Entrepreneurs Take Their Biggest Leaps Through Excitement And Fear

Jeffrey Madoff: Hi and welcome to part two of Anything And Everything with me, Jeff Madoff, and my good friend Dan Sullivan. In this continuation in part two, we're going to talk about recognizing opportunities, assessing risk, achievement versus celebrity, and the fact that when you say yes to something, by proxy, you're saying no to other things. So how do you make good decisions in doing that? So as usual, we're going to pinball around with a lot of interesting and exciting ideas that, if nobody else, at least Dan and I love talking about it and we hope that you love listening to it. So, thank you.
 
I mean, it's interesting with a play, which is what I want to be doing and I'm doing, although I will say also still love the teaching because that brings me in touch with such a range of people. 'Cause as you said, we both have a trait that we share, which is curiosity, that's kind of unending in any direction. It's all how you look at it. With the play, we did the 29-hour, then we did the workshop, then we did our first commercial run in Malvern, now we're gearing up for Chicago. Each step along the way, you have to raise more money. But every step along the way, you are also getting immediate feedback from your marketplace. How's the audience responding? Are they buying tickets? All of those. So I'm getting constant business feedback.
 
Somebody said, "Well, you're wearing two very, very different hats. One is that you're the playwright, and the other is that you are the lead producer. How do you differentiate what you think about?" I said, "Whatever creative act and creative actions it took me to write the play, I now have a product that I want to bring to market." And I get market feedback from the audience and, of course, the very talented people that I've been able to attract to work with me on this. None of these journeys are done alone either.
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is that they've chosen to be with you. All of them are people who get offers from people who have great resources, people who have great projects. And during this entire period, the talent, and I'm talking about the backstage talent, have chosen to stick with this project. That's confirmation.
 
It's very interesting, there's a term that came into your life and my life, probably around 25 years ago, and it was self-esteem. There's this psychological thing about self-esteem and there's a whole industry around self-esteem. And I said, "You know, I don't believe in self-esteem. I believe in self-confidence." And it's the result of trying something and having evidence from the outside world that it was good and it worked. And I said, "And every time that happens, my self-confidence goes up." And they said, "Yeah, but what do you say to yourself?" And I said, "What I say to myself is nobody else's business." I said, "But this is measurable success outside of myself when I get good feedback for people who are influential, when I get checks." I really like checks; checks are a wonderful measurement. People say, "What's the difference between a good idea and a bad idea?" I say, "It's generally a check."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's interesting because ultimately the success of the play will be determined like it was in Pennsylvania, on word of mouth and ticket sales. The success of Strategic Coach is not through your advertising efforts, it's through people who are satisfied with the results, believed that it enhanced and helped their lives, and recommend it to others. And I think that that's an area that is so often overlooked because, this is my ongoing mantra, it's the relationships that you have and maintain and those that you build, the new ones that you build with credibility and trust, that can help move an enterprise forward.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. When I go to Genius now because I've been in Joe Polish's program, first time was 2011, so it's 12 years. Even during the COVID, I attended all the Zoom versions of it. Joe doesn't go five minutes when he doesn't make mention of Dan Sullivan and Babs and Strategic Coach. And he always quotes me and people say, "Did you say all those things?" And I said, "You got to figure out Joe. Joe reads things and he remembers them, but he doesn't remember who said it." So he's got an easy solution—he just says that I said it. And I don't contradict him. I don't contradict him. He's got a simple solution. Why introduce complexity or confusion into a situation? I personally don't take credit for things that I actually didn't do. I do remember where I read it, and I do remember who said it. But I said, "Why muddy the waters? Just let it go by."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I did say to Joe, it wasn't Dan Sullivan who said, "I have a dream ... " It wasn't Dan Sullivan who said, "Four score and seven years ago ... " It wasn't Dan Sullivan who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you ... " And so, think you're a beneficiary.
 
Dan Sullivan: "Give me liberty or give me death."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Well that was you, I think.
 
Dan Sullivan: No.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That wasn't, oh my God.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, no, that's funny. Yeah. Why contradict a compliment?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that's-
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it's like not accepting a compliment. You want to lose me real fast, don't accept a compliment because it's actually a form of insult. You're insulting someone when you don't accept a compliment.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You draw an interesting distinction when you talk about how you talk to somebody else and especially if you're giving them a correction. And I think this is really important for people to understand, both in relationships and in business, how you can talk to somebody and it shuts them down, or you can talk to somebody about enhancing.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it opens things up. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Could you just talk about that a little bit? I think that's great.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And usually I find, as I go along, I put it more in the form of a question to start the conversation. I said of your experience, like Andre Norman, who's a great friend of Joe's. Andre was in prison for 14 years and that's his public position. He tells his life story. So I'm not saying anything that Andre would talk about, but the other night there were a number of people gathering around. We were leaving right after we met you. Andre was out helping people get cars and everything as he does and driving people to the airport. So they were talking and I said, "Andre, before you went to prison," which is always a good way to focus the conversation, I said, "Thinking about when you were the gang leader in Boston, what would you have done differently as a gang leader in Boston? I mean, how would you have gone about committing crimes?"
 
