Overcoming Imposter Syndrome And The Psychology Of Success

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan. One of the things that Dan and I were talking about before we started recording was imposter syndrome, something that seems to be a real obstacle for a lot of entrepreneurs. And we're going to talk about imposter syndrome, what it is and why it's a difficult psychological obstacle to overcome. And Dan, you were saying how that's a question that you're often asked. And so I'd like to toss it to you first. But let's start with how you even define what imposter syndrome is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, it happens to people who are successful. I mean, it doesn't happen to unsuccessful people. It happens to successful people. You know, we've both gone through a lot of movement in our life since we were born in Ohio in the 1940s. Okay. You've taken a road and it's much bigger. I've taken a road that's much bigger. And I think it has to do with the fact that the people who suffer from imposter syndrome don't realize that they've created who they are.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Now that bears further explanation.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and what I mean by that is that they've actually patterned themselves on somebody else. Okay, so one of the key problems with imposter syndrome is, and why it's a psychological problem, is that you've created an image in your mind of who you should be, and you're not measuring up to who you think you should be, and you think that other people notice it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Or does that primary drive to create, is it ambition to create that idea of who you'd like to be that you haven't yet achieved and that gap is what makes you an imposter? Because I think, you know, everybody's an imposter, therefore nobody is. And what I mean by that is that you're an imposter until you're not, which means you've achieved certain goals that you have gone after and so on. So was I a playwright before my play was produced? Well, being commercially produced now, I can call myself a playwright. Was I an imposter before when I was writing a play? No. And part of that had to do with ambition, right? You know, you want to become something, but there's that gap. So where does that gap come from between one's ambition and truthfully being able to identify as what it is you want to be perceived as?
 
Dan Sullivan: You put your finger on it in the sense that it's an ambition. So just to compare the person who's ambitious and constantly growing because of their ambition, who doesn't feel like an imposter, and the one who is ambitious and growing, it has to do with what the measurement is for your growth. Okay, is it internally generated measurement or is it externally measured? And what I mean is you're trying to be like someone who has already known or you have a picture of who you could be in the future and that's your measurement. One is based on self-knowledge, the other one is based on copying.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Or ambition or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing that then that calls into question for me is the notion of being an imposter. I read that as being a con that you are an imposter if you're misrepresenting who you are. Yeah. Or you think you are. Or you think you're misrepresenting. OK. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think it's not a solvable problem for the most part, because you said that they feel they're not a something until they are. My sense is that they never are in their own minds. Yeah, they could feel it when they're in their 20s, they could feel it in their 60s. They've changed, they've grown, they're much more powerful, but they still have that feeling of insufficiency, they have that feeling of failure, they have that sense of disappointment, and this is an internal experience. I run into it all the time with entrepreneurs who are way, way different from where they grew up. They're way, way different from the family and the community they came out of, but they're still back there.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, so why is that? Why, no matter what the achievement, because I agree with you, I know that there are people who have become, by all objective measures, very successful at what it is they set out to do and are doing it, yet they still have that dark place where they somehow feel that they're either fooling somebody, they aren't all in on who they are on a certain level. Where do you think that comes from?
 
Dan Sullivan: A wrong decision. And what I mean is we got to measure something in order to move forward. In other words, we have the ability to measure where we are, and there's a measurement that's out in the future. And the future is made up. A lot of people don't realize that the future is made up. But equally, I would say that the past is made up. I think both are creative fiction. OK?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Totally. Yes. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: In other words, that I just came up with an idea because I'm approaching my 80th birthday. And I came up with an idea, it's actually a thinking tool, Your Life as a Single Project. Okay, that's the name of the tool. And I said, if your life was a single project, so for me, it's 80 lived years, what is the project that I've been working on for those 80 years? You know, I mulled it over, played with it for a few days. And I said, I think it is that I am passionate about turning my own experience into thinking tools that other people find useful. You know, my mother told me once, because she went a long time without knowing what I actually did to make a living. And I can remember I took her on a trip when she was 73 to Italy. You know, she was growing a bit lame and she always wanted to go to Europe. She especially wanted to go to Italy and she especially wanted to go to the Vatican. So I set up a two and a half week vacation and she was the guest. And, you know, we went to Venice, we went to Florence, but then we went to Rome. And we went to the Vatican, then we went to Capri just for a neat side trip. And we were talking one night and she said, “This coaching thing you're doing,” she said, “you know, I could see that in you when you were young." She said, “You had an ability to say things about other people and their experience that other people learn from.” And I had, I think I've talked about it, but until age six, I never played with anybody or interacted with anyone who was my age. It was just a function of growing up on the farm and who I met. So I started interacting with adults at a very young age, as soon as I could talk, I had figured out a killer question. And I want to get this question in because it's indicative of basically what my whole life was. And I would ask an adult, when you were my age, when you were seven years old, what was going on in the world? And they'd talk. I had a woman who lived next to us on the farm, next farm. When I was seven, she was 77. She was born in 1874. She was 77. So I just asked her questions. Well, do you have electricity? No electricity. Do you have tractors? No tractors. And yet they had a farm, and it was a prosperous farm. And I just kept asking her questions. And as it turns out, as she reported to my mother, he asked me about questions I've never thought about before. You know, she says, I always feel good after, and it was worth two glasses of milk and four cookies, you know, so I would–
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, just success metric measured out there.
 
