How Entrepreneurs Can Be Heroes Or Villains

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan. Today, what we thought would be interesting to talk about, and we haven't had much preparation for this, so this is a freewheeling improv. That much preparation. About that much. Whereas Rodney Dangerfield said, give me one of these. We're gonna talk about entrepreneurship, but in an interesting way, in a way that we're talking about archetypal characters like you would in film or theater or books. And so I thought it would be an interesting way, especially with Dan's vast experience with entrepreneurs, my experience with theater and entrepreneurship, that we would look at characters, if you will. As Shakespeare said, the world is a stage, and we are but the actors, and there are many actors that we both know. Some are good actors, and some aren't. You know, because film and theater books, they aren't mirrors on our society. They're interpretations of what our society is. So, Dan, I'd like to toss to you just in the sense of, what do you even think of the concept of entrepreneurs as different kinds of archetypes?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, first of all, I have proof that it's true. You know, I have 50 years, so I started coaching entrepreneurs in ‘74. I've personally interacted, coached, you know, either individually or in workshops, a little bit more than 7,000 individuals. You know, the thing I was interested in is the use of the word entrepreneur is fairly recent in history. And the earliest definition I can come up with for an entrepreneur that seems to fit with the individuals of today, now, some of them famous, but there's millions of entrepreneurs, was from a French economist by the name of Say, S-A-Y, Jean-Baptiste Say, 1804. And he said an entrepreneur is someone who takes a resource from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity, okay, but no talking about what the character of the individual is. And they come.
 
There's good people who do that. There's bad people who do this. There's very popular people who do this. There's very annoying people who do this. So there's a value in improving resources. I think that generally society afterwards is pretty forgiving of their role because they move things forward that benefit a lot of other people. But on the other hand, there's criminal entrepreneurs. You know, there's gangs of people who take a resource and take it to a higher level of productivity that does them good, but it doesn't do anybody else any good. It actually robs people and endangers people. So they come in all forms. But I think at the basis of it is someone who has sort of a conception of the future where they can be better off if they take certain actions that would be daunting for other people or would be even dangerous for other people. And they're willing to take these actions to move themselves ahead.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And you hit on a number of really interesting points there, because the leaders of drug cartels are entrepreneurs, right? You know, people are doing sex trafficking and entrepreneurs. There are, that's the full spectrum, like in life, there's a full spectrum of… It's 360, that's 360.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The interesting thing, like in drama, and I'll stick to theater and plays, nothing happens by accident. whether it's a movie about a cyclone or a tornado or whatever it is, the things that occur because of some outside force like fate, writers, directors, it's all about the individual human decisions. Okay, so when you're writing a character in a play or a movie or a novel, they have to be making decisions that affect the story. It's not an outside thing. That can be a catalyst, but with entrepreneurs, it's also about the individual decisions and actions that they take and the consequences of those. So, one of the things about that then is characters have to be responsible for what happens to them. Would you say that's the same with entrepreneurs?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think that your play Personality has a spectrum of different entrepreneurs in it. If I remember right from the front, you know, you have Lloyd Price, who's, you know, he's the classic hero and he's you know, a 17-year-old when the play starts, and he's got this delight he gets of making up songs, and he sings. His father, you know, digs trenches for septic tanks. But he's not. He's a survival entrepreneur. You know, he gets hired to do that, but he's got 11 kids, and he's got to put food on the table, and he does it. And then you have the radio station, the person who has the radio station. And then he goes there, and then the record company entrepreneur comes in from Hollywood.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And he's there. Root, I think his name is. Art Root. Art Root is there. He's an entrepreneur. And you have the musicians. Fats Domino is there. He's not well-known yet, and he's an entrepreneur. And so he gets noticed, he gets recorded at the radio station, and he goes to the top, really. And then he's got the producer in Houston, he's an entrepreneur, he puts on … and Robey puts on plays, and then he meets Logan, and Logan's a real entrepreneur. You have all these entrepreneurial characters, and what they have in common is that they're entrepreneurs because they're very, very different in terms of their personalities. The failed entrepreneurial project is the turntable in New York City, where he gets, Logan gets killed because he's bringing entrepreneurial venture into territory where people don't want him to have it, you know, and everything else.
 
And I think that there's a real huge entrepreneurial structure to your play. And I think that's why it's in it. I mean, it's one of the many reasons why it's such an interesting play. And it's very American. It's a very American—and Calvin Coolidge, who is sort of a forgotten president, he was vice president and president in the 1920s. And he said, you know, it's really simple. The business of America is business. And it's the buying and selling of things and, you know, of creating value. But I think one of the reasons why your play is so interesting is that it really touches on the core that somebody has a talent and they feel themselves confined in the circumstances that they're in, and they take a risk. They take a risk to break out of their circumstances to get a greater sense of freedom over their lives. Now, they can be on the good side of the law or the bad side of the law, but they're striving to do this.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, first of all, it's really interesting, because I honestly had never really thought of, other than Lloyd being an entrepreneur, and the whole act of mounting a play being entrepreneurship, I hadn't thought of it until you just articulated it, that so many of the characters were entrepreneurs in the show.
 
