during COVID, he had an affair with a 31-year-old staff member. And I said, “That was a big risk.”
 
I don't know if he's been a good mayor or a bad mayor because Toronto sort of grows itself. It's the banks and real estate developers that are in control of, which I think is probably true of New York City, too, for the most part. you know?
 
And I said, “It's unfortunate because this is how he's gonna be remembered.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Your finale is is how your life is seen. Because first of all, people don't think about it. They just say, “Oh, he's the guy that, you know, had to resign because he had an affair with a 31...” He's 68. Thirty-one? I mean, geez, you know? Somebody in his office, I mean, at least, you know, go to the motel on Jarvis Street. You know? And he blew his entire career. You know, he blew his entire career. He would have been remembered probably for being instrumental in the growth of the city for lots of things.
 
You know, Toronto is a city that just always grows. You know?
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, it's interesting because you bring up another fascinating point which is how do you recognize risk and how do you assess a risk that is worth taking? Is it really worth having sex with someone 36 years younger than you in the office when it can destr—I don't know if he was married, but
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. He had four kids, he's been married for 45 years. You know, solid. They were invited to all the events, you know, mayor and so and so and everything else.
 
And I said, “Boy, oh, boy. You know?”
 
Jeff Madoff: I mean Is that really a risk worth taking?
 
Dan Sullivan: There's a difference between risk and just outright stupidity.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then she owns you when you have that. She owns him. You know? Like, the person with less power just got power over the more powerful person.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And when you say it's stupid, it's as if that person never looked at the possible consequences of their actions.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, he's been in politics his whole life. I mean, he's been totally a political player, and I said, elected office is a very entrepreneurial activity: People only remember the last election.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, we started off this segment talking about philosophy, psychology, then-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup.
 
Jeff Madoff: And it's kind of fascinating because these foibles of we humans repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. How long is the line of men that have made really stupid decisions because they're thinking with their genitals instead of their brains?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Shakespeare wrote about this. You know, the Greek, Sophocles and those people wrote about this. Caesar, you know? Caesar just had too many affairs with too many important men's wives and daughters. Everybody said it was over power. They were all after power, but he was after their wives and daughters, you know? People take it personally after a while.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes. After a while.
 
Dan Sullivan: And how do they remember Caesar? Mostly for the fact that he was assassinated.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: The final act, you know, the final act.
 
But the big thing about it is that it's one to have a time perspective in terms of humanity, but it's important to have a perspective in terms of your own life. Okay? Because my feeling is that any day you can remember something from your life that you could learn something new from that thing that may have happened 45 years ago that would be useful for the future.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, absolutely. And one of the questions that I asked the guests in my class is, “If we'd have known you as a kid, would we be surprised by what you're doing or would it make perfect sense?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Now, great, great, great question.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right? You know? And the thing about it is that I think that we often forget what it is that excites us makes us feel good, get lit about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, I've talked in previous episodes about the things we did. I mean, you know, you learning how to open up those adults when you were eight years old is not unlike what you do now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And it's something you always enjoyed doing and it's something that you still do. Because, you know, another thing that you and I share is the curiosity about how people operate and what their story is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. When I got to first grade, they didn't know anything.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Like, I never really had much to do with the social life of my classmates, because they didn't have any experiences. They didn't have any experiences that you could learn something from, you know, and the teachers didn't know as much about World War One and the Great Depression, World War Two as I did.
 
My mother told me she said, “You may have to remember when you go to school, the teachers are only teaching you what they've been taught.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: They’re not teaching you what they created.
 
And she said, “But you're gonna learn how to read. And if you can read, you can go anywhere you want with your brain.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know? That was very useful. I mean, what she told me. I was the vicarious child for her. I've lived the life that I think my mother wanted to live.
 
Jeff Madoff: Really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. She was born in 1910. She was a girl. She was also a fifth child, both my mom and dad are fifth children in their family.
 
Three fifth children. I mean, we all understood the game when I was born. I mean, I was given a lot of freedom, but there were very strict rules about what I could do and what I couldn't do. And I didn’t screw it up. I stayed with the rules and everything else. And my mother said, “You know, when you're 18, you're gonna leave. You're not gonna stay here. You're not gonna grow up around here. You’re not gonna get married here. You're gonna go out into the world.”
 
She never told any of my siblings that. She only told me that. So I think she saw in me— this is a question for another podcast.
 