Dan Sullivan: And what I learned at an early age, all the money, the adults have it all. And if you get them talking about themselves, they'll pay you for the experience. You know, I'm putting a meaning on something I didn't experience at the time. OK, of course. But what I realize, I'm just passionate about people learning from their own experience.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And does it affect you at all? You know, you just gave two examples. Your mom, she was 73. This woman that you were just talking about is 77, and you're gonna be 80 in May. How do you look at, this is a sidebar, but this is called Anything and Everything, so here we go. Does your age seem at all surreal to you?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it's insignificant, because it's all the same experience.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Being all part of that hole that is Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you know, it's just what's happening currently now. And, you know, I have no plans to ever stop unless I get stopped. You know, here's a question that's kind of points back to the imposter and people say to me, boy, you've had a tremendous impact. What do you want your legacy to be? And I said, well, I don't want my legacy because that only happens after you're dead. Legacy? What's that, something to put on my tombstone or something? You know, what is that? I said, I don't think in those terms. I got projects for this quarter. I got deadlines. I've got teamwork. And that's the only thing that matters to me. Okay, unfortunately, we're doing a lot better now than we were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And I have measurements, but it seems like a constant experience to me. And I'm exactly who I was with a lot more experience, a lot more skill, you know, a lot more reputation, but it's still the same person. And it's the only person I've had a direct relationship with. I got influence on this one. I got it. You know, it's a crapshoot for getting a handle on what other people are. But I find if I talk about it in those terms, it gives people a structure of looking back. If your whole life was a single project, what was the activity?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, well, you know, tonight, the Academy Awards are on. And it's interesting because they don't call it the Legacy Award, but they do have a Lifetime Achievement Award. So I guess achievement, in a way, you can look at it as totaling up the things that you have done in this single project, which is one's life.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll see because I haven't tested the concept of the tool yet. I haven't got it all structured so I can use it with my entrepreneurs. But my sense is that, I forget who said it, it was a 19th century, like Emerson or somebody like that, American thinker. And he said, self-comparison is the killer of joy. So who are you comparing yourself to? I would say that after 80 years of practice, I'm comparing to who I used to be that's measurably successful, and how do I want to expand that in the future?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's a great definition. I think that's a wonderful definition. But have you ever felt like an imposter?
 
Dan Sullivan: No.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I haven't either.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I get that about you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That I am one, or that you are?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, that you've never felt that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So how do you get that about me?
 
