How Timekeeping Shapes Your Wealth

Jeffrey Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called Anything And Everything with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Sometimes we have an inkling of what we're going to talk about, and we do today. I'm not guaranteeing that we're going to stay with it for very long, but it's how the time systems around the world came to be. In other words, we have a 24-hour time system, but go back a couple of hundred years and they didn't have 24 time zones. London, England is the beginning of the time zone, Greenwich Mean Time. And then as you go around the world, there's 24 time zones. And I was just reminded of this, Jeff. I do a two-hour Zoom session. One of them is more North America, and another one we start at a much earlier time. So we get people from Europe, we get people from the Middle East. It doesn't matter when I have them. I have somebody who comes in from Hong Kong, and he's always in the middle of the night. And he said, no, we're staying up for it. But you did a little research, actually, on this. My contention was that it was a Canadian who invented the time system, a man named Fleming, and it had to do with railroad scheduling. When you had a single track and trains went both ways on a single track, how did you have to work out the timing so that they didn't collide with each other? Because many of them did. But what did you discover about the United States, especially in terms of time zones?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, there were over 300 time zones, so was chaos. And I imagine it took a number of crashes before they realized this isn't going to work. We need to do something else and establish what became known as Standard Time, Eastern Standard Time, and Mountain Time, Central Time, and Pacific. Specific, yeah. Because how else could you schedule trains? Originally, I'm guessing this part, but originally it was probably transporting goods. Once they started transporting people, and I don't know what the gap was there; that would be interesting to look into. I just started doing this research. They had to establish a time so that people knew when to go for the train, or actually load the train with goods, or whatever it was. Time zones were totally subjective.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they were local. They were all local.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. Everything was local time. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they were determined by a clock tower.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: In the center of town.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I remember when I was a little kid and one of the questions that was asked every Saturday morning was, hey, kids, what time is it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Howdy doody time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. You know, I didn't realize what a deep question that was at the time. Hey kids, what time is it? And it was, as you said, howdy doody time, which of course was different in the Midwest where we grew up than it was in the East Coast or the West Coast. And so we started developing a sense of time and, you know, clocks went from sundials, you know, to …
 
Dan Sullivan: Mechanical.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, in the middle of town or something. And I don't know when in the evolution things got miniaturized so that you could have a pocket watch and eventually a wristwatch. But people walking around—for years I never wanted to wear a wristwatch because I thought that the idea of time just ticking away attached to my wrist, you know …
 
Dan Sullivan: It was impressive.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I thought that it was weird, so I didn't wear …
 
Dan Sullivan: I think that was your resistance to accountability as part of that.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Time was always really interesting to me when I was a kid because it was that, and then when I got a little bit older, I mean, I think most kids are at some point in their life fascinated by dinosaurs. And when I started getting into astronomy a bit and the concept of light years, and, you know, theoretically, if you were at that distant planet space and would look back at Earth and the speed of light and how it travels, you would actually be seeing dinosaurs, you know? And so all these things with time work like, fascinating to me. And then the language, the discussion about time, there's something else we talk about that also you can almost swap the meanings. And that was time is money. You spend time, you spend money. You save time, you save money. You know, all of these different things where time, which is essentially a human construct, in measuring it and so on. And I don't know when it was initially, the only measurement there was, was it was dark and then light.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, obviously the most time was really a function of what the experience with the sun was every day and what the monthly experience was with the moon, you know, with the moon. And then they started to understand that the visible stars could be seen that they recurred in a regular pattern, and then they determined that that was an annual pattern. In astrology, you have what house were you born in. Like, I was born in May, so I'm a Taurus. Every civilization on planet had a way of determining the years by what stars were where, you know, and they kept track of them enormously—great records that these people had, you know. Well, they didn't have much else to do, so I guess they could spend time doing it. But I think that you've mentioned time as money, that I think that money got created because they were keeping track of time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, if you go back to the world's oldest profession …
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. Even whoever came in second.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, whatever that cost you. You were buying an increment of time along with the favors.
 
Dan Sullivan: Any kind of occupation, labor was based on the same principle, you know. It's interesting that there's also a political aspect to this, that there's been attempts when there was a revolution, the French Revolution is a good example, where the French threw out the normal measurements, they threw out, actually, what stuck is they created the metric system, but they did everything by 100. Okay, so the day had 10 hours in it. It's called decimization. It's based on 10. So there were 10 hours in the day, and there were 10 minutes in every hour. So there were 100 minutes in the day. Then they had even finer. And the French did that because they felt oppressed by the monarchical system, you know, I mean, different countries that the British and the Americans still have the imperial system, yards, feet, inches, miles, pounds, you know, and we still do. And I find it a little bit oppressive.
 
