Change Your Brain Every Day - Tips for the Aspiring Entrepreneur - Pt. 3 with Dan Sullivan

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

In part 3 of a series with Strategic Coach Program’s Dan Sullivan, Dan gives his practical success tips for entrepreneurs. Dr. Daniel Amen weighs in with the role that the brain makes in all of Dan���s super helpful and actionable advice. 

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. We're here with strategic coach Dan Sullivan, co-founder and creator of the Strategic Coach Program. He's had over 18,000 entrepreneurs go through his program. He's a visionary, an innovator, a mentor for Tan and I, and we're just so grateful for him allowing us to help make his brain better and him sharing our work with so many.

What, Dan, I want to do in this last podcast is really have you speak to our audience on the big things you have learned that have been the most helpful both to yourself and to the people you serve. So when I ask you that, what comes into your mind? Yeah, well, I think the, you know, and it was interesting because yesterday we had a number one workshop. So we have three levels of the program. The first is called the signature level. And this

is really basic. And it's usually 200 to $500,000 income groups. And then we have another group, which is the 10 times. So the number one thing, and you'll appreciate this, when I give talks, I just go to a whiteboard and I'll write three, you know, I'll write three or four words and I put a circle around it. And what I write down is self-managing company. And I said, now, you don't know what I'm going to say about this, but how many of you would like to have one of these? And every hand in the room goes up. And I said, well, this is the key because you have certain unique abilities that gave you the courage to go out and be an entrepreneur in the marketplace. But then life got really complicated. I said, life was never so good as the day before you actually had your first customer.

You just had complete freedom of time. If you wanted to go to a movie that day, there was no problem. You know, you could play golf. But I said the complexity of your life is you acquired customers, and there's details. But you're, for the most part, and I would say this and I would certainly say it for you. The success of the Amen Clinics is obviously the scientific part that you put together, but it what you're creating in the marketplace, and you're the number one messenger for this. That's certainly true in strategic coach for me. world, or your impact is the message and the messenger to your team, because not everybody's a front stage performer, but in terms of who they are in the company, and the biggest difference I

make is that you should be in charge, but you shouldn't be in control. You should be in charge, you should be electrifying things, you should be giving vision, you should be in charge you should be electrifying things you should be giving vision you should be providing motivation but you shouldn't be controlling the details because your job is to always be creating the future company not the present company the present company is already created and what you need is really good managers who are excellent at maximizing the present company. But your job is to be taking all the experience of your success. So the first distinction I would make is be in charge, don't be in control. And entrepreneurs, that's tough. You know, it's very, very tough. A lot of them are rugged individualists. And I said, the biggest shift that you have to

make is that there's other people in the world who in what they do are just as smart as you are. And you have to just find out where you're smart and not go to the areas where you're not smart. And the whole future of your growth as an entrepreneur is teamwork. So that's the second thing, teamwork empowered by technology. I said the whole future of an entrepreneur is teamwork. So that's the second thing, teamwork empowered by technology. I said the whole future of the world is teamwork empowered by technology. And so that's the second one. And the other thing is you can't operate by a bureaucratic time system if you're an entrepreneur. So what I mean by that is entrepreneurs are bureaucrats have weekdays, they have weekends, they have holidays, and they get a certain amount of vacation.

And so what I say is, that doesn't work for you. I mean, that's not how you operate. And I said, so I'm going to tell you how you operate, you operate on an entertainment model. Okay. And if you think about entertainers, which also includes athletes because they're part of the entertainment world, they have performance days. And it could be two or three hours. But it's crucial that during those two or three hours, they're just performing, whether it's a stage performance or whether it's a you know a stage performance or whether it's an athletic contest they have and they also have practice days where they're getting ready to perform and then they have lots of free time they have lots of free time and i said so you're a performer you're not a corporate executive if you were a corporate executive, you'd be a corporate executive. You've chosen not to go in that route. You're a performer and you've got ideas for creating new kinds of value in the

marketplace. And I said, so what we're going to do is we're going to take 365 days in the year and we call one of these days free days. And this is what we're going to look at first. How many free days are you actually taking? And a free day for us is no activity related to work whatsoever. You can't read business book. You can't have. So we recommend they get two phones. They have a business phone and they have a personal phone. And on free days, you can only use the personal phone.