Dan Sullivan: You have sort of mountaintops in the play. There's valleys in the play, but you have mountaintops. But almost every one of the mountaintops is an entrepreneurial mountaintop.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, interesting, very interesting. And you talked about a couple of other things too. Entrepreneurs, by their nature, have to believe they can predict the future. And what I mean by that is that they have got to convince investors or customers or something that there is going to be a good outcome for this. You know, I mean, the distillation of that is from The Godfather. You know, when Brando utters the famous lines, “I gave him an offer he can't refuse.” That's predictive of behavior. And the main reason he can't refuse it is he would be dead shortly after refusing it.
 
But that prediction of the future is a huge part, believing you can predict the future, believing that you can know what the market wants, is really interesting because also to achieve that future, in novels, in plays, in order to achieve that future, what goes along with it is sacrifice. Whether you're giving up your time, you're giving up a relationship or relationships, entrepreneurs this is universal with, also heroes, is that they have to sacrifice. You know, it doesn't just happen easily. There are things you have to give up in order to get. So, it's kind of interesting because oftentimes in movies the heroes aren't very happy people because they have sacrificed. You had said something earlier about which also defines villains. It's the difference between somebody who does something to bring value to others and someone who does something only to enhance themselves. So in the arts, that hero sacrifices for the greater good as opposed to self-gain. You know, and there can be heroes like Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was thinking of Citizen Kane is a great entrepreneurial movie. It's based on William Randolph Hearst. I think the story, you know, actual American newspaper empire that he created, but it's based on that. But Orson Welles himself was an entrepreneur because that's a film that he literally created out of his, you know, he was the producer, he was the director, he was the lead actor. He wrote the script, you know, I mean, that was pure entrepreneurism. And it's totally one of the great all-time American movies. You know, I've seen it four or five times, you know, at junctures. It's a very interesting thing. I was given, somebody wants, approached Joe Polish and me to create a Spotify series where we talk about this subject. And I think you'd be interested in this because you're the one who put me onto the Constitution series that's on public television.
 
I gave the people who are interested in doing this series, I said, I'd like to have a series called the Bill of Rights Economy. And I said, if you just take the first 10 amendments of the United States and you drill down to the freedoms that it identifies that individuals should have, you know, in each of the right of speech, certainly the second amendment’s created an enormous entrepreneurism. But all the amendments, the first 10 amendments, is individuals the essential thing of not being interfered with by the government and them going about their business. And I said probably the entire U.S. economy is really based on the constant outward extension of those first ten amendments to the Constitution. Right in the first article of the Constitution is the right to have intellectual property, that you can create ideas that you can benefit from, you'll be given a monopoly in the marketplace. copyrights, trademarks, patents, you'll be granted a thing.
 
And my sense is that the founders who, if you look at their histories, basically were all involved in entrepreneurial activities. Some of it inherited, but a lot of it they created. A lot of them were bootleggers. A lot of them were, they didn't like the interference in their private activities by the British government. And they said, let's create a country where they won't interfere anymore with it. The other one, Madison, was a very keen observer of human nature. He's generally credited with being the cut-and-paste artist for the U.S. Constitution because he patched together a lot of different things that had already been established in constitutions, James Madison. And he said, you know, what we have to do is we have to base the entire system on self-interest. In other words, we want to give people maximum incentive to express their self-interest, but organize it in such a way that in pursuing their self-interest, they actually create a lot of good for other people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that makes an interesting transition to me because I think, you know, sort of the standard refrain about entrepreneurs is, you know, to add value, to take something and take it to a higher level of value. I would push back on that. And I would say that the main thing is more what you've been talking about, which is trying to gain power. And that power, that doesn't mean it's bad, but you want power, meaning more control or more freedom over what you do. Now, it can turn to bad, but anything can. But I think that power is really the thing about entrepreneurship. And along with that power, when you're talking about looking into the future, going back to Citizen Kane, it's about, which he never really gets, redemption. You know, because the power that is most respected probably throughout the ages, and certainly in this country, is to be able to predict the future, which is the essence of sales. Right? I mean, that's the essence of selling something, is the ability to predict the future and convince others your future will be better with this.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Dean Jackson, I do a podcast on Sundays in the morning with Dean, and he's a very canny marketer. He's very, very good at marketing. He said, you know, compelling offer is 10 times more persuasive than a convincing argument. He said, you can convince somebody with an argument, but it leads nowhere. They just don't have a counter argument to come back. But a compelling offer triggers action. You know, it triggers the exchange of money. I'm a real believer that living in Canada for, you know, I've lived in Canada for 53 years. And every time I cross the border back into the United States, which is pretty well every month for business purposes, I say, this is the land of the deal. The moment you get across, you get the feeling that it's, things are being offered here. You can buy a lot of things in the United States. And it's really funny.
 
And you don't find that in Canada. If it's in Canada, it's sort of derivative. Let's be like the Americans. But they're not like the Americans. They just don't make the same kind of compelling offers that Americans do. No, I was just looking and think about the phenomenon of, well, two phenomenons, because Taylor Swift's been in town for six concerts. The police actually shut down the main highway from the airport, and she came in on Thursday. And they shut down the highway so her six cars could just go unimpeded into the city, and then she, you know, I don't know what hotel she's at, and then around basically the stadium, it's a covered stadium, and they have 50,000, they can put 50,000 in it, and that's sold out for six nights. So they closed down all the streets in about, you know, three block area around, no cars in that area and everything like that. And I said, she makes a very compelling offer.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: How would you articulate her offer?
 