I've been living in Canada for 55 years, and I still haven't made the switch over to the metric system for temperature, metric system. I have to do a quick translation. I'm close. I know that eight degrees is pretty close to 50. It's very interesting. We were in Italy. Babs and I went on a hiking trip of the Amalfi Coast, very beautiful area of Italy. Positano, Amalfi, Ravello are there. The island of Capri is in that area. And we were taking a hike that brought us through a forested valley, and we came to the ruins of a factory. It was just the foundation was there. And I walked around it, and there was a cornerstone, and it said FE15. That was the date, and it was the 15th year of the fascist era. So the fascists in Italy tried to create a new time system. Yeah, the French Revolution, they changed everything. They got rid of all religious references and everything else, and they tried to change it. But what it points is, regardless of what system you have, it's important for getting things done.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and when you're referencing religion, I remember when I was a kid and hearing the story of Methuselah, who supposedly lived 900 years. And with some of the conversations we've had, it's an interesting form of optimism to be 450 and think you're middle-aged.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the thing is, it was just telling you that they were using a different counting system. They just had a different counting system, you know, maybe equivalent to our months. In 10 years, you've lived 120 months. So I suspect it's something like that. I don't think that they were insane. And first of all, I don't think anybody back then lived any longer than people live today, probably a lot less. Probably less. So it's just somebody wanting to get across the point that these things were really different, but probably they weren't really different, they just used a different counting system.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and for whatever reason, that's the only reference to time I can think of that was explicitly about time and somebody's age. I don't remember anybody saying how old Noah was or any of that stuff. So it was interesting. But where does the compulsion for measurement come from?
 
Dan Sullivan: Predictability.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Go into that a little deeper, if you will.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you can predict the future. You say, we'll get together in a few days. And what does few mean? Is it three days? Is it five days? And everything else. So my sense is that when people developed a consciousness that there is time and we're in it, they wanted to have measurements so if two people agreed to do something in the future, maybe it was a loan and they were going to repay the loan at a certain point, my sense is that you can't create any economy or any kind of money system unless you have time attached to it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think another factor is the stage after hunter-gatherer when people were …
 
Dan Sullivan: Agriculture.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly. And realizing, and this is to your point about predictability, that whatever plants, crops that they were growing, starting to understand that it took X amount of time for that to happen, and when they could predict that they would have a yield, then they could go to market.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And also, how much of a surplus did they have to make it through the part of the season when they didn't have food?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And also, it actually gave birth to local security, because they had to protect the silos of goods because people would steal them. And, you know, that's one of the ways that that kind of local policing started. It's fascinating to me the antecedents to things that we now take for granted, but how did these things come about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, as far as we can tell, the first actual form of money that was separate from barter—for example, the Lydians who lived a long time ago, they lived a long time ago, Middle East, you know, but very agricultural. I mean, all this counting stuff really started where you had agriculture, where you had seasons and you had surpluses and you started getting bigger populations. But the first grain that was used as the basis of value was barley, probably because you can make beer out of it. And a bushel of barley at one point was a shekel. And that was the first named coin. And then a day's labor was worth a shekel. So they could say that means that a bushel of barley is equal to a day's labor. So they created a comparison system. And then they had all sorts of things that were equal to a shekel and then to a half shekel or to two shekels and five shekels.
 
But they had to have a constant that they could make sense of how to trade things. If you want this and I have this and they're different, how do we determine who's getting the good deal or the bad deal? And the shekel was the first one. And then somebody got the idea, well, why don't we just create a currency called a shekel? And that was made out of metals. They created a metal piece that was a shekel. And then it was stamped, and they would use some symbolism representing a god or a ruler or something. And then that was really great because you could take the, you didn't need the bushel of barley, you didn't need the day's labor, you just had the coin that you could actually, you know, you could carry value with you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it's interesting because you can divide currency the same way you divide time with minutes and seconds and, you know, all of that. And there are parallels between the two.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And that's why all the talk about today, cryptocurrency is a currency. And I said, well, no, it's not a currency. It's not a currency. And they say, yes, it is. My Bitcoin right now is $5,000. And I said, the only interesting thing you said there was dollars. That's the only thing you said. What's it being measured in? It's being measured in dollars. Well, in the future it won't be because, and I said, well, it won't happen Monday. Call me then. But the big thing is that the more that people agree to a common sense of value, a token of value, the more prosperous they are.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, so I'm doing a quick check and it's interesting because I think when you own time, meaning that you have the means to reach into your pocket and take out a pocket watch, you have a distinct advantage over somebody that doesn't have one. And that clocks were miniaturized into pocket watches in the early 1500s and by Peter Heinlein in Nuremberg, Germany, using mainspring technology. It was 300 years later, in the 1800s, that pocket watches, that wristwatches came. So that was quite a long time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Pretty long time, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, and pocket watches, I didn't know this, were originally known as Nuremberg eggs. They were worn as pendants around the neck initially, because they weren't that small initially. And King Charles was the first leader to carry a popularized, the pocket watch, and so he had a pocket where he could keep the watch as opposed to it being around his neck. That's the name pocket watch. Of which country, King Charles?
 