But I saw my parents as sort of immigrants from their families. Like, their families, they both grew up in the Cleveland area and they moved 50 miles out. And in the 1930s and ‘40s, 50 miles was a big distance.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That was like, one blown carburetor and two flat tires.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, and it's also interesting that after your advertising, that you actually ended up returning to, and it may not have been conscious, but you ended up returning to what it is you loved doing when you were a kid-
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeff Madoff: …Which is figuring out people's stories.
 
Which is just, I think, kind of fascinating, because as a result, that life you were living then and the marriage that you had then, once you realized who you were and not trying to fit into this job and that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: It allowed you to create a unique methodology and a really good business.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is that people's stories are completely original. They didn't learn how to live their life. I mean, the life they lived is not something they learned from somebody else. Especially the entrepreneurs. You know, they're outliers. I'm a real outlier from my family, and I'm an outlier from everybody I grew up with.
 
The fact that I'm in a real growth period at age 78 is an outlier. It's an outlier position, you know?
 
But the thing is that I'm so imbued that everybody lives an original life, but very few know it.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. And until the right questions are asked, they're not triggered.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that's the other thing is that life is really about great questions, not about great answers.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. It's also I think about those great questions, if there are truly great questions, it's a way into that person, because that'll uncork them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And that gets into a whole other area in terms of how do you quickly establish trust so you can get people to talk about themselves in a in a real way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think that's mysterious.
 
Jeff Madoff: It is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think that's totally mysterious. But more and more, as I've studied psychology and that is that the human brain meets somebody new and they just take that new person and they run it through their entire experience of human beings that they've known in their life, and it's plus or minus. It's plus or minus. And I think it's the first skill that babies learn that these shapes, they know certain shapes and everything like that. But I think facial recognition and voice recognition is the first basis for knowledge, and what they're discovering more and more, it starts when they're inside the mother because they can hear the sounds, they can pick up on things.
 
Talk about a rude experience. Birth has gotta be one of the great rude experiences in life.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: “Whoa! Whoa!”
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: “I was swimming, you know? It was warm and comfortable and whoa. You know? And then they slapped me and then they cut-“
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Cut something. I gotta believe that's—“Whoa!” But then our brain, I mean, Steven Palter, he doesn't really deal with newborns that much, he just makes sure that they happen. But he said that when you put up, you can hear the baby's brain growing. He says it's like, “Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…” And it's just putting things together.
 
Humans are unusual in how much we allow the young to stay on for the length of period. And that's really progress. There are people in your class, you know, at Parsons who are in their twenties and they're, technically, they're still children.
 
Jeff Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right.
 
Jeff Madoff: What is your birthday by the way?
 
Dan Sullivan: Nineteenth of May.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. I knew it was in May. I couldn't remember.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But I think that's the other thing that we share, besides the 60 or 70 years of things happening in the world that we experienced, both of us. We know about things that happened, you know, in the Fifties, you know, and we've gone through all the different social revolutions and technological revolutions and political revolutions, and one of the things, I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was noticing that there wasn't really much written about it.
 
And I said, “This is one of the greatest land empires in the history of the world and it just collapsed.”
 
And everybody said, “Oh you could see it coming.” Nobody saw it coming. The Russians saw it coming. I mean, the Russians could feel it and they trying to prevent the world from knowing how bad things were.
 
To a certain extent, not much, but I can sympathize a little with Putin. He had it really good. You know? Putin really had it good. He was a colonel in the KGB, and I have to tell you in the Soviet Union being in the KGB, it just didn't get any better than that. And they were the ones who are educated. They're the ones who got to travel outside. They had God-like powers? And it was all taken away. I mean, he was in Berlin. He was in the KGB in Berlin when the Wall fell, and everything like that. And he said it was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.
 
And I said, “You know?” I said, “Looking out from your perspective, I can really see how that was true.” I said—I'm used to getting inside of how other people are looking at it, and I can sit there and I was saying, “He's really pissed off. He's really angry.”
 
His whole world was taken away from him, and then the history of that world is constantly being degraded. It's like there's nothing good that happened in the world that he grew up in. But I think that world of his had real meaning to him and the meaning was taken away.
 
People will murder for having their meaning taken away from them.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, yeah. Yeah, which is a whole other fascinating topic.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's another podcast.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, this has been “Anything and Everything”. And true to our name-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: We have covered anything and everything with my friend Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: And also we wanna just ask you that are listening, leave a review-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: That would be really great, if you did. And, of course, tell your friends about it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think the review is really “What did you learn from it?”
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. That would be great.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't mean five-star or anything like that.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But just something that you thought about as a result of our conversation.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's great.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeff Madoff: Absolutely.
 
Dan Sullivan: Let's go, for both of us.
 
Jeff 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.