Dan Sullivan: You're comfortable in your own skin. Yeah, I don't know who else's skin I could fit into. But a lot of people don't realize that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. No, I think I'm probably the best person at being me, you'll find.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Oscar Wilde said, be yourself. Everyone else is taken. Great statement. Oscar Wilde had some great, great lines. Yes. Yes. Three greatest pleasures. Yeah. I drink before and smoke after.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which reminds me of the Mae West line, the guy said to her, do you smoke after sex? And she said, I don't know, I never looked. But, you know, it's the big question is always, in a way, what the caterpillar asked Alice. Who are you? And I do think that that's a question that many people are plagued by. Yeah. Because maybe it's because they tried to please others. And they never realized, ultimately, if you don't please yourself, you're always going to be in want of that approval from somebody else. And you're right, the only thing, when you compare yourself to yourself, if you were a track and field athlete and you mapped your timings over the course of your track and field career, you have actual measurable metrics of what's going on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, without measurements, there's no valid sense of progress without measurements. And the measurements aren't what other people think about you. I mean, first of all, it's a very elusive measurement. What? Think about you this morning, think about you this afternoon. First of all, how do I know what they're thinking? I really don't know. And I think one is, and I'd like to hear your comments on that, I think it was a lot easier being yourself in the 1950s than it is in the 2020s.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, I don't know. I mean, certainly the pressures of social media that put on to younger people in particular is a really terrible psychological burden to take on. And unless you're really grounded, unless you have people you can actually talk to and true relationships and friendships, not likes, on some social media platform. I was wondering, by the way, what if you acted in real life like you do online? Go up to someone and say, I'd like to show you a picture of what I just had for lunch. I don't want to see a picture of what you had for lunch. Would you like it? Would you give it a thumbs up? You know, it's ridiculous.
 