It's for personal relationships. You can't check your computer. You can't do a deal on a free day. So I just had a wonderful, wonderful conversation with Peter Diamandis yesterday because Peter is a tightly scheduled entrepreneur. And he told me yesterday, and this is seven years that Peter's been in coach. And he said, Dan, he said, I'm going to tell you something. He says, I canceled two huge speeches in July so that my family and I could go to Iceland for two weeks free. And I said, you're approaching strategic coach manhood, Peter.

I love that. Never in a million years, seven years ago, would Peter have done that. But what he's noticing is that the more free time he has, the more slack time, the more he just does important deals. He only does really important things. And what you're trading is quantity of time for quality of impact, quality of impact. And, you know, and, you know, and you see it in sports, you see it in entertainment. Corporate world doesn't really work that way, except the really great ones who are dealmakers. You know, they make certain crucial decisions. And, you know, whatever people think about his politics, Trump is just knows when the crucial three minutes is when the crucial 10 minutes, not about what's going

on backstage, it's just what's going on print stage, you know, and Hillary was just the opposite. She thinks, you know, studying long and hard um did it and that's not the way the united states is an add country so add oh my god it's a total add country because the add people were the people who risked their lives to come from europe or japan or china to come here you know you have to ADD to leave behind everything you did because you're so thing. So I said, you have to have a leader who's in sync with the people. So we got an ADD president who's in charge of an ADD company. But you're seeing this more and more because the world is becoming more unpredictable about the changes because of technology. And so you have

to reinvent yourself a lot on a quick basis. And the entrepreneur is the person who has an unusual ability to reinvent themselves in response to changing conditions. And so that's the big thing. And the other thing is think in terms of 25 years. So our time frame for thinking in the future is 25 years. And that gives you 100 quarters and you don't have to live the 25 years. You just have to live the next 90 days, do five important things in the next 90 days and come back to us. Go through your thinking. What did you achieve, what, you know, and redirect yourself and go out. So you can see how for the ADD person, and I have to tell you, the program has been formed

in response of what will keep an ADD person in my program for 20 years. That's amazing. And I heard one statistic, although I'd love your thought on this, that about 50% of CEOs of entrepreneurial companies have ABV. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's not a liability if they just go after the sweet zone, the unique ability, and then everything else just gets delegated out to other people who have unique abilities in those areas. And, you know, I mean, this is why we love sports, because the really great sports teams, coaches don't ask athletes to do things that they're not good at. You know, they, you know, they, they, they, they will surround

somebody with a lot of compensating capabilities where the people are really, really great at it, you know. And, you know, I mean, where you are, I mean, there's a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists, you know, who are dealing with the issue of ADD that got a practice and they've got clients. You're unique. I mean, when I look at you, because you said, well, first of all, it's not my opinion that we're going to go on. It's not my unique artistic ability to figure out whether you're unique or not. We're going to actually do tests, and I can show you the tests. And so you immediately developed a multiplier and then you surrounded yourself by people, you know, everybody who is needed for one clinic. And then how many do you have now?

Eight. We just opened our eighth clinic. Yeah. Yeah. And you did that because there are certain things that you're really great at. And you not only are you great at, but you'll be because there are certain things that you're really great at. And not only are you great at, but you'll be greater at them in the future. And as long as you can stay in that suite and the support systems around you, plus you have other things like growing reputation know you just have raving fans and you can build build on that but you can multiply yourself almost indefinitely you look like you're in great shape and there'd be no reason why you wouldn't be better at your game 25 years from now than you are for today I mean I'm 74 and I'm looking at 99 you know because the help is out there peter and i just had two podcasts last night and he said you know um you know the help in terms of technology and science is out there but

people who don't have any reason to use them aren't even going to notice them you know well and being passionate being purpose, actually people live longer. They have less dementia if they have a reason to give up. And a lot of entrepreneurs, money's not the thing. Although I always say if there's no margin, there's no mission, right? So you have to be a good business person. But that's not the reason why we do it we do it because we're passionate about our businesses i mean forever i've been passionate

about what we do at amen clinics um yeah and i notice i notice my sense of humor is proportional to cash flow yes i understand and i don't say that lightly to actually have a sense of humor about yourself means that you're significantly freed up in your freed up in your brain you know that you're you can see yourself from different directions and you can make yourself the object of your own humor that's actually a phenomenal psychological capability. And I would say that the other thing that we do right off the bat when people come into the program, I say, first thing I want you to do is write down a number. And the number is how old you're going to be when you die. I just want you to write down.