Dan Sullivan: Her offer is that the police will shut down the major highways when you come. Yeah, I mean, it's something that must be so entertaining and so engaging that, you know, and all the hotels are sold out, all the restaurants are filled up, you know, I'm doing it. She's a one-person economy when she comes to town.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that's incredible.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. But it's very American. It's very American that you would have a person like this. It's just very interesting, and I comprehend it. It's not my music. The lyrics don't talk to me, and it's not my music. But I understand it's a wonderful show, just the way the show that she puts on. We're going to Argentina next week. We have advanced stem cell treatment in Argentina. But the first time we were there, she was there in Argentina to do a concert. And we're staying at the same hotel for seasons. People say, did you see her? And I said, no, she was busy. I was busy. We just couldn't get our schedule together. It wasn't a thing, but what a phenomenon. And they had no reserved seats at the stadium where this was. There were four concerts. And so there were people who were in tents for two months waiting to be first in line to get into the stadium. And I said, yeah, that's great. Quite amazing, it's an amazing phenomenon. I just, as the coach of entrepreneurs and an entrepreneur myself, I just appreciate, even though it's not my thing, I'm not the target audience, I'm not the target market for what she does, I can appreciate what she's pulled off.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Now that makes me want to veer off. I, by the way, interviewed Taylor a couple of times. And, you know, she's very bright. Very, very bright. Her compass is pretty clear in terms of the direction she's going. And when I interviewed her, she wasn't the magnitude of, she was a star, but not the magnitude that she has become. So you talk about somebody creating an event like that and what she has done and sustained globally.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And this trip, there's a hundred concerts this year, I think she's doing, and it's a billion dollars. I mean, the bottom line on it is a billion. She's the first tour that's ever brought in a billion, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: What's fascinating about her, though, is she delivers the goods to her fans. She delivers. Otherwise, word of mouth would kill it. But in fact, you know, I know people that flew their daughters to Sweden because it was less money to do that than to buy a scout ticket to a sold-out concert in the United States. And then I think of this just happened. Friday night, I'm embarrassed to say that I watched it. The Mike Tyson, Jake Paul fight, which was the hype machine at its highest volume, which didn't deliver the goods.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it's funny, Dean Jackson's watched it too. And he said it had a lot of middle to it. He said there wasn't anything exciting. First of all, at 58, you just don't have the muscles for, I mean, and the other guy didn't have the skill to knock him out, you know, so.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I don't think he, whether or not he had the skill or power to knock him out, I think there was a calculated judgment there. Jake Paul's 27. How's it going to look if he beats up a 58-year-old? Yeah, I'm sure the sentimental favorite was Tyson for all those middle aged and older men who would love to have seen old Ice and turn back the clock.
 
Dan Sullivan: You 75 me 80. We'd like to see a 58-year-old knock out a 27-year-old.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, that's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because we're doing it. In our fight game, we're knocking out young people.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The thing to me is that what about when you create, as an entrepreneur, which Taylor is, which he is, Jake Paul, and he's an extraordinary self-promoter. I happen to find him repellent. So I'll put that out front. I happen to find him repellent in his attitudes, repellent in his brother, repellent. You know, his brother, even at the end of the fight, when the announcer, you know, said, what's next for him? Maybe you'll fight—his brother's name, I guess, is Logan. And Logan says, I'd kill him. And I'm thinking, oh, man. But I think that Jake was smart. He knew that if he knocked Tyson out, and by the way, Tyson isn't just a 58-year-old who used to be a boxer. He also used to be a drug addict. He also did prison time. He's had a hard, difficult life, physically and emotionally.
 
Dan Sullivan: Great story.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And so the fact that he could get a few million dollars.
 
Dan Sullivan: Wow, 30. Each of them got 30.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: So their entourage has got 30, whatever.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Yeah. They did fine.
 
Dan Sullivan: They did fine. Yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And, you know, for Tyson, it was an opportunity to have the world's eyes on him again. And, you know, the reasons why he did it are all pretty obvious and good for him. But what ends up is that the entrepreneurial approach to that didn't deliver the goods. And now I don't know that, you know, Paul is clearly very nimble, very smart, in terms of self-promotion. I respect that even though I don't like what he's promoting. And the best part of the evening, if you like that, which I frankly don't, but the women's boxing match was actually an exciting match. I can't say that I enjoy seeing women beat each other up but they were two highly skilled athletes who really did well and it was way better than anything else that was a part of that card.
 
Dan Sullivan: I know the doctor personally who's worked with Mike Tyson over the last 10 years, because he's in a far better shape at 58 than he was at 48, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But he could hardly walk to the middle of the ring. His balance was shot, you know.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The championship for him is that he's alive at 58, you know.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's interesting. What do you think if you're a great marketer, which Jake is, my daughter told me and son told me that he got known for doing outrageous stuff on YouTube. Well, he's now partners with Netflix to do their first global live event. And what is your take on the fact that he didn't deliver? And where does delivering on the promise come into entrepreneurship?
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay, so let's just take a, he didn't deliver or it didn't deliver?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I would say it didn't deliver.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it didn't deliver, yeah. And it sort of borderline that sort of match because in their, you know, certain Mike Tyson in his prime, he delivered, you know, he was the world champion. I'd have to think that through a little bit, but the fact that you were not impressed and Dean Jackson wasn't impressed …
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But we both watched it, which is another factor.
 