Dan Sullivan: And you send it on to your friends. Right. Yeah. Well, I think that the young person today, I didn't see television until I was nine years old. I was born in ‘44 and we just didn't have television. You know, I grew up on a farm essentially by myself. I have a lot of family members, but the next one is six years older. So there was four older ones. The one closest to me is six years old. Well, if you're six and they're 12, you don't really have anything to do with each other. Right. I mean, you know about them, but they don't know about you because you never look downwards. Then I had two younger ones, seven and nine years younger, and, you know, I was the older brother. But I just had this farm. I had my parents, and then I had all the adults my parents dealt with in the farm community, you know, in the church community, neighborhood community. And I'm a kind of communicative character, you know, I came out wanting to interact. And so I didn't have anybody to interact with except the adults. So I had to crack the code. How do you talk to these people? And what I discovered is it's not the answers you have, it's the questions you have. That's the interface. If you ask a question, you're seven years old, and you're talking to a 77-year-old, and you ask them a question of what life was like when they were seven years old, 70 years ago, they haven't thought about that. They haven't thought about that. And you could tell they got really engaged, and they would talk about that. But afterwards, they found it a great experience. My mother would be told by this lady, she said, I love talking to him. But I didn't say anything. She was talking, but she was talking about things she had never given any thought to. I got that as a thread to the future. One of the things I got a feeling was adults lead really, really complicated lives. I got that feeling very, very early that it's not easy being an adult. You got a lot to think about. There's a lot of pressures. There's a lot of different things you have to pay attention that you don't have to. And I said, I want to be one of those, but I want to be better prepared than they are because I had a feeling a lot of them weren't really prepared. If you ask people really interesting questions about their experience and they learn something, you're a coach. You're using their experience to create lessons for them. I think that's a really good definition of what a coach is.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, that's great. I mean, you know, it's also probably a definition that fits Freud, you know, in terms of asking people questions to probe who they are, who they think they are.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think there's a departure point with Freud and, you know, with anybody else who created a thinking system. And the thing is, you kind of say, well, this is the way human beings are. And that's what Freud did. And then he creates all sorts of concepts, which are not immediately obvious, like the id and the ego and the superego. But they're not graspable in terms of people's experience. You have to believe in the philosophy to use the philosophy to identify your experience. I don't want to do that. Okay, I'm not creating an ideology, I'm just creating a methodology where people can think about their thinking.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you were seven and that woman was 77, that generation was not about self-reflection. So the mere fact that by asking her a question, you gave her permission to talk about something that she probably never talked about to anyone before.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but I didn't tell her what her experience meant. She determined what her experience meant. Understood. Now I understand. I don't tell you what the answers mean. The answers you come up to the question, it means what they want it to mean.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, that gets into a whole other area in terms of why do we behave how we behave? Why do we act out in certain ways and so on? I do agree with you that looking forward requires a certain imagination, but it's not factual. And even looking backwards as to how you arrived, you're going to construct your own narrative about that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I mean, If you create facts or you create experiences that didn't happen, then you're being sort of an imposter. Right. I'm simply going on the basis that have incidents that happened to me that I can reinterpret any way I want. Right. You know, it happened to me. And for a while, I thought it meant this, but now I'm reinterpreting. So I didn't know it meant something else.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But I suspect through that reflection, you also can pretty quickly divine patterns from others about how they talk about what they do and why, and you probably have a pretty good sense of the obstacles they set up for themselves.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but the main obstacle is they're comparing themselves to other people to be right. When I am like this person, I'm right, and you'll never be like that person. That's right. Yeah, that's the imposter, that you're setting up a false measurement.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what's the criteria for measurement? What do you suggest that we look at?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I'll give you a good one, and we've already done this on several podcasts, the beginning and where you are now with the play Personality. and who you are now than who you were five years ago in terms of expansion of skill, expansion of knowledge, expansion of how the industry works. There's been real jumps from the first reading of the first script. Well, first of all, there's the first script. And then the other thing is you have a comparison that even goes back. It's your interview with Lloyd Price, which was then recorded, and the conversation said, you know, Lloyd, this would make a great musical. Okay, so go back to that day and where you are right now, and there's been tremendous growth. Right. Came in stages, and it was an agreement with the world that this was a good thing. Because you had to get funding, you had to get talent who committed themselves to it, you had to get ticket sales, you had to get reviews. You came up with an idea, but you had to stick, handle, and negotiate with the world to think that the world actually thinks this is a good idea. That's all real. It's the difference between, and I'm totally opposed to this idea, the idea of self-esteem. And I said, I believe in self-confidence. Self-esteem is a story you make up about yourself. Self-confidence is you set a scary goal and you achieve it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so self-confidence requires taking a certain kind of action.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, committing to something that you don't have the capability yet, having the courage to go into the unknown. And I think it's a combination of commitment and courage that creates the capability. And as a reward, you get confidence.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So I like that, and we've often talked about the differences between courage and confidence, which I think is really an important factor.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, confidence feels good. Yes, exactly. Courage does not feel good.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So why is it, do you think, why is it that some people set up a, let's call it a model ideal self? And what I mean by ideal self is it's somehow something you think is worth achieving and that gap is what makes them feel like imposters because they haven't achieved it. Why don't people look back at how far they've come instead of how far they have to go? Because every day, you've hopefully come a little further. So you've got certain achievement that has happened one way or another, whatever that metric is that you use. Why do you think that people set their ideals around an identity that's not them?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it has to do, who do you take your measurements from? Do you take your measurements from yourself or do you take your measurements from other people saying it? And I think taking your measurements from other people automatically sets you up for feeling an imposter because they may say something good, but you don't feel good. There's a disconnect between what other people are telling you and how you feel internally, okay? So how do you protect yourself from that? Well, don't do that. How do you not do it? By going backwards, by going backwards. The hardest thing for human beings is to go backwards and understand that their past is a goldmine. And they can see all the beginning movements of what's made them right now. And what they will see when they're looking at the progress they've made, that they're a lot further ahead as a person than they were 10 years ago. I'm way at 80 further ahead than I was at 70, and I've got numbers to prove it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So essentially, you call it a gold mine, and I might call it a map.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's a map, but you're the one who completely redraws the map to serve your present purposes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, for example, it took me a long time to figure out why entrepreneurs were better customers and clients of coaching than, for example, government officials who I had, people who worked in corporate bureaucracies, which I had, people who worked in charities. And I tested out my methodology. This goes back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. And I realized one is, the only ones who were interesting were the entrepreneurs. And the reason was because they, more than anyone else, have a feeling that they've created their lives.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the other thing is they're the only people who will make a decision on the spot. And they're the only ones who will write a check on the spot and get started. Others, they had to talk about it to the committee, you know, well, I'll see if we have a budget for that, which told me that they didn't have the budget for it. The budget had to come from somebody else, don't want to work with them. And they couldn't make the decision until someone else gave them the approval to go forward. And I said, I can't deal with that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So when you started Coach–
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, 74.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, when you started that, at that time, there's certainly coaching that could be effective for corporations. There's certainly coaching that would help for anyone who's caught in some organizational structure and all of that. Did you find out by elimination I want to be with entrepreneurs because trial and error.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So initially it wasn't just entrepreneurs. It could be anyone who, you know, you had to find out which lake to fish in. You know what I mean? You know, it's trial and error and it's cashflow. It's determined by cashflow. When do you get your cash and does it flow? Yeah, I mean, it's all determined on being able to pay the rent, you know. And what I found was that really successful entrepreneurs, they didn't see it as a cost, they saw it as an investment. So that's good. But it's all at the beginning, it's all trial and error, you know, it's all guessing and betting. And even entrepreneurs, I found that there were a difference between growth entrepreneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs. And lifestyle entrepreneurs were people whose measurement of their success was measured in terms of the kind of house they lived in, the type of neighborhood they were in, the types of clubs that they belonged to, where their children went to school. And once they achieved that status, they didn't grow anymore.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's interesting because I don't know anybody that sort of considers themselves anyone with the kind of ambition and drive that it takes to achieve a certain level of financial success or whatever. I don't know that I've ever met anyone who feels satisfied because ambition propels them forward.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's an incorrect measurement. I think that's the incorrect measurement. I have a little diagram that I draw. So you think of a, a smart board and it's wider than it is higher. And I draw a little circle down at the bottom of the left-hand corner. And I draw a big circle in the upper right-hand corner. Okay. And then I draw a straight line that connects them with an arrowhead when you get to the big circle. And I said, this is a portrait of your life. And I wrote the word under the little circle, here, and at the bigger circle, there. And then on the straight line, striving. And I said, when you were 10 years old, you were here, and you wanted to be there, and you strove. You strove your whole life, and you did this at 25, you did this at 40, you did it at 55, some of you are older, but your whole life is measured by you being here and trying to get there. So let's say you started when you were 10 and now you're 60, that's 50 years. What's the most powerful habit in your life? That you're here and you're not there. So I said, at what point in your older life are you gonna be there? Well, you can't because your entire habit is never being there. And you feel like an imposter because you're not there. About 10 years ago, I was doing that somewhat. 10 years ago, when I was 70, I said, I'm there, and now I'm just gonna expand there. Create a bigger playground. But strictly on the basis of people I like being with and work I like doing. So anything I was doing before, I didn't like working with them. Anything I was doing before that I didn't like doing, that's eliminated from my life because I'm there now and I don't have to do that anymore.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean, that's where I am.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, I sense that about you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it's interesting because our memories are very unreliable and we construct memories and those memories change over time. The more we talk about certain things, the more we reinforce certain memories or create new ones in where we want to go. It'd be interesting. Do you actually ask that specific question? You know, where do you want to be five years from now or 10 years from now?
 