Everybody does. I've never, I've done it with 18, our company's done it with 18,000 people. And I said, now I want you not to talk about that number. And let's say it's 85. I said, let's talk about 84 the year before. And I want you to tell me how you are physically when you're 84. And they, oh, great, great shape and healthy. And I say, mentally, how are you? Sharp, you know, sharp, got all the faculties. And I said, financially, independent, no worries. Relationship, oh, just deep relationships, many stimulating relationships.

And I say, and what is your assessment of your life that you've lived over the first 84 years? What would you say about? So, you know, contributed immensely, maximized my opportunities. And I said, so everybody says the same thing. All 18,000 have said the same thing. So I repeated back to them, you know, the physically, mentally, financially relationship. And I said, so if you were that way at 84, what do you think the chances are you would die at 85? And they say, well, I wouldn't. I said, you wouldn't.

So how much longer than 85 would you live? And they said, 10, 15 years. And I said, well, which is it, 10 or 15? And they said, 15 years. And I said, well, which is it 10 or 15? And they say, well, 15. I said, okay, we're at a hundred. You've been here an hour and a half and I just bought you 15 years. That's hysterical. But here's the thing I did because everybody's got a number, but very few people know they have a number. They pick it up from family history, you know, actuarial tables, statistics. But you are actually planning your life and you're investing or not investing.

You're slowing down in relationship to a number. So mine's 156. 31 years ago, I established that I was going to live to 156. And the reason is I wanted to live a complete century. And I was born in 1944. So I missed the 20th. And so I said, well, we'll add 56 and then we'll start fresh in 2000. So 21st century.

So I didn't tell anybody about this. I just did it one afternoon. And I said, I wonder if I think about this for five years, it will actually shift my expectations of how long I'm going to live. And at the five year mark, whenever I think of my lifetime, my brain immediately switched to 156. And I'll tell you, you know, Dan, when I really, really noticed it was when I started getting to be about 65 and 70, 10 years ago. And it had to do with the attitudes of people who were my age, about how long, what they were doing with their life. And I was thinking that the next 30 years is going to be a huge growth period. I mean, it was kind of like the diagram that, you know, I shared with you when you were in Scottsdale.

And that is, I said, supposing you're just breaking water now. You're on a Hawaiian island. You know, the tallest mountain in the world is actually Mauna Loa. Mauna Loa is a mile higher than Everest, but you don't see the base and up to, you know, it's about eight or 9,000 feet. And my feeling is, you know, from an outside standpoint right now, you're just breaking water. People are just becoming really aware of you because people are just really becoming aware of the problem and the whole issue of brain and how much brain determines

everything else, the health of your brain, the, you know, the, how much of the abilities of the brain you still have. I think you're just, you know, you're just breaking water right now. This is, and all the growth is going to be over the next 20 or 30 years. So how you're looking at that and what you're going to focus, how you're going to divide your time up and just what you're going to look at for the next. See, I think you've got the message and you're the messenger for a whole world now that's just coming to grips with a fundamental issue that changes everything. I mean, this literally changes everything. So when we were growing up, space was the new frontier. Remember that, that go where no man has ever gone before. And now I firmly believe the next 30 years, it's the space between your ears is the new frontier. And given our database of 140,000 scans,

we know things that no one else knows. You know, that things like Lyme disease are a major cause of psychiatric illness. That playing football, whether it's high school or college or in the NFL, it's a damaging sport. And it can negatively impact your life. Well, soccer is if you're doing headshots, you know, if you're doing headshots.