"Oh," he said, "Yeah, yeah." He says, "Yeah, we were too general." And he said, "We weren't really a gang. We were kind of a mob. And I would've really, really learned the individual abilities of everybody and kind of created situations that had a higher degree of success and everything." I mean, he says, "The reason I got sent to prison is because of a failed operation." Now he says, "No, I would've spent a lot more time just seeing what people were really good at and, you know, only put them in the situations where they could be successful." And he says, "I would be a far better gang leader today than I was back then."
 
And Andre was so pleased with that. 'Cause he's fast on the uptake, and he got that I was kind of pulling his leg a little bit when I introduced him, but he fell right into it and he just gave a masterclass. And I told him right at the beginning when I first met him, I said, "You're really attracted to entrepreneurism, but you did entrepreneurism to the best that you could, how you grew up and everything. Weren't you entrepreneurial?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah." So what I try to do is zero in on how someone is seeing their own experience, asking them about their experience. And when he got into prison, according to his account of it, and that he very quickly was a leader in prison. And he said, "A lot of people think that guards run the prison." He says, "The prisoners run the prison, and the guards are laborer. They run and get things for you and they make sure that deliveries from the outside come in and everything else."
 
And he said, "You think it's precarious for prisoners?" He said, "It's very precarious for your guards to actually be in prison." Anyway. But the big thing that I try to do is, I try to zero in on people's experience and how they're measuring and judging their own experience. And then I can say something complimentary that I see about how they perform without bringing up- People are hard on themselves. I find generally most people are very hard on themselves. And so you don't really have to give people a lot of criticism, but they're hard on themselves with not too much intelligence. First of all, if they had really thought it through, they wouldn't be hard on themselves. They would be, what I would say, they'd be demanding of themselves that they jump to the next level, but they wouldn't be hard on themselves. I find you don't have to be hard on people. Most people are 10 times harder on themselves than you ever could be.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. And because of the position I've been in for so long in running a business and even in producing the play, I never, ever berate anybody.
 
Dan Sullivan: You never do it in front of anyone else either.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's correct. And if I have something that I want to tell you that is going to be personal about a behavior, I take them aside. Because even being called out, even if you're not saying anything negative. Now, if you're complimenting people, you can compliment them in front of others. But if you're going to be giving them a note of some sort, it's really good to give it to them separately, because just the fact of being called out in front of others can shut them down. And I think that it's really important to keep those channels open.
 
But the main reason I think it's okay to do that is to not be ready to not do that is aside from, I think, it's bad behavior and destructive. Everybody I deal with is a professional. They're all good at what they do. And as you said, they already know they've screwed up. You don't need to wow them with your keen powers of observation, which is about something that's very obvious to them. And if you don't berate them, they're even more aligned with the mission that you're on. Otherwise, they're reluctant to even say certain things. And I've seen so many businesses, large companies and small, where there is management by fear, and then the person in charge makes the mistaken assessment that people agree with them when they don't hear objection. And it's not that they agree, they don't want to risk being humiliated.
 
Dan Sullivan: Someone I knew who lives right in New York City and he's got a research firm, and it's a very interesting research firm in that its members are 200 individual Chinese in China who don't know each other. And they have a specific task every day, every week, to actually collect publicly available information and send in a report to him. And then he's created an algorithm that takes all this information together and it creates trends, trendlines. He has clients, he has corporations who buy his research, but his number one client is the Communist Party of China.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Really?
 
Dan Sullivan: And they hate it that that's true, that they have to be my number one client. But he said, "The high leadership have absolutely no information of what's going on in their country that they can see as a trendline." He says, "Because the penalty for giving bad news in China is so prohibitive that nobody gives bad news, but they get punished even for good news. So they give their leaders no news."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Hence the phrase, "No news is good news." It doesn't place you in jeopardy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I said, "Do you ever go to China?" He said, "Ooh, no, no, no, no, no. I don't go to China." But none of the individuals actually know any of the other individuals. So there's no way of one person influencing another. He'll ask them some general questions just about their observations and what the people are complaining about, and he noticed and everything else, and incidents of corruption. But this is available information, it's not like secret information.
 