Dan Sullivan: But you have to put numbers to it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, I was gonna ask, so what type of numbers do you put to it? Like what you want your income to be, what you want?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, all of that. Yeah, but we do it on four freedoms. Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. And that would be both at work and not working. So, you know, what kind of time do you want to have that you control completely so you can do what you want with it, and we do it at work, so what at work would you love always doing, and what at work you don't wanna do again, so that's a decision, that's an action you have to free yourself up. But these are all measurable, and a lot of people's goals are actually bumper stickers. How do you mean that? Working for a bigger and better world. How do you measure that? I have no idea. No, no, because it's not measurable. And when you don't have a measurable thing that drives you into the future, then it's other people's opinion about whether you're doing it or not. And basically, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But you're looking for them for expertise on who you are, but they never thought about it until you asked the question. Oh, you seem like a good guy. I mean, you're really successful. Everybody says great things about you. Those are not measurements.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think I may know the answer to this, but if someone has sat as, you know, where do you want to be? And they'd say, well, I'd like to have X amount in the bank. I want to have two homes, one for winter, one for summer. And, you know, they have those things so that they can acquire, you know, have acquisitions that they think will make them happy. And then they achieve that, but they aren't happy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the measurements are all useful for a sign of progress.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So not as a goal.
 
Dan Sullivan: You were talking about the Walter Benjamin book on Elon Musk, okay? I mentioned this to people who are great admirers of Elon Musk, and they said, you know, he's amazing. I said, I think he is amazing. But I think he's amazing for reasons that he probably doesn't appreciate himself. I said, I find Tesla interesting. You know, it's not a 10 times better car because it can't go any faster in traffic than any other car. And, you know, his other things, the boring company, that's where you're going to dig tunnels. And I said, it's a properly named company because you have to be in a lot of boring meetings to even discuss it. Boring people, especially bureaucrats and politicians. And, you know, he's got this neural link. And I said, you're having a tough time dealing with your brain already and you're going to connect it to the Internet. I said, does this increase ADD or decrease ADD? And he's got other things like his solar power and everything. And I said, it's all interesting. But even he has said that it's all for the purpose of SpaceX, the rocket ship, because he wants to go to Mars and he wants to walk on Mars. And I said, I get that as a goal. I don't have any problem with that as a goal. But when he gets to Mars and he walks it and he's got a thought, now daddy will love me. Probably not. His daddy's whole shtick is not to love you and to withhold love. I mean, whatever it is. But he even defines that in his book. He actually talks about it. They got no approval. He got no love, according to him. But is the goal walking on Mars or is the goal walking on Mars so someone else will think something about you? Well, the first one is a great achievement. The second one is going to set you up for disappointment.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And which are you calling the great achievement?
 