Dan Sullivan: King Charles, which I'm assuming is England, right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it could be. I think there were other countries that had King Charles, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, he would be in the 1600s. It would be 1660s, 1600s.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, well this says 17th century.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, 1600s.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, great. And what was also interesting, I never even thought about this, is aside from more people had watches, when there was one clock in the town square or sundial in the times square, you kind of had to agree that that was the correct time. The mainsprings in the watches weren't very accurate. And they would go out of whack probably within a few hours. You couldn't really synchronize your watches too well, which I also think is quite fascinating. And wristwatches were initially seen as being feminine because it was like, where women wore jewelry.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was very interesting. I don't know if you remember, it was probably in the 1950s or ‘60s, that Bulova, a very famous watchmaker, created a particular type of watch which was called the Accutron.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, the Bulova, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the Accutron had a battery in it, and it was geared that the moment that the battery in any way lost power—no, it was a tuning fork. The battery actually did a tuning fork. And if the battery decreased in power, the tuning fork would stop. And they did it for the space program. The first ones to wear Accutrons were the astronauts. And it was to make sure that their timing was precise, you know, with the Apollo station, yeah. But I had one. Someone gave it to me as a gift in the 1960s. And you could put it to your ear and you could hear the tuning fork. It was like a [humming sound] like that, very, very low. And that was just the vibration. And the moment the battery lost any power, the tuning fork would stop and the watch would stop.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Do those still exist?
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't know. Bulova still does. I think Bulova. It's on the way to LaGuardia when you take the big Bulova building is right ten minutes before you get to LaGuardia.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I wonder if that's, is that …
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, if you're coming, well, it doesn't matter if you're coming from probably the Midtown Bridge and then you go on to the Long Island Expressway. And as soon as you get on Long Island Expressway and you go around the curb, big Bulova building is standing there. I'm telling a New Yorker, we're at the Bulova.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I wonder, was Bulova a family name?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I wonder. I bet you would look that up and we'd know in a matter of seconds.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, we could. I love the name Accutron.
 
Dan Sullivan: Accutron, yeah, very well named.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, it makes me think of early mainframe computers, the Univac, same kind of a name. You know, I don't know if Accutron came from accurate electronics.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think probably. It's an electronic watch and it's more accurate than wind-up.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, so the name kind of conveys that what was at the time modern thinking. That's interesting. I don't know how much time I waste chasing down stuff like this, going down the rabbit hole, but I do find it really interesting. Bulova watches originated in 1875 when 23-year-old Bohemian immigrant Joseph Bulova—because I've never heard that name before—opened a small jewelry shop on Maiden Lane in New York City. The company, originally named J. Bulova Company, began producing pocket watches and clocks by 1911 and established a specialized production plant in Biel, Switzerland in 1912. That's fascinating. And for some reason, New England is where like Waltham was, which is a big client. I'm not reading that now. I happen to know this. Waltham was a big company and Elgin. There were a number of mid-range, which I think Bulova was too. They weren't a luxury brand. But it is really interesting. Well, I wondered …
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think there was one called Wittenour. Longene Wittenour. Longene Wittenour. On Sundays, they were one of the first hour-long programs. They put on plays, and the Longene Wittenour hour, they had … but I remember they were classy. I mean, what they conveyed was a sense of classiness and upscale. But the thing about time is, you know, that and then value is related to time. Yeah, it was very interesting, where Edison had his first breakthrough where he got paid. I don't know if it's exactly accurate, but it was shown in the movie where Spencer Tracy portrayed the adult Edison. And what he did is that he created the technology that, you know, the ticker tape, when it first was invented, it was Morse code. It was Morse code. And they had readers in the stock exchange who would translate the Morse code. They would write it out, and then they would pass on the information.
 