Dan Sullivan: So you have great sacrifice in each of you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, I'll never get those few hours back. You're right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think that nobody would do it. I couldn't have a second one. Nobody would watch it. But Taylor is doing 100 concerts and the thing is, at 35, can she be doing this at 40? Can she be doing this at 45? I don't know the answer to that. I just don't know. I don't really. Dig deeply in how she's done what she's done so far. But she's certainly way beyond any other country and western singer. I mean, she started in Nashville. I mean, her genre now is not country and western. She's created her own genre and everything else. So the one I was going to bring up, not in the entertainment field, but it was AI. It's two years since AI. It was November 30th, I think, when ChatGPT was introduced. And there was a huge compelling sell that this changes everything. The head of my tech team at Strategic Coach was familiar with this and he kept, this changes everything. And so I've heard that before.
 
I remember when television came in, this changes everything. Well, it changes some things, but it doesn't change everything. And when computers, you know, personal computers came in, this changes everything. Well, it changes some things, but it doesn't change everything. And you're the one who pointed out the Goldman Sachs report. They're saying, you know, the large corporations who put perhaps even trillions, I don't know what their investment is, that this is going to change everything. And now their shareholders are saying it didn't change the share price, you know, and which is what Wall Street is about. But let me ask you a question: What is it about customers that they hope there's something big? Then they'll put money and put time into hoping something's big. I don't know what the audience was for Jake Paul and for Mike Tyson, but I imagine it was global and it was huge.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. It was. I think it was the number one thing on Netflix. At least that's what Netflix wanted everybody to believe. They had 72,000 people at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. And just by the way, to finish what I was saying before, if Jake knocked out Tyson, Jake would look bad. He's beating up a 58-year-old man. If Tyson knocked him out, he would look bad. Jake would look bad by getting beat up by an old man.
 
Dan Sullivan: So a bigger risk on Jake's part.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So really the only thing to do is carry him for eight rounds. So whether or not he has the skill or the power to knock him out, I don't know. But just in terms of …
 
Dan Sullivan: He made the right career decision.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. Because I think he would have put off a lot of people.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, because he was such a sentimental favorite.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think less of him if he knocked out a 58-year-old man.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. So I think he did the right thing given the circumstances.
 
Dan Sullivan: Exactly. Exactly.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. But what he does, and this is true with entrepreneurs, and I think this is an essential trait of entrepreneurs, because I think entrepreneurship is about power. And when I say power, I mean the power to make decisions, the power to determine your time, the power to, you know, with power comes freedom. Unless you look at the flip side, which is from the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” freedom is just another word for nothing left to use, lose. Let's screw that up. That's why I'm not a singer. I think that that's true. But there's another aspect of power that I think is inescapable when you exercise power, and that is defiance. Entrepreneurs defy the status quo in a certain way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. What I've noted right from the beginning, and I've sensed it in myself, that I have a sort of an, it's not anti-social, it's not, at a certain point, what other people think about I'm doing doesn't count as much to me as what I think I'm doing. And most socially conscious people, that would be a horrible risk.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think that there's something that everybody seeks. And that is respect. You want to be taken seriously for what it is that you do.
 
Dan Sullivan: And uniquely. Go into that a little deeper. You don't want to be respected necessarily in the way that other people are respected. You want to be respected for something more distinctive. Something more original.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and by the way, I want to give attribution because a lot of these ideas were inspired by the writer and professor Howard Suber, who wrote The Power of Film. And that documentary, I'd recommend to everybody, it's great. Because as I was reading it, I kept thinking, wow, they're calling us a hero in this particular story. But that's also what an entrepreneur does. And I think that defiance, and there's varying degrees of defiance, but that's an absolute necessary character trait for entrepreneurs. Because if you didn't think by defying through exercise of power can help you get to that future that you predicted, you wouldn't do it. It takes a certain level of defiance to take that on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. In our Strategic Coach Program, there's a thinking tool called Identifying Your Hero Target. And what it is, you want to identify the customer or client in the marketplace that you can be a hero to them. In other words, you do things, they have particular issues, they have dangers that need to be eliminated, they have opportunities that need to be captured, and they have strengths that need to be maximized, and you create a means by which they can do all three of those things, and you're a hero, and what they grant you is a monopoly. It's called a value creation monopoly. These are all strategic go-to tools, you know, just to use Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has a global monopoly, is what she has. She's created it. And as long as she keeps entertaining at the level that she's at …
 
I was so struck, I went to see Barry Manilow. And Barry Manilow is 81 years old, and he started as a singer rather late. I think he was 37. So he's been doing it for 44 years. He was a songwriter, actually a quite good songwriter, and he had a lot of songs which were being rejected by other singers. And so he just put an album together, and it was a real hit. It was his own album, and that was 37. But there were people in the audience who, there were grandmothers, mothers, and daughters there, you know, and this would go over the 44 years, who are his fans, and they've granted him a monopoly. And we were talking to a woman in front of us, and it was more than 100 concerts that she had been to. And I said, you know, he's got a monopoly here. And it's really very interesting because you think of monopolies of someone who crushes their competition, but actually it doesn't happen that way. My experience is that the paying customer grants you a monopoly. They're the ones who crush the competition. They make a decision. You have my money. Nobody else gets my money, you know?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think that decision example of that kind of decision, is people that buy into the Apple ecosystem. That's like a very clear example.
 