Dan Sullivan: Walking on Mars. I mean, that's measurable. It's have witnesses to it. You can have videos of it, you know, and everything else that's measurable, totally measurable to you. And it's measurable to other people. But if it's to have a certain feeling about yourself, I don't know, that's up to you. Right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, I think it's fascinating, because how much of what we do, do we do in hopes of gaining the admiration, approval, whatever, of others, and in the process, losing yourself?
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Joe was talking about an actor, Greg Moschauer, I think his name is. He became very famous on the TV series 24 with Kiefer Sutherland. Right. But Greg Moschauer is a sporting actor. And his entire career, he's been a supporting actor. And according to Joe, Joe Polish, he's a very successful and satisfied support actor. And if you look at his resume on Wikipedia, the guy is always employed. He's on a TV series or he's in a movie and you don't know who he is. He's part of the furniture. I say, I recognize that guy. I recognize that guy. Who is he? But you never remember who he is, but he's totally employed. Most actors spend 90% of their career unemployed. And he tells this story, and I says, well, the reason why he's successful, the reason why he's always employed and why he's satisfied, is that he knows who he is. And the way he told it to Joe was, he said, look, when somebody's producing and directing, you want some big stars that'll get people to fill the movie because they're big stars, maybe three or four at the most. And then you get down to about number six, and the director says, who can I pencil in there that's not going to be any worries? He said, let's bring Greg Mosher. He always shows up on time. He always knows his lines. He's always great for the team. He's always great for the company. So what I got from that, and I talked to Joe, we did a podcast on it, and I said, you know, of course he's happy, because he knows exactly who he is, and he's got measurements for success. He's not trying to win an Academy Award, because you don't win an Academy Award for being number six on the production. It's not in the scheme. Who played in The King's Voice? Who played the King? Colin Firth.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Colin Firth. Yep. Wonderful actor.
 
Dan Sullivan: Remember when he received the Academy Award and he says, I guess it's all downhill from here. You know, I was saying, what does he mean by that? And one of them was he had a goal to win the Academy Award.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. And he won the Academy Award. But if that was your big goal, there's no bigger goal beyond that. Right. Or you've won your Academy Award. Now we're going to give it to someone else, you know? So I think that judging who you are as a person and the value of your life on a particular incident that takes about at most five minutes or 10 minutes in the future, when you're at the top and recognized as the top and actually half the audience wants you dead. Yeah, pure envy. They're smiling. Their hearts are envy, but they have a smile on their face. And they wish it had been them or, you know, well, this is what the whole industry is about. And I don't have any problem with the award. I don't have any problem with the contest because contests and awards are part of measurement.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, although I also think they're part of measurement that is a certain type of measurement. You know, because it's interesting when the four minute mile was broken, which was thought to be impossible. Within a year, I think it was like 1400 more people ran sub four minute miles, then high school students were doing it. Yeah. And sometimes, sometimes it's just somebody showing you that it's possible.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The astronaut story, Chuck Yeager, the main character was Chuck Yeager. He was the first person to break the sound barrier. They thought the plane would just fall apart and it didn't fall apart. I shook and everything because they hadn't figured out the mechanics of that yet and it got better and better. Then it became frequent. Now they're doing two, three times. The top jets now do three times the sound barrier. So the big thing is that striving for something that no human being has done before is a legitimate goal. But it's how you interpret it in terms of who you are. Whether you get any happiness or satisfaction is strictly up to you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and that strictly up to you aspect of it is, you know, on one hand, like I'm a big believer in how you talk to yourself, how you think about yourself is very important, because some people use that period of doubt, going from here to here, to derail themselves because they talk themselves out of being able to make it somehow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think it's self-inflicted. You know, it's a form of, you know, when are you going to be there? Most people there, it's success. But I also think it's a level of ease with themselves and a comfort with themselves that they want to be there. So if you say, well, I'm not where I want to be, I have to be somewhere else. You're never going to get to the point where you feel cool with yourself. I've never really been tortured with myself. I've never had unease about myself. I've had frustration because the things I'm trying don't work and I'm not getting cash as a reward, I'm not getting approval from a decision standpoint to move forward, I get frustrated by that. But that's just because I'm not smart enough yet to pull it off.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So what is, well, I'm gonna interject first. The caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, when the caterpillar first says, who are you? Which is a very profound question because… And smoking at the time, is it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes, out of a hookah, yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Who are you?
 