But he had a technology that would translate the Morse code inside the machine, so it came out English. And the first person to buy it was the gold exchange. People in the gold exchange in New York City bought it because it gave you about a three to four second time advantage that you would get the information before somebody else would get the information. There's a famous scene in the movie with Spencer Tracy where the, I think he sold it for, I don't know, and that was a big pot of money, you know, this is, you know, 1800s, you know, when he was still young. And the person negotiating with him said, you know, Edison, I think he sold it for 10,000 dollars in those days, which was a lot of money. And when he got finished, the guy says, Edison, you're a fool. I would have given you 20. And Edison said, no, you're the fool. I would have taken five. But he needed the money. But just think of the stock exchange, how much the stock exchange time is money.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, in the high-velocity trading, where now it's not a four-second advantage, it can be literally a thousandth of a second.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, micro. Yeah. Nick Sonnenberg, you know Nick Sonnenberg?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, I do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, Nick was a microtrader in Tokyo before he came back to the States. And that was fractions of a second. The money was made on fractions of a second. And the other thing, remember the Lehman Trilogy at the end, how they were starting to get out of whack, the whole Lehman family, and it just shows the numbers on screen and everything's going on, how much time and money go together.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it's fascinating. That was also …
 
Dan Sullivan: That was a terrific point.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, my God, yeah. Phenomenal. I mean, that's one of the best plays I've ever seen.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I saw it in London. I saw it. It was right around the corner from where our hotel was. Yeah, it was just phenomenal. You were on the edge of your seat, literally, because there's just three actors and a marvelous set.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, it was. You know, it's interesting, because probably the first, and I don't know this for sure, but it seems like it would be affordable, but one of the first methods of keeping shorter intervals of time would be the sand through the hourglass. And interestingly, how that icon of that has, you know, continued to be something for the passing of time on your computer, you know, that you get the hourglass icon that something's processing. And I'm wondering, so how did they know that that was a minute's worth of sand? And what were they timing it against? You know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I've read a lot of novels over the past year about the British Navy. So this would be late 1700s, early 1800s. And they had one person who every day, and it was hard when the sun wasn't out, but they determined that this is high noon, you know, the high noon. And that moment they had a water sand clock and they would switch it over, and then they had created this. Every hour when it got down, it would be switched over, and that gave them a sense of the passing hours using the same measurement.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting. And one of the things that I find fascinating here is that early on, I sort of read down further, but that Leonardo da Vinci produced the earliest known drawings of a pendulum. And the pendulum, you know, discovering that frequency was only dependent on length, not weight. And the pendulum clock, it was designed by Christian Huygens, a Dutch polymath. And they were more accurate than other ways of telling time. And Galileo, the investigations, he's the one that investigated the swing of the pendulum and about the frequency and the length is what determined the time of the swing, not the weight. That's two minds there for you, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, what's really interesting is that in one of the greatest money centers in Italy was in Florence. Da Vinci lived in Florence and Galileo lived in Florence. Michelangelo lived in Florence. And this book, this David McWilliams says, he said, wherever money is flowing, all sorts of intellectual activity happens. He said that I can trace it throughout the world, that there's all sorts of experimentation, people invent new things, the arts flourish, and everything else. He says when, and the Florentines—double entry bookkeeping was created there. And it was the first time in Europe where they used the Arabic numbering system, which had zero in it; even up until the 1200s, they were still using Roman numerals. And Roman numerals are just a very, very inefficient way of counting.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it was very, very bad.
 
Dan Sullivan: But Italy, being right in the Mediterranean and having lots of trade, they noticed that the Arabic traders who came from North Africa or they came from the East could do numbers in their head. And it was kind of like a trade secret. They wouldn't allow, but somebody finally, for a bribe, actually told what the numbering system was like, and they had nine numbers plus zero. And so they could multiply 10, 100, 1,000 very, very easily in their head. And that happened, and then the Florentines just took to this, and the government was run with the Arabic system and everything. But you begin to realize that that was a time innovation, the numbering system that we have today. Well, so I wonder about, this takes us back to our entrepreneurial roots. It's always entrepreneurs who do this, by the way.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, how does one determine how, when there's not general knowledge of a marketplace, how do you determine the value of your time? I'm going to the oracle here because I don't know the answer.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you have a way of measuring it. It's a really interesting question because I notice that the entrepreneurs that we have in Strategic Coach have a really good grasp of time. You can see them. They can do things in their head and everything like that, you know, because we have Four Freedoms that if you want to get better as an entrepreneur, the first freedom that you have to have is freedom of time. You get time back. So for example, I haven't watched television since 2018. I haven't watched television at all. And I estimated, I kept track over about a quarter, how much time every week did I spend watching television. And it worked out to about 15 hours a week. So that meant that in a year, if I didn't watch any television, I got back 800 hours So I figure I've gotten back eight times 800 hours, about 6,400 hours. And this has been by far the most productive and enjoyable eight years of my entrepreneurial career that I got all that time back. Most of it's gone into reading, actually. I'm reading way, way more than I read prior to 2016.
 