Dan Sullivan: 1987, our company, we said, it's going to be Apple from now on. So it's a long time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But AT&T actually impeded any innovation on phones because they had a true monopoly.
 
Dan Sullivan: They had a bigger monopoly than anyone can dream about today.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. Which killed innovation, which made it very difficult for anybody to enter that space because they didn't have the necessary funds to put up with what was the reflex action lawsuit that AT&T would file and could afford to file thousands of them to keep that from going. I think in the open market, you could buy other computers, but Apple established their part and developed followers, you know, like a religion, you know. And the cross was the apple with a little bit of a bite out of it. You know, that was the symbol. That was a very strong brand proposition. And, you know, Steve Jobs is kind of interesting because Jobs is that quintessential entrepreneur, and part hero, part villain, in terms of his behavior. And he did exactly what you're talking about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it was very interesting. I really paid attention to intellectual property right from 1989 when we started the workshop program. And I had a sense we were creating stuff. Obviously, it could be copyrighted, it could be trademarked. But I said, I think there's, what we're doing is patents here. And we were ahead of the game. The Patent Bureau had to change one of its thoughts over the last 35 years. It happened about five, six years ago. And all of a sudden, you know, we've achieved a lot of patents. But my original IP lawyer, great entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, John Ferrell, and he lived for 15, 20 years next door to Steve Jobs. And he sued him. I mean, he's next-door neighbor and he sued his next-door neighbor on behalf of somebody, you know, he sued Steve Jobs.
 
I said, so what do you think about it? When he died, John was at his workshop about two days after Steve Jobs died. It was like Mother Teresa died, you know, at all the Apple stores, people had vigil lights and they had flowers, you know. I said, what do you think of this response? I said, I've never seen this with an entrepreneur. It's almost like he's got a saintly reputation. It's like a saint died. And he said, I haven't the foggiest idea who this person is. He said, I found him the biggest prick I have ever met in my life. He said, but I know people who worked at Apple who would take a bullet to get the chance to work with him that he so transformed them. So you have both sides of it. What made him great on the plus side for the products that he created, was balanced off by who he was on the personal side. He was a very difficult human being to deal with.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I spent a very interesting day with Bill Hambrick, who took Apple public. And Walter Isaacson sent the galley of his book about Steve Jobs to Hambrick to say, do you think I captured him? And Hammer said, you know he's a prick. And Isaacson said, yeah, I do. But as part of that, and this isn't conscious, but as part of that, when I was talking before about sacrifice, you know, Job sacrificed his kid, sacrificed his marriage, sacrificed a lot. Now, I suspect all knowingly, although I don't know that he could have known the repercussions of that, because the real word of sacrifice is sacred. It was interesting when you were saying how he was treated like a religious leader. And there's a reciprocal relationship between heroes and religion. Heroes in drama and I think in real life, sacrifice sometimes, where there are heroism. And so that sacrifice can take on the aura of the sacred. The question is, in terms of action, what is the difference, or character profile, that's even better, between a hero and a villain?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think how things end up, I mean, for one thing, I think the series that was on public television for years, Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, I think it was. I think that became quite well known and quite popular in the 70s and 80s, that there are people who are entrepreneurial, who've actually used the stages to sort of give them an understanding of their life. I would say this, entrepreneur, as we understand entrepreneurs today, it's new to the world. And I don't see much evidence of it in real invention, where you're actually creating new things before the 1770s and 1780s. And it took place in Britain. I gave a little talk, I gave a podcast about the year 1776. I said, you know, some years are a lot more important than other years. I mean, we say, well, a year's a year. And I said, there's some.
 
So in 1776, three things happened. One of them was James Cook, who was a Scot, created the first steam engine that produced 25% more energy than it used. And they'd had steam engines for 100 years, but they were like 5% return on, you know, you'd put so much wood in and fire and everything else, you'd get a 5%, his was 25%. And that changed the world, that just changed the world, because you could take this steam engine and you could apply it to all sorts of existing industrial activities, and all of a sudden you got this 25% return. That was in March, I think, of 1776.
 
And then in, I think it was in late May or June, Adam Smith, another Scott, came out with the book, The Wealth of Nations. And he defined both the good side and the bad side of entrepreneurism. And he said, on the one hand, these are valuable people. But on the other hand, if you put a bunch of them together, it's a real conspiracy against the public. Okay, because they try to screw up prices, they try to screw up wages and everything else. But both are true. They create new things which further trade and they further economic progress. And then in July, the Declaration of Independence happens. And my sense is that the founders knew they had a good deal on their hands of having this entirely new continent. They depended on England, but they wanted to be free of English regulation. I mean, it's very complex, but it's really thin.
 