Dan Sullivan: Right, that's right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And… Blue smoke circles. And, you know, I love that question. because it wasn't just a kid's book question. It was truly one of identity. And when he asked Alice, where are you going? And she didn't know, then he said, well, then it doesn't much matter how you get there. Because you'll never know if you've arrived if you don't know where you're going. So how do you suggest that people set whether it's the metric or the goal, because the unachievable goal of approval of a dead parent, you're never gonna get that. So if that's a hole that's there…
 
Dan Sullivan: It's a delusional goal.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, which ultimately leads to sadness and frustration or lack of fulfillment. So how do you suggest people set a goal or a metric for those goals or whatever so they don't constantly find themselves in that state of frustration and sadness because so often, and I know some very financially successful business people that when they achieved the financial goals long ago, the overarching feeling was, is this it? Yeah. Don't feel any different.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I don't know. It's about having goals every day and achieving them and that being good, you know? And one of the things I do is I just have a goal that every day I'm just going to achieve three things that moves us forward. Moves me forward, moves the team forward, moves the company forward. And it varies from day to day because it could be just the start of a project, could be the middle of the project, the end of a project. One of the things is that I feel I have a relationship with my brain. When I crossed 70, I got really clear about a lot of things. And one of them was that my brain pretty well does what it wants to do every day. And I spend a lot of energy trying to control my brain. And I decided just to work out a deal with my brain that you can do anything you want during the day, but by five o'clock, these three things have to be achieved. And my brain says, all right, well, that means we should get them done as fast as possible so I can do what I want to do. And it's a great deal. I get three things achieved every day times 365 days. And it's a good month. It's a good quarter. It's a good year. So there is a part of me, I mean, there's enormous amounts of your brain that you don't have any control of and it doesn't respond to your corrections. And I think that's okay. So I'm easy with that part of me, but I have more of a relationship with that brain than anyone else has relationship with. So I'm more of an expert at dealing with my own brain. And as far as dealing with other people's brains, ask questions.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, my wrap up for that is I think it's so important you found out when you were a kid, when you were seven years old, that you can not only get the cookies and milk, you found the way in to something that was really interesting to you, which is asking people's questions and realizing that when people get a chance to talk about themselves, that's where you can discover the most. So listening is a huge part of it. And I think it's accurate to say that lit you up when you were younger, because in a way, you're doing variants on that same thing. Instead of cookies and milk, they're writing nice-sized checks, you know, for you to be asking them questions.
 
Dan Sullivan: At a certain point in life, milk and cookies are a good check.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You're right. That's right. That's right. And now you can buy all the milk and cookies you want, you know, as a result. The same with me is what lit me up when I was a kid was drawing and writing stories. Then when people read those or saw those, the enjoyment they got was also very enjoyable to me. Yeah. So I think that it's so important to really think about what gives you a feeling of fulfillment.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the activity itself is enjoyable.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. And I think that if you don't have that, if you don't know what really satisfies you and you don't know what process it is, so your metrics, I think, you know, can become those things that you'll never achieve because you're trying to close a wound which you won't close, happiness and fulfillment are gonna be much more difficult to achieve. So like what you did, you figured out what you really like doing. And it may have been, you were quite a bit older before you look back and realize, yeah, that's actually not so radically different than what I was doing when I was seven years old. And I loved it then and I still do.
 