So one of the first things that we do in Strategic Coach, it happens on the first day, we give them a new time system. And the time system is based that you have three kinds of days. And I borrowed this from the entertainment world, the theater world. And what I noticed when I was involved in theater, that actors and directors and that used a different type of time system than corporations would use. And you have performance time. And so there's days when you're performing and it's not, you use the whole day for performing, but you try not to do anything else because you have a performance and you want to put all of your attention on the performance. And then there's rehearsal day, preparation day, and that itself is an activity and you want to free yourself up to really rehearse really well. And then you have off days or free days. You have free days.
 
And I noticed that the entertainment world operates on a totally different, and we call them Free Days, Focus Days, and Buffer Days. And Free Days are, you're just free. You're not doing any work or anything like that. Focus Days are where you're doing the most important and the most profitable activity. And then you have Buffer Days, and Buffer Days are preparation days. And immediately, like in the first 90 days, they'll get back as much as a week of time just by looking at their schedule like that. And they keep improving them. Every quarter, they improve the number of Free Days they have, both the quantity of Free Days and the quality of Free Days. And then the Focus Days are the profit-based days—not revenue, but profit, that you're doing activities that make your business profitable. And then preparation days are for learning, for investigating new things, creating new things, and everything like that. But in the first year, if they double their amount of free time, they double their income.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, the thing is that the time you save isn't like it's there in a safe, you know, that you can withdraw when needed, it's that you're choosing to spend your time some other way. In your case, you may not watch television, but that time you did spend watching television, maybe that's now going into reading books. You know, because it's not like you can warehouse the time and then use it when you want. It's just, how do you choose to use the time you have and how much time can you devote to doing those things that you want to do? You know, and I get, and I would think it's the goal is for me always, to eliminate as much as I don't want to do. Try to eliminate all those things I don't want to do, so I have more time to do what I do want to do.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, going through the play structure over the, since 2019, think about how time got used going from the reading, to the workshop, to the Philadelphia opening, to the Chicago, to London. And everything has to be calculated in time, when you can put actors together to rehearse, you know. How much time do you have before the opening performance?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And, you know, those having the availability of time that we can book them. They may want to do it and we may want to hire them or cast them, but they don't have the available time because they're committed to something else.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, so it plays in all those different areas, but let's go back for a moment to, how do you value your time and why is this person's time more valuable than that person's time? How does that get set up? I mean, it's easy to think about it when there's a marketplace for those things and you can sort of get an idea of market value. But it's also just made me think of this, during COVID, people who were willing to use their time either as first responders, stocking shelves in grocery stores and delivering things, and all these things where what was considered more menial labor-intensive things became much more valuable because they were willing to spend their time, if compensated well enough, to do those things.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Let's say we get into the 2030s and we look back, we'll see that the entire direct home delivery industry came into existence because of COVID.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, there was that going on before.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh no, it was there, but it wasn't, it was nice. It wasn't necessary.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting because the value of someone's labor shifted tremendously upward. I mean, we're still seeing that. The interesting, I have a friend who's very, knowledgeable about restaurants and the business of restaurant touring and all of that. And it's interesting how narrow the margins are. Even at the most expensive restaurants, what it actually costs to put that plate of high-priced food in front of you. You would think it was a lot more profitable than it actually is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Food is three percent. Yeah, it's crazy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But I also think that we now have come to view that level of chef as a very creative individual. And there is just an experience now related to going out to eat that you're willing to pay more for those two hours. And while they're thinking about how quickly they've got to turn the tables and how many times do they have to turn the tables through a given night to make the money and all time-based. And it's a kind of a shifting value of what that time is worth. How did people determine what their time was worth?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I was doing some comparisons last year. So we're in our thirty-seventh year now of Strategic Coach. But I measured it when I wasn't the only coach. So we started in ‘89. We had our first other coach who was coaching workshops in January of ‘95. Actually, he just died about three weeks ago. But in 1994, I was the only coach, and I coached 144 workshop days that year. And I was doing it in one, two, three, four, five cities. And I said, this is the limit. I can't do any more than that. So we started having coaches, and now we have 16 other coaches besides myself. And last year we did 600 workshop days, and I did 12 out of the 600 full workshop days. Our revenue was 25 times what it was in 1994. So that's a really good comparison of how time and money go together.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so also time is a perception. Piaget did studies of infants and children and their sense of time and what that was. And when a baby is weeks or months old, and if they are crying for some reason, whether they're hungry or wet or whatever, that crying is an eternity. There isn't a sense of time specific about that. When you get older, we have a different sense of time. We become conscious of time. And I remember thinking like I would be doing things in school, like there was the old clocks and there would be that definite click to the next minute. And I would try to hold my breath, you know, or do different things to just make the time pass. And I remember, you know, when you're in kindergarten, the time between kindergarten and first grade, and each grade, the summer break that you had in school seemed like this large expanse of time. And now, two and a half months feels like nothing. And I started thinking about, why is it that my perception of time has changed so dramatically? And I started thinking about this. I actually wrote a paper when I was 15 about this. And I actually believe that what I wrote then was true. And that is that as you get older, each year that passes is a lesser sliver of the whole.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's correct.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So when you're five, you know, a year is 20 percent of the time you've experienced. When you're 10, it's 10 percent. When you're 50, it's one-fiftieth. Now it's one-seventy-seventh for me. Each year does, in fact, seem to go faster, but I think it was like Einstein's studies and sitting in a train car and seeing the trees passing, that each passage of time is a lesser part of the whole, so it seems, the perception is, that it's faster. That made perfect sense to me.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's also subjective. That, to a certain extent, is explainable in quantitative terms, because you have a sense of the whole. And, you know, a unit that represented one-tenth at one time represents one-seventieth, you know, where you are right now. So that's quantitative. But from a qualitative standpoint, people are asking him, what's relativity? And he says, well, I'll give you an example. He said, it's the last 10 minutes that you're going to be with someone you love for two years. How long does that 10 minutes last? He says, on the other hand, you've gotten yourself into a situation where your hand is on a hot oven for 10 minutes. How long does that 10 minutes last? Seems like forever. And he says, compare the one to the other. That's relativity. Quantitatively, they're the same, but the experience is totally different.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, well, it's the old saying, a watched pot never boils. It's that kind of thing. But it is, to me, the relationship between—how can I say this? I think part, possibly, of the wisdom that you gain when you get older is realizing more of the temporal nature of life and the experiences that you have and prioritizing how you spend that currency we're calling time in a way that brings you the most satisfaction. I am sure that you are happier not traveling and doing 144 coaching sessions a year. You not only increase your income greatly, you don't have to exhaust yourself. So you've got the different things to weigh in terms of what's worth doing or not. I would imagine that initially, and you came up with a brilliant business solution, but initially it's like people wanted to be coached by you because you were the guy that started all of it. And that built up to a sizable period of time, that 144 coaching sessions a year, until you realize, well actually they will pay for somebody else to do it. And that then made you more valuable, because you could charge more and set up certain prerequisites before they could do that. You know, they had to be part of Coach for what, two years before they did that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the soonest they can get to me is two years. So there's two levels and they can spend, you know, and that's our judgment, whether they're ready, but they spend one year at one level, another year at another level, and the third year. And we've had about four or five who've done that intentionally. That was their goal and they did it. And we agreed that they were, that they were ready. And yeah, I've had some famous people that you've seen at Genius Network who are also coaches of some sort. You know, coaching's a big deal. I mean, there's just a lot happening in the world where coaching has become a medium.
 