He didn't say this to us. We had him here for an evening, a discussion book evening. But he said it to the person who brought him, and he said that the officials in Wuhan, where the COVID started, were so petrified of telling anyone, that it was six weeks before Beijing even knew that this had happened. It was so covered up at the local level. I just want to finish off the question that you asked about. How do you give people feedback that's useful to them? Well, first of all, you ask them about how they're seeing their own experience. And they'll generally be more critical and harder on themselves than you ever could be.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So you and I both deal with at least two types of people. One type is high achiever and another small subset of that, or people who are striving for, celebrity. What is the distinction you see between celebrity and achievement?
 
Dan Sullivan: In my own mind, I would divide it differently, that there's achievers who are trying to achieve celebrity and there's achievers who are trying to grow to the next level. And one of them is status-based and the other one is excitement-based, that the next level's going to be more exciting than this level. And the ones who are achieving celebrity stop at a certain level of status. And the achievers never stop. They never stop. They just keep growing. And it took me a while as coaching with our coaching company to figure it out, because they're all ambitious when you meet them, they're paying money, they're investing time to come to your program. So they are doing it because they have something bigger and better planned for themselves in the future. And then I would have people who would thrive, one of our measures is 10x revenues, is a good one, or 10x profitability. That's a good one.
 
And then they stop and they say, "Yeah, I'm where I want to be." And you realize that... I always tell our internal coaches, so we have internal coaches who keep people in the Program and we have external coaches who bring new people into the Program. So we've got the get-them-in salespeople, we got the keep-them-in salespeople, and we got the get-them-back salespeople. So we have all sorts of salespeople. But the ones who are the renewal salespeople, you're renewing from year to year, they'll say, "But they were doing so well, and they were talking about their success, and then they didn't renew." And I said, "Well, I'll tell you right off the bat, it has to do with what's going on outside in their personal life."
 
And there's two possibilities here, that they've reached the level of respect, socially, that they always wanted to have. And now they have it. And it's a particular type of home. It's in a particular neighborhood. There's social organizations and they're part of, and their children are going to the right schools, and they're golfing at the right golf club and all that, and they're driving around in the right kind of car. And I said, "That was their ambition. They felt deprived as children and they wanted to get to a point where they didn't feel disrespected the way they had felt when they were children. And they wanted to get to the level that they're the one who can do the disrespecting."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's good to have a goal.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Hey, hey, there's all sorts of things that keep the world going. The other ones, they just have this inbuilt permanent motor for growing to the next level and expanding their capabilities, being surrounded by people who have greater capabilities and greater reach. And they never stop growing. They just never stop growing. And I'm one of those, you're one of those. What I've achieved since 70 is greater than everything that I've achieved before 70. Since 70. So I'm 78 and what I've achieved in the last eight years is way beyond what I've achieved in the first 70 years.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, which is fantastic. And you have a phrase, which I actually know that you said it, I don't make the same mistake as Joe, I remember.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It's not a mistake on Joe, it's a solution.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Very charitable of you. And that is, "Making your future bigger than your past."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing from a entrepreneurial standpoint, we were talking about this the other day at lunch, that people don't realize that your entrepreneurial company protects you in an incredible number of ways that people who don't have companies don't have that protection. And one of the big things is, it avails you of applause. People are always clapping. If you're growing and you're achieving, you're getting applause. But the other thing is you have enormous influence because of that you have your company. But the other thing is, it keeps you in a creative zone of excitement and fear.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's true. I'm very much in that zone now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And both of them are necessary. You don't have excitement without fear, and you don't have fear without excitement. A lot of people don't realize that these are two sides of the same coin.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think another factor in that is risk and the recognition that no outcome is predetermined and safe, but that doesn't dissuade you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. We've both been in the marketing world. I was a copywriter at a big agency, big global agency, and the first thing you learn, and you learn it about the second day, that what you did yesterday doesn't matter.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That is true. Well, I think that once again, we've been true to our name of this podcast, Anything And Everything. And I love the concentration around the notion of risk, fear, achievement, but also all the different components to that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And luck.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: The whole luck aspect, yeah. It's really interesting. I have a less direct relationship to theater, but I've always been fascinated with theater. And I experimented in my 20s. In 1964, I went to London and I went to one of the Outward Bound schools. I don't know if you know the Outward Bound movement, it's for another discussion, but it's an outdoor leadership, outdoor, it tests you physically. And it's worldwide. It was created by Prince Phillip in the 1940s. It's been going for a long time. And I'd read about it when I was 10 years old, and when I was 20, I said, "I'm just going to save up some money, and I'm going to take off two or three months, and I'm going to go over." But it was 1964, and it was Shakespeare's birth year. So in Stratford, they ran all the history plays in order.
 