And you put those three together, and you can see that this is the real start of entrepreneurism as a class of people. They weren't a class of people. They were merchants, and you had traders going back thousands of years. But they didn't have this ability to create new kinds of energy until Cook comes along with the steam engine. And it's very interesting. The anti-slavery movement in the world did not happen until the steam engine was created. Up until the 1770s, the most productive economic forces in the world were slaves. You put a thousand slaves, all of a sudden you get a new energy source, and all of a sudden you don't need it. All of a sudden, people say …
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And a cheap energy source.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, real cheap energy source. And England, you know, within 20 years of the steam engine, they start saying, no, no, we can't have slavery anywhere in the world, you know. Well, they didn't think that way until they had a replacement. Yeah, so the big thing is you don't see this class of individuals like we have today. I think at the center of what Americans consider to be cultural heroes, it's a large number of them are entrepreneurs. They're not generals, they're not bureaucrats, they're not philosophers. At the heart of the American culture, who you consider to be a hero, they're mostly entrepreneurs.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, it's interesting because when you say that first person to pop, that's not true in Canada, by the way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Uh huh. When you say it's not true in Canada, meaning that entrepreneurs are not the cultural heroes, their prime ministers and their institution builders, their doctors. But you don't have that entrepreneurial.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You know, I think that's interesting because I think that more typifies a cultural trend for a time, you know, after World War II, it was Eisenhower and someone who had a military background and, you know, that was the thing and back to the Civil War even. And so I think that there are certain traits that surface And now it's what you're talking about. And I think of like Frank Perdue, who ran for president, entrepreneur, a chicken tycoon. And entrepreneurship didn't have the sheen then that it has now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Look at Musk.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, the interesting thing about Musk is, to me, as we get into the kind of archetypes again, Musk is, I mean, you're correct, but I look at Musk, he's like a Bond villain. You know, that's what he's like to me. He's this over-the-top character who, and one of the differences in drama between a hero and a villain is a hero does for others, a villain only looks out for themselves. So I think it's really interesting. It's his own self-enhancement.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's a meme I saw. It said, what a fool Elon Musk is. He spent $44 billion for Twitter, and all he got out of it was control of the three branches of government.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I have a prediction, and that prediction is, I've been saying this to my wife, with Trump, there's only one person who can be in the spotlight. And at a certain point, I think that relationship's going to blow up because it's not as if Musk is a shrinking violet. So that standing ovation that Musk got when he walked into the room with Trump, a separate standing ovation …
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm willing to bet, although I won't be able to, Trump even said, I heard it—Babs had it on her iPhone yesterday. We were driving and it was Trump. He was introducing Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and Musk and Vivek, the guy whose name I can't pronounce. He said, you know, I don't think he said Trump. He said, Bobby, he said, you know, he says, you're going to do wonders for us and you're going to be really famous, but not too famous. Not too famous, there's … I just want to let you know where the line is. Careful, careful. Yeah, it's really interesting when you look at all this, not in terms of politics or economics, but you just look at all this just in terms of theater, grand theater. It's much more fulfilling to look at this from a theatrical standpoint than it is that, oh, big systems and everything. That's not interesting stuff. Looking at it as heroes and villains and grand theater, it's much more interesting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, you know, it has become grand theater. But as I mentioned that, it's also true that you can go back to Lincoln and the Lincoln Douglas debates for its time were spectacle. And, you know, the most people, of course, didn't see them, but still talked about them.
 
Dan Sullivan: But it was the age of newspapers and you had these supreme productions of the debates all across the country. And you had the telegraph at that time, so they could be sent very quickly across the country.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, so I think that there has always been an aspect of showbiz, and I think it's even more so now. And again, and I agree with you, not speaking politics, Trump is a showman. You know, he knows how to get a crowd's attention. He knows how to play to the audience he's in front of. And that's undeniable. So I, like you, find the phenomenon of it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Fascinating.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. And it's for high stakes. I mean.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, God, yes. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: I read this fascinating book, I don't know why I picked it up, but it was about the Prime Minister in England at the time that the First World War started. And these are private letters that he had, he was about 60, and they're private letters that he exchanged with a 25-year-old woman. And it's not entirely clear whether it was sexual at all. He was married, he had a family, and she was the daughter of a very wealthy family. But it was back and forth over a period of about nine years. It started when she was about 21, it went until she was about 30. And they've all been preserved. So the writer, it turned it into a historical novel, but he was using the actual, Asquith was the name of the prime minister.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I heard about that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it starts off really slow. And I said, I don't know if I can stay with this. Then it gets more and more intriguing as it goes on because they're being investigated by Scotland Yard that he's giving away state secrets to this 25-year-old. I mean, he's passing on telegrams that he gets from the Kaiser and from the French president and everything like to this 25-year-old who apparently had great political sense and she was a great advisor to him. But Churchill comes all the way through, and Churchill was a conservative, then he became a liberal. This was a liberal government. You begin to realize what almost a madman that Churchill was. I mean, the Battle of Gallipoli was just horrendous. They lost 40,000, 50,000 troops just on a mad idea he had that you could attack Turkey from the Mediterranean. And then you realize how Churchill ended up this way. And he actually had to resign over his failure. And he went and he volunteered for the front lines. And then he came back and he was in the wilderness and he came back. But he obviously understood the role of the hero in the theater that he was taking part in.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it's so interesting because also people create their own narratives. What happens, like in the case of Churchill, when I was in London, I had dinner with a friend who invited this guy who runs the Churchill Museum.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah, that's a great museum.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And he's a Churchill scholar. I said to him at one point, when you are a character of the stature of Winston Churchill, how much investment is there in maintaining the mythic proportion of his story, which isn't really true? And he said, a lot.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, at the end of the war, you know, he was thrown out of power even before the Japanese war started. There was an election right after the Germans surrendered and he was thrown out. Labor took his first time. Labor government came in and he was always short on funds. I mean, he was a prolific writer because he had to be, but he signed this huge contract to write the history of the English-speaking people. He wrote a contract to four-book history of the second world war. And somebody asked him, do you think you'll look good in history? And he says, absolutely, because I'm going to write it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and as the saying goes, you know, history is written by the victors.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. And he's a splendid writer. I mean, he's just a master of the English language. So you, I mean, even if it was all lies, you would read it because it was entertaining, you know. Well, then it would be in the fiction rather than nonfiction section. Historical fiction, historical fiction. So a lot of history is fiction.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah, yeah. And I want to read you, this is a lift from Suber, and I'm applying this to entrepreneurs. He was talking about heroes and villains, which I think was fascinating, which is that physicists define power as the ability to produce change or prevent it. This is the kind the hero seeks. While the villain seeks and uses power for his own self-enhancement, the hero seeks and uses power either to help other people or to prevent the villain from harming others. And there you have the plot of almost every … That's very astute.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I totally relate to that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You say you totally relate to that
 