But I've known this person for 15 years, and he's, you know, he's well-known, he's a key speaker. And he said, okay, Dan, he said, I think I'm ready to come in to Coach. And I said, okay. And he says, so when's your next new workshop start? And I said, oh, no, you can't do it with me. You have to start at learning the basics for a year, and then you jump to the intermediary for a year, and then that would be the best. And he says, oh, no, no, he says, this is me. You're not talking to just an ordinary prospect. I said, well, I'm treating you just like an ordinary prospect because you don't know anything. He said, oh, no, I know all the stuff you're doing. I says, well, why would you come into my Program if you know all the stuff that I do? And it's very, very interesting because anytime we've broken that rule and allowed someone to jump ahead, it doesn't work, doesn't work.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So there's also a lot of psychology in that, you know. My assumption is that you were confident enough about the value of your time that if someone such as a person you were talking about don't come into it, it's not going to change anything. And you'd rather hold that perimeter.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, the other thing is lack of preparation. His lack of knowledge would affect the group.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: He doesn't know what he's going to get in the first year and the second year. It's all new. I mean, it's unique. The U.S. Patent Office tells us that it's unique. But it's really, really interesting. And I can understand it from his standpoint. He wants to jump from here to here. And we've tried that out and it doesn't work. So you have to start at the beginning. But it's really raised the quality of new people coming into the Program.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. And, you know, as you have said, that really comes down to more than anything, the double sale, you know, that you and Babs realize you're sold on that approach. And, you know, that's not an approach you started when the business was new. It took a while to get there. So that gave you the confidence, which increased the capability of your own coaching. And then all of a sudden, it's the person who wants to spend that money to get to you, but just, you know, wait a minute. These are the necessary steps. And so when you're trading the money for the time, we set the rules for how that's done. And it's to your benefit that we do. You know, it's funny, it made me think of when you invested in my play, you said that you and Babs wanted to support the play, which I was very grateful for. And I had set a minimum, but that was early on in the pursuit of this, but I felt that I had good reasons for the minimum. And so when you told me that, and then I was thinking on one hand, you need that money, take that money. I said, no, no, you've set a standard. You keep that standard. You arrived at that for a reason. The reasons are reasons that you can validate. You need to say no. And I remember your smile, your rules, your game were in, you know, because it's always an interesting question in terms of value.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and the other thing is, after I had some bad experience with receivables twice, and I said, from now on, all the money's up front, you know, for a year. And people said, no, you just can't do that in the marketplace. And I said, well, we're just going to find the people who are willing to do it, you know, and almost all of them in some way have been influenced by that to do the same thing in their business, to have money up front. Almost anyone who's in Coach has an area of their business now where all the money is up front. Now, it's helpful to have good cashflow before you have the courage to do that, you know?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: But you want to get to the point where you don't need this check. That's a good place to get to in your business career, where you don't need this check.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. One of the questions I would ask my guests in my class was, in business, how do you define success? And my answer was always the ability to say no without any dangerous, catastrophic financial consequences. I think you're always in a better position when you can walk away from something.
 