It was the first time that Stratford, they had taken the history plays and done it in the order of when the kings were. And it was very interesting. It was first year for Vanessa Redgrave, it was her first year. You had all these people who became 50-year legends in theater and movies in England. And they were in their first or second year in Stratford, 18, 19 years old. Anthony Quayle was there, and just a whole number of really famous people. When I was in London, I went to Westminster Abbey, and in Westminster Abbey, they have the graves of a lot of the royalty. In the early days, they were buried in the Westminster Abbey, which is right next to the Parliament buildings. So they were talking about kings and everything. And I said, "What about actors? Are there any actors?" And they said, "Just, well, he wasn't dead yet. You know, can't bury them until they're dead."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I hate limitations on behavior.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I asked the question then, "Are there any actors?" And they said, "No, the actors wouldn't be important enough. This is more royalty." But then when Sir Laurence Olivier died, he was buried at Westminster Abbey, and not at his request, it was the Queen asked his family if he could be buried there. So it was actually the Queen who took the initiative. So he's the only actor that was buried in Westminster. There's poets, there's writers and everything else, but no actor, because acting was not a respectable profession until very recently. But anyway, there's a story about Laurence Olivier, that he was the master of being as fresh in the 200th performance as in the first performance.
 
He just had this ability to always be fresh. And he was the sort of actor who would have 200 performances of a play. And the way he did it, it's actually written, I read a biography, is that before the performance and the audience was starting to fill up the theater, they had these spy holes in the curtain, and he'd look, and he had this mantra, and he said, "This is not last night's play. This is not last night's performance. This is not last night's audience. This is not last night's script." And he would just remind himself, and he would literally get himself as scared on the 200th night as he was scared on the first night. And I thought, that's useful in more than acting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that so much informs so much else. And I think that the worst thing you can do, no matter what field you're in, is to silo your thinking. And you're absolutely right. That mantra is good for anybody.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Always start fresh.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Always start fresh. And in theater, you want the audience to believe that that performance they're seeing, nobody else saw quite what you saw, 'cause it was so special. That it must have been a one-time thing. I saw Lena Horne, her one-woman show, and this is when standing ovations actually meant something because they were rare. And in the middle of the first act, we're on our feet applauding. I didn't even remember getting up. I didn't even remember standing. The phrase, "You were lifted out of your seat." And first act finishes, standing ovation, which never used to happen. And I said to my wife, "Margaret, what's she going to do the second act?" She's made us laugh, she's made us cry. What is she going to do? And it was even better.
 
Well, I then took my parents to see it. We went and saw it. Those same things that I thought were spontaneous were done at exactly the same time, exactly the same way, and got exactly the same standing ovation and response. And it's the first time I ever did this, Margaret and I went back again, and the final performance was her 70th birthday. So there was cake in the lobby afterwards for all the attendees. And once again, I saw how precise she was in her performance. And I got that insight back then is, "Wow, what a gift that is." Like what you were describing about Olivier, that each time she could go out there and make it feel fresh. And somehow, even though it was doing the same thing, everybody that saw it felt they were seeing something new.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And the thing is that the audience knows in what mindset the performer is, it's communicated. And if it looks like he or she is mailing it in, you might admire the skill and everything like that, but you know he's wondering what restaurant he gets to go after the performance tonight or something like that. Yeah, it's very interesting. We went to see a play, we usually stay in Soho when we're in London and theater right around it was Helen Mirren and Helen Mirren was playing in a play called The Interviews [The Audience], and it was about all her interviews with the Prime Ministers from Churchill, right up to David Cameron. It was when David Cameron was the Prime Minister, so that she had a dozen Prime Ministers at that time and then there's been more. But nobody knows what happens in the interviews. They're private. So this is imagined by the playwright, and she never left stage.
 
So they had just a screen and she would change costumes behind the screen while she was still talking. She would be talking and [inaudible] and doing, which is probably an art in itself. It's a craft in itself. And she really had Queen Elizabeth down pat, the mannerisms, the voice, the everything. So we were there and we had front row seats. So when it was over, Babs just shot up. British audiences do not give standing ovations. So Babs stood straight up and she was clapping and so I got up and I was clapping, and we were the only two. And Helen Mirren, who was taking her bows, came over and stood right in front of Babs and gave her a bow and walked off. And I said, "The Queen would approve."
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's great.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's a million theater stories that have real-life impact.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh yeah. Oh yes. So I think we have been true to our name, Anything And Everything.
 
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.