Dan Sullivan: ? No, I totally relate to what he's saying there. You know, the essence of what he's saying.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I think it's fascinating. And I wonder, it brings me, you know, makes me think of something else, which is serial entrepreneurs. And I'm not talking Corn Flakes. You know, the serial entrepreneurs, those that keep starting, you can't even keep track of what worked and what didn't work because they're in such a flurry of doing a new business. I have this new idea. And, you know, as much as they fall in love with their new idea, they only fall in love with it up to a point that it's still new and then either abandon it or it doesn't work. And they're hyping something else. How do you look at that and how do you define a serial entrepreneur? Do you have any that are part of Coach? I don't need to name any names. And what do you think that is?
 
Dan Sullivan: I have very few. And what I have a lot of is people who've been basically constantly developing a single business over, you know, I've got about 50 in their fourth decade now, they're in more than 30 years. And what I made a case for was that they should constantly reinvent themselves inside their same business. Okay. We all start off as the main salesperson of our business. We start off as the main manager of our business. And then we have this concept of Unique Ability. And I said, you know, the skills that get you out of Egypt aren't the ones that get you into the promised land, as the book of Exodus kind of tells you, you know. And I said, what you have to do is that you have a role and you are the leader. And you have to free yourself up on a continual basis and download everything else that other people can do to go after the creating of the future for your business.
 
And I've sold them. The serial entrepreneurs are the people who haven't been able to do that. And so instead of being able to recreate themselves inside their own business, they've got to create a new business all the time. And what they try to do is sell off the existing business. And Mike Koenigs and I have about two podcasts on this. And Mike's on his, I think is on his seventh business now since he started. And I said, Mike, I can see a connector for all those seven businesses. And if you saw that, you'd realize that you don't have to fire everybody and sell off what you do. You can just recreate yourself and jump to the next level. And, you know, that's what I've done and this is what Babs has done inside of our company.
 
We started in ‘89 and ours is workshops for entrepreneurs. And in 1994, I was doing 144 workshop days that year. Okay, I was the only coach, and we were at about, you know, maybe $2.5 million at that point. And then I started saying, well, we gotta have other coaches. So we worked with a team, we have other coaches. So this year our company will do six, I think I said this on another podcast, we have 600 workshops and I have 12 of them. And we're worth 20 times what we were then. But I just kept looking at me and saying, okay, you have to go simpler. There's just certain things you should be doing now. And I think it's the big problem is that they can't recreate themselves. You have to become a different person or you have to focus on different skills. As you become more successful, you have to reinvent yourself. The company will take its cues from your reinvention of yourself. You don't have to worry about creating a new business. I've never found the serial entrepreneurs very happy with who they are and what they do.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think what goes along with that and is coupled to that is that when you fire everybody and start again, in a sense, what you're saying is it's their fault. I'm getting rid of those people. Now I'm lean and I can do it, you know, all that. And of course, it's then you do the same thing again and the same thing again a year and a half later. and it becomes that kind of a cycle. Until you accept the fact that, no, this is about you and how you run a company. And as you said, until you reinvent yourself, until you confront and deal with that problem, you're just going to do it again and again and again.
 
Dan Sullivan: I had this one client that's around 1998, and he was on his fifth marriage. So he said, can I talk to you? Can we have lunch? So we had lunch. And he was telling me about his marriages. And I said, same kind of woman each time? He said, no, no, they're all different. And I said, well, is there any common factor? Is there any one thing that's always the same in each of the marriages? And he says, well, I can't say it. And I said, is there anyone who's witnessed all five marriages? He said, oh, you mean I'm the problem? I'm just asking a question. I'm just asking a question. I'm not making a statement. I'm just asking a question. Is there any common factor? You know, it's not science until you find the common factor.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. So one other thing, in drama, the hero is the one who is willing to sacrifice more, even at the cost of their own happiness. You know, I remember the first movie I cried at when I was probably 11 or 12 when I saw Spartacus. And you know, Jane Simmons was on the wagon with Peter Ustinov, and she looks up and sees Spartacus Kirk Douglas on the crucifix. She's going, my life, my love, and you know, as they're getting out of there. And you know, of course, sacrifice. I'm wondering, do entrepreneurs, in your opinion, is sacrifice a necessary part of achieving what one might define as success?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there was a speaker at the Genius Network conference last weekend, and he talked about sacrifice. And he said, the moment that you focus on one thing, you sacrifice everything else. He says it's very important to realize that the goal that you focus on for a long period of time, when you achieve it, you've sacrificed an enormous amount of other things in your life to get there. And that's not bad, but it's important for you to realize that it's necessary.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So then the flip side of sacrifice, because let's say that you have crashed your marriage, or you have crashed relationships that were important to you, or, you know, that sort of thing. The flip side of sacrifice is redemption. And redemption is an interesting kind of contract, because if I behave like, in a way you were telling your friend at lunch, here's how to redeem yourself. Find out what the consistent problem was. Hey, it was you, by the way. Find out what the …
 