Dan Sullivan: You'd appreciate this because of your parents and their stories, but Terry Rosen, very, very famous clothier in Canada, he knew all the other independent clothiers. He has this one friend. There's a very large mall in the city of Edmonton, Alberta. It's called the West Edmonton Mall. It's the biggest mall in Canada. You know, it covers blocks. So he had a store there, and Harry was talking to them one weekend, and he said, “How are things going, Josh?” Maybe his name was Josh. He says, “How are things going, Josh?” He said, “I'm feeling really depressed.” And he says, “Why?” He says, “We just had the best week in history.” “You had the best week in history and you're depressed?” He says, “Yeah, they all came last week. Nobody's coming next week.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Retail is funny because retail, you know, as you know, my parents were in it. Retail is stuff. Why isn't it busy? Well, it's raining today. So nobody wants to go out next day. It's beautiful outside. How come people aren't coming in today? Well, it's too nice. Nobody wants to be indoors.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: There's always the reason, hard to figure, but there is always the reason.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, another Harry Rosen, he says there's only two problems in retail. And he says, I'll tell you what the first problem is. A man comes in the store—so he's all men, he doesn't do women. Immediately you go up and greet him and say, hi sir, how can I do that? And he thinks you're being pushy and he gets angry and he leaves. That's the first problem. The second problem is man comes into the store and you let him take his time and he thinks you don't care and he gets angry and he leaves. Those are the only two problems.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When I was selling shoes at Summit Mall in Akron, Ohio, I approached this man and I said, “Can I help you, sir?” And he goes, “When I'm buying something, I'm helping you. You're not helping me.” I said, “Well, can you help me with something this evening?” And then he said, “Where's the manager? I want to know where the manager is.” And the manager was standing about eight feet away and heard the whole thing. And Bob came over and he said, “I want this young man fired.” Bob looks at him and said, “And why do you want him fired?” He said, “Because I told him when I buy something, I'm helping him. He's not helping me. He's rude.” And Bob said, “Well, you know, sir, actually, I find you rude. I overheard the same thing. And I think you should take your business elsewhere where you don't find it as upsetting." And he looks at him and he said, “What are you saying?” He said, “I don't know how to say it any more clearly. We don't want your business.” And the guy stormed out of the store. I turned to Bob and I was 16 and I thanked him. And it was really interesting because yes, the stories you're telling, the stories I'm telling about retail, there's variations on those every day in business. And what works with this person doesn't necessarily work with that. But I think probably the main thing I learned in doing retail and door-to-door sales is, how do you engage people really fast? And sometimes it doesn't work, like that time, but that guy was, you know, I wasn't gonna be successful with that guy.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, the interesting thing is, and I think it's true about anybody who's good at something, has a feel for something that nobody else has a feel for. In other words, they just have a, they're picking up. There was an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, and it was that since Warren Buffett is gone now, he's gone from Berkshire Hathaway, they've been identifying the next Warren Buffett, and the next Warren Buffett isn't around. So they were saying that people have studied him, and they asked him, do you use insider information? And he says, nope, no insider information. And he said, well, how do you find the firms that you invest in? And he said, well, I go around and talk to all their competitors. And one of the questions I ask their competitors is, is there someone who's a competitor of yours that if you had a chance to buy into his store, you would do it quietly for 10 years, and you wouldn't move the investment? And he said, and I just see who's the person that everybody would buy into their store, and I invest in that store. And he said, I do just the opposite. The ones who say, I hate that guy. It's a dirty business. Yes, I don't invest in those people. He says, all I have to do is walk around in a marketplace. Who are the competitors of this person and what do they think of them? And if they all would like a part of their business, I would like a part of their business. But that's wisdom.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's not knowledge. That's not information. That's just wisdom, you know, human nature.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. I had coffee yesterday with a former student who reached out to me and, you know, how much she liked the class. She graduated a few years ago and she's got a business and would I have a cup of coffee with her? And I did. And it was really interesting. She makes these really beautiful handbags. in New York. They're manufactured here. Very high-quality manufacturing, small runs. I mean, they sell from $1,900 to $2,900 for the handbag, so expensive. And they look it. I mean, they look expensive. You know when you're looking at it that this is not gonna be a $75 or a $200 bag. And she said, my problem is that when trying to get a seat at the table, there's all these huge manufacturers that are making leather goods like this. There's Prada, there's Coach, there's all these companies that make these kinds of expensive bags. And I find it really difficult. How do you start doing business? Because they're gonna do all the business.
 