Dan Sullivan: 30 is the crossover when I felt confident about this, that I could be an entrepreneur and make my living doing it. Because I hadn't worked out the business model. And I mean, you got to have cash. And I hadn't worked that out. And when I was 30, I worked it out.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So is it safe to say that, for our discussion today, that you're not an imposter if you're striving to do something, you're only an imposter when you're trying to con somebody to thinking you've already done it. And that can either be in business or even in personal life.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I'm not so interested in conning other people as conning yourself. Well, that's right. It's not that you're an imposter to other people, it's that you're an imposter to yourself.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, that's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think that's the real problem. And I don't buy into the misery of that. It's become a very popular image of the driven unhappy entrepreneur, the driven unhappy athlete or anything. It's become sort of a model that the price of success is your unhappiness. Is that okay with you? And I said, no, it's not good. It's a bad deal. But you're the only one who can determine what is the success that's going to make you happy. And it's only that you are who you are and you're doing the things that you want to be to be a bigger and better version of yourself. And if you have to depend on outside comparison and outside approval and outside judgment, you're not going to be happy with that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think today may be the first time that we have stayed over 95% on topic. So does that mean we're imposters when we call this anything and everything? But no, we have to look at the entirety of it all. And this is just another move forward. And fortunately, this process makes us both happy because it's fun and we learn something.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And do you have the experience and I have it frequently now, people listening to our podcast and you say, you know, that point you made. That really struck home with me, and it wasn't even what I thought was a major point.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I know what you mean, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I said, that's really interesting that people take from any experience what they want from the experience. So you can't control the experience that other people are going to have about anything.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that's right. You know, it's you have the intent. You know, in writing a play, I had the intent of what I would hope the response would be. But the most you can do is put it out there in the best way possible. But that doesn't mean that your intent is going to be clear to everybody. It's interesting because there is the intention, there's the act, and then there's the response. You can have that intention, you may not execute well on it, or maybe you do and that's when you get the real high and the real satisfaction that it's working.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's a great question, you know, and I mean, we covered certain dimensions of it today, but I think it's a very fundamental part of being a human individual. We're the only species that makes up our future and makes up our past. And how do we know if we're doing that right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Because you're not going to do it accurately, but I guess doing it right means you feel good.
 
Dan Sullivan: Accuracy is that there's some predetermined models, right? What if you're just making it all up? I think that's a scary. I mean, that's a scary thought to a lot of people. You know, you mean I'm just making this up? And I said, truthfully, yes, you are. And humanity has just made itself up, you know, going back thousands of years. How did that come into being? Somebody made it up and it stuck.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah. And which makes me think of something else that's occurred to me numerous times is even history changes. Oh, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, history is constantly being reinterpreted.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, that's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And this question of whose version gets dominant. I mean, we're looking at the world is reshuffling. You can tell it's a new Monopoly game and all the pieces are going back in the box right now. You know, people were saying, you know, you know, the things that America was telling us about what was going on in the world, you know, that was self-interested. I said, oh, my God, I'm shocked. I'm truly alarmed and shocked that America was doing things for its own interest. You know, I thought they were doing it for the benefit of the world. And what they were doing it for is they didn't want taxpayer’s bodies coming back in coffins.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You get a lot less out of it that way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, U.S., this is a separate subject. Maybe we can talk about it again. United States is the only country in the world that taxes on citizenship. No, really. Doesn't matter where you are in the world as an American, you're getting taxed.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Uh huh. Right. Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It's not based on residency. It's based on citizenship, you know, and being alive. Yeah. And your tax paying doesn't stop when you die.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: True.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, anyway, I really enjoyed this because I had to think through, I mean, your questions were really great, because you want to get down to a finer distinction, and I really like that. Yeah, but why does that happen? I said, oh, jeez, I hadn't thought about that before, and that's what makes a great conversation. I mean, I said things in response to your questions, and I asked questions that were only generated because we decided to talk about this.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yes, well, we can let our listeners know that you and I spend months coming up with topics.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and we do focus groups.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Focus groups, that's right. Focus groups. And mail-in surveys.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, we have a meter that determines second by second, meter by meter, whether we're really connecting with the audience here.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, the fun thing is that at least we know there's for sure at least two people enjoying this.
 
Dan Sullivan: All right, well, Jeff, another exploration that didn't go anywhere I thought it was going to go. Learned things that I hadn't thought about before and got more insights into the experiences that you find valuable and discovered some on my own. So I think we fulfilled the mission purpose of anything and everything.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I would agree, and I felt like neither one of us were imposters throughout this conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I certainly felt that way about you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Funny, I felt that way about you.
 
Dan Sullivan: There you go. Maybe that's how it all works.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And that's how anything and everything works. We never know what's going to work, but we'll talk about anything and everything. It could be anything. And everything. Thank you, guys.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
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