Dan Sullivan: He wasn't a friend. He was just a guy who married five times. Yeah, yeah, well, it's true. I mean, most people are not capable of that type of sacrifice. You don't know because people may have sacrificed a lot and nobody knows about it. Take Lloyd Price, if you take the story and read it back, there was a lot that he had to sacrifice, you know, I mean, usually you have to leave home. You know, usually you have to leave home. He went from New Orleans to the world, you know. You know, I left home right away. I was 18. I graduated from high school in five years. I was gone. And I've only been back for visits over the last 62 years. And nobody even lives in the Norwalk where I grew up. Nobody's ever there.
 
You know, I was in a marriage that I didn't think was gonna work, and I called an end to it because we were going like this. And that caused a lot of bad talk about what I was doing, but I said, you know, is it going to be any better three years from now? And I said, no, I said, we gotta stop it right now. And I think it was good that I took action for me, and I think it was good for her too, although I haven't seen her in 40 years. We can only focus on one thing at a time. That's the number one restriction of human beings, that our brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and over a short period, if we're not successful, unless we're only focusing on a few things. And we can't focus on everything, you know.
 
And the redemption, I think the redemption, that's a great word because I see a lot of it that when they get their act together inside their company and they're really well delegated and they put together a great cast around them of great roles, they immediately go back to their personal life and they start repairing and making up for bad things they've done in their mind, that they've done in their own life. I see that a lot. It's very funny. If they're in Coach for more than three years, they stop talking about money altogether. They don't talk about money. It's all other things that they have to transform in their life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And to cap it, where it takes me back to, which I think is fascinating in theater and film and books, but also in terms of the world and entrepreneurship, because I think after the sacrifice, which is inevitable if you're an entrepreneur, if you go through the redemption stage, then you come down to, I think, what you have always wanted. And I think what people always want is respect.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And, you know, you had talked about how I loved it. You had talked about Elon Musk and you said, and if he is the first man on Mars, he's going to find out his dad still isn't there to hug him. You know, that acknowledgement that we all need. And when you think of, you know, I think one of my favorite films, two of them, On the Waterfront, and what was the Marlon Brando, Terry Malloy, what was he searching for? I could have been somebody, you know, I could have been somebody. He had no respect. Got a one-way ticket to Palookaville. You know, when you look at Atticus Finch, who is one of the great characters, Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch was another one who, it was about the self-respect that he had, because he had the respect of others. And, you know, Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, he just wanted respect. I mean, it's really fascinating, that theme, because it becomes, in a way, we've been talking about drama, but parallels to religion. And I'm not religious. Sacrifice, redemption, respect. I think there is a lot to mine here. What did you take from today?
 
Dan Sullivan: I hadn't really thought about the concept of sacrifice before last weekend and this brought up. So it was a thought that I had not heard before from an entrepreneurial stage. And I said, there's a lot more interesting than talking about trauma. Because sacrifice is a decision that you make. And I think part of the reason is you only have limited time, you only have limited capabilities, you only have limited opportunities. And to be something that people respect, you've got to get really narrow and focused to do it. And I find it a very, very intriguing topic. And, you know, sometimes I think you don't see the sacrifice until afterwards.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, yeah, and the thing is, when you say it's a decision.
 
Dan Sullivan: Decision means to kill off, you know. Decidere, the Latin word, is to kill off the alternative. You know, when you get married, you kill off all the alternatives. And that, I said, that's what makes it work, is that you don't have alternatives. You can just focus on the one relationship.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But I think a lot of people don't realize it's a decision. They think that it's something that happens to them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Or it was forced upon them.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a decision. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And I think that the ability to recognize what a decision is and that you actually have the power to make that decision. Not that it's easy and it's like a light switch, but yeah, this is a–no, it takes commitment and courage.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right. Before you get any capability, you have to go through a period of commitment and courage.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And you can't know that the outcome of that is gonna be successful. Guesses and bets. That's right. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, this was good. We're getting kind of deep here, Jeff.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I thought we were just going to enjoy the shallowness of life. Yes, well, that's the next series I'd like to start. It's called The Deeply Superficial Podcast.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you want to sign us off? Yeah, it was like, what's his name? Sam Goldman, MGM. And he said, you know, the single most important skill in Hollywood is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you can do almost anything. Yeah, well, I really love this and it really got me thinking. I am going to watch that movie series now because you brought it up. I mean, the bottom line of this is nothing comes free. There's price for everything in life. And if you want to be admired and you want to be respected, there's going to be a price to getting there.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was invited to a conference last week, and the title of the conference was Navigating in Uncertain Times. So they gave the introduction and I raised my hand and said, when aren't times uncertain? They're always uncertain. If you're trying to start a business, you don't know if it's going to work. That's independent of whatever else is going on. It's always uncertain.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And what's this navigation shown anyway? Well, yeah, that's great. Loved it. This is a really great one.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think so too. And thank you. Thank you guys for listening. And this has been Anything and Everything with Dan Sullivan and me, Jeff Madoff. Next time. 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.