And I said, “Well, I look at it differently.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “They only have business to lose. You only have business to gain. So you should be targeting their market, because they're in the price range that you're at and making yourself known there and not worry about they're so well established and you're just starting, because they can only lose business. You can only gain it.” “Wow, I never thought of it that way.” And again, I think that is wisdom. You know, that is, you know, a real, I've never been asked that question before. But that's how I look at it. You know, that's how it is.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which of you, the big manufacturers, or you can have a really great relationship with individual customers? They're on the clock. They're on the clock.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that's right. And it's also interesting, you know, my sister, they're, she had a very good business. She just closed it this past week after 47 years. And, you know, she was a real pioneer in retail and she did well. And there are a few designers that she brought into the American market who have done very, very well. And at a certain point, when they started to sell to much bigger stores and all of that, who shopped my sister's store to find her resources. That happens all the time in retail. You go and see who were they selling. And that they then wanted, and she gave them substantial business, but they wanted a larger commitment from her because they're a large company. And this is years in now. And she said, “I introduced you to this market. I introduced you to your first clients. I was your first client in the United States. And now you're saying you've gotten so successful that you need a bigger commitment to me or you won't sell to me?” And they said, “Well, we have larger minimums now and all that.” And she said, “Well, obviously you don't want my business, and I don't want yours anymore. I'm not buying from you anymore.”
 
And what made me think of that is what you're saying about what kind of time do you have in the relationship. And my relationship with Ralph Lauren, I'll never forget, because I'm so proud of it, when he said to me, “Jeff, I can afford to hire anybody I want. I want you to do this.” And we had a relationship and that's meaningful. In those words, only the dollars and cents, you know, you have long-term relationships with a number of your Coach people. And I think that, that there's a wisdom in knowing the value of relationships. So, I don't know where the hell we were today in terms of anything and everything. We spent time, not money, but we spent time going through some of those areas.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I think the two are very related. We have calculators in our brain that put the two together. How much is this time? You know, like a movie that you might have sat through 10 years ago, you watch it for a half hour and you say, I'm out of here. It means that your calculation over a 10-year period means that your time is worth more to you now than it was 10 years ago.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, that's true. A friend of mine who's a writer, Bill Persky, he became the head writer of the Dick Van Dyke Show, did That Girl with Marlo Thomas and Caden Alley, and he said, “I started thinking to myself, because I was finding work not satisfactory, what else could I be doing?” And he said, “I started asking myself before I would take on any commitment, what else can I be doing? Because if I'm saying yes to this, I don't even know what I'm saying no to, because I'm cutting off opportunities for eight months at a time.” And I thought that came from some real wisdom too. And I love that, asking the question, what else could I be doing with my time?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think that, you know, the decision about are you going to keep doing what you're doing is a question. But I think the other question is, am I simply working at this point in my life for greater quantity, or am I working at this point in my life for greater quality, you know? And I think the one is unhappy and I think the other is happy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I agree. I agree.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm truly pleased with what we've pulled off here.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, well I was thinking, what could I be doing instead? And I thought, well, for this time, right now, this is what I want to be doing. So thanks to you for that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And whoever stayed with us the whole thing, I really want to thank you for doing it, because you're saying this was worth your time.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Because you're not going to get any money from us. Hopefully you got value from something else.
 
Dan Sullivan: And this is it. You're not getting any more today.
 
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.