Right. And if you love it, as you did, it puts you at higher risk. And so the goal is teaching people to love their brains from the beginning. And even if they've been bad to their brain, well, what is it I can do to repair it? So from a business standpoint or a mission standpoint, it's huge, but it's so exciting. So much fun. So, so exciting. No, I'm convinced. I mean, I mean, I get updated with your, you know, your analysis every, you know, every year, couple of years when I see you. And I said,

you know, almost everything you want to know about education can build on the platform of how you're taking care of your brain, you know, your total learning ability. I have to tell you, and I don't want to run you too long here, but one of my great sort of hobbies is I go to London a lot because we have the company in London. And they have one of the most phenomenal institutions in the world, and it's the black cab drivers in London. And it's very, very interesting because anytime I get into a black cab, and I don't take Uber, because the black cab drivers to get their medallion have to be aware of roughly about 3,000 streets. They have to kind of, if you say it, they have to be kind of, within a matter of seconds, they have to kind of, if you say it, they have to be kind of within a matter of seconds. They have to kind of know where it is. And they don't have the phones.

You know, they don't have the GSP. And they know about 1,000 landmarks. So I asked them, I said, well, how many started in your class? You know, the class that you started, because they have classes, continual classes. And I said, about 25. And I said about 25. And I said, how long does it take to get through before you get your medallion? They said, it's about three years, full-time study. It's like a master's degree. I mean, it's like a PhD. And it's streetology, you know, they're doctors of streetology. But London, it was designed by

cows 2000 years ago. You know, there's not a straight street. And, you know, the street in three miles will change names six times and will change directions four times. And they have to be able to answer the question, this is the fastest, easiest route to get there. And so I said to them, when I give you an address, what's happening in your brain? And they said, well, I'm seeing the complete math in my brain. And I said, if you don't have that visual ability, can you be a black cab driver? And he says, no, because it would be too frustrating. That's hysterical. You wouldn't get better. You wouldn't get better. There's actually an MRI study on London cab drivers, and it showed a part of their brain

called the hippocampus, which is Greek for seahorse. They're about the size of your thumbs was significantly larger in London cab drivers and the more you work it the bigger it gets so the more you use it the more you can use it and so even though you're 74 because you have the expectation you're going to live to 156 and you stay completely immersed in what you're passionate about, and you got rid of the sugar. Let's not get rid of that. That's important. You got rid of the sugar and you're balancing your brain with the medicine. You are likely to be more purposeful, sharper for a longer period of time than anyone else your age. So we have to stop. But what a joy to spend time with you. It was a real pleasure. But I just wanted to get across here how much in alignment, you know,

what I discovered when I came to the clinic, how much in alignment the work that I've been doing since 1974 is, but two completely different worlds. I mean, you came at it from a completely different direction, but that's how entrepreneurism and what the next level of entrepreneurism is where you are so good in your company that you've gone 10 times. Now you can collaborate. So we say, what would it take to go a hundred times now? I mean, you've already gone, how many times have you gone? 10 times, three or four times, but now let's go a hundred times. And you'd say, well, I probably couldn't do that inside my company. So I said, so what's the capability out in the marketplace? It doesn't have anything to do with you that you need to go a hundred times. And we just started this program

about a month ago. And what do we have now? About 40 total? 40. And everybody who's everybody that you would know is in this program. Dean Graziosi starting in two weeks. Joe's there, you know, Joe Polish, of course. But a lot of people who know you are in that program and they are visibly younger. They are visibly younger because I've just given them another 25 or 30 years of fascination and motivation as they go forward. And this is why I'm on the planet, is just to help this one kind of person, this entrepreneur, this person who creates new value in the marketplace, creates new solutions in the marketplace. And this is all I really want to do is just help people who have something massive to give to the world to do it in a way that's enjoyable for them. I mean, there's lots of people who are doing great things for the world, but they're not getting any psychic benefit from it. You know, send me information on it. I would love to know more for people who want to know more about Dan Sullivan.

He has books. I think going to strategic coachach.com would be a great thing to do. It's actually the best. Yeah. Great. Yeah. All right, my friend. Thank you so much. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amonclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain's Way cookbook we give

away every month.