The Greater Game: Chapter 3 – Greater Motivation

John Bowen: Well, I wanna welcome everyone to The Greater Game and the third podcast in the series of the 10 Multipliers. And we are at “Greater Motivation: Engineering Your Self-Generating Success Engine.” This is where we are on our pyramid, The Greater Game. We have gone ahead and you have worked with us. Hopefully you've listened to the first two podcasts, “The Foundation For Freedom.” And that's level one. We've got ambition and security, and we are diving in so that you as a successful entrepreneur can expand your business, generate that energy. Dan, I always think of you as extremely motivated. I am too. What are we talking about when we talk about motivation?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think that motivation is what you're heading towards is more exciting than what you're leaving behind. That you've structured a system for yourself, and in Coach, we have a center to everything we do. It's called your Unique Ability, that you have a certain set of activities, and this is from birth, a set of activities that always fascinate you and they always motivate you. And the whole point, taking us back to the whole definition of an entrepreneur, the resource that you as an entrepreneur have bet on, because you guessed and bet, that you could go into the marketplace head-on. You didn't need other people to secure employment. You didn't need other people to guarantee your financial security. And the reason was, you were betting on an entrepreneurial future, but basically the bet was on you, that you had the ability that regardless of the circumstances that you would always be fascinated and motivated by what you were doing and that in fact energizes everyone around you, it energizes everyone who's in your team, it energizes your clients and customers.
 
And what people don't realize is that the number one thing that people really buy is other people's motivation. We're totally inspired by other people's motivation. So that's it. And you can see by the different foundations we're creating here, this is compounding. You're not just adding one level to another. You're using one level that multiplies the next level and multiplies the next level. And I think, really, the fact is that you have the experience of multiplying, and I don't think there's any greater motivation that human beings can have than that they're multiplying.
 
John Bowen: Well, we want everybody to be intentional, and that's where we've created this greater game. And, you know, and I always love, Dan, I'm not sure I'm saying exactly how you say it, but you always want to make your future bigger than your past. And I'll share that with people at, you know, 70. And they go, how can you do that? There's no question in my mind by playing the greater game that this is, you know, it's fairly easy to do. And it's exciting. And I get up every morning, you know, just fully charged to make a big impact. Yeah, I get tired along the day. I'm not going to say that, but we all do. But it's so exciting to have that energy that comes from really motivation. And it makes everything else easier. We're going to talk about some of the multipliers, obviously, that we're getting to. But, you know, the ability to attract collaborative partners, you know, the ability to attract teammates. When you are excited and you have a bigger future that you're building than your past, people want to be around you, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think one of the things that you share and I share is that we have the ability to give purpose to other people's talents. Not everybody has the ability to say what their talents are good for in the world. They need direction. But we're always creating bigger projects where people can just plug themselves in and they're energized by the projects. People do things for their reasons, not ours, but everybody wants to be around and involved in and have some predictability that no matter how much they grow, there's going to be even greater opportunity to grow in the future. I think that this is really what leadership is, is to give people a sense of, you know, as long as you're aligning with us and as long as you're changing your mindsets, you're increasing your mindsets, that you're always going to have a bigger future as long as you're aligned with our purposes.
 
John Bowen: No, very much so. And I want to go to the research real quick. So, you know, we're in episode three, the third multiplier, greater motivation. And what I love about this, this is the self-generating. You control this. This is a success engine that you can do. And unfortunately, when we look at the research, about 94.6, this is why people want to retire, is a depletion cycle, or they want to sell the business. They've got an external validation. It's diminishing returns. It's more effort. If I want to grow, doubling my business, well, that means I got to work twice as hard. No, that's all kinds of exhaustion. Success requires sacrifice. Each win requires a bigger hit to feel normal and we want you to get to where you're generating this motivation and it becomes the engine. What we have is a real opportunity with the generation cycle, and this is what the top 5.4, this is why we do this, is, you know, they have an internal purpose and it creates increasing returns.
 
And we're going to tell you a little story about David on how he takes mission and margin. Everybody thinks, you know, entrepreneurs are just all about making more money, but we're all about making a bigger impact. That's how you create value and that's how you generate and you get the emotional paycheck and each win generates a fuel for the next. And this is where I think, Dan, so often people get caught up. You know, they're in the kind of do a business, flip it, make enough money, and then go travel the world or play golf or do whatever it is. And, you know, you can be intentional about your business and build it in a way that you want to be involved for the rest of your life.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm hmm. Yeah, the big thing here is that you're buying into other people's formulas of what your life is supposed to look like. But my whole sense is that when you uniquely understand who you are, okay, and why people love working with you, that's infinitely expandable. So my sense is that our body pays attention to what our mind is doing. People say, yeah, but I'm just not going to have the energy. I could get a disease. I've seen people, they start falling apart at 50, 60, 70 years old. And I said, yeah, but their mind fell apart before their body started falling apart. They didn't have an internal direction of who they were going to be. They were taking their directions from other people, none of them who had a future bigger than their past. And this is why the beautiful thing about the research that you brought to bear on this project is, let's not look at what the average people do. Let's look at what the exceptional people do. Let's be guided as our normal course by the measurements that are being established by the very, very best people who are entrepreneurs. And this is irrespective of entrepreneurial field. It could be any industry. It could be any market or anything else. They're just operating from an internal motivation.
 
John Bowen: Well, and it's really, we can all be intentional. You know, when we take a step back and that's really what The Greater Game is all about, is we want you to be successful on purpose and whatever purpose you're working to. And that's where, you know, again, we start with ambition because we want you to be thinking big. Today, you can pretty much do everything. You can't do everything at once. But over a 25-year period, you can create some amazing things. And we're going to have security now. We've got that from the greater multiplier, too. Now we're really having that ambition, making that future bigger. And I want to tell David's story. Do you want to share that?
 
Dan Sullivan: David Reiling, he owns banks. He has a great story because …
 
John Bowen: I was thinking of when you asked him that one time. Go for it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it's a great story. He started off with one of the big banks, you know, the big national banks, and he was in a very, very dangerous neighborhood. I asked him, I said, when did you make the decision to have your own bank, not be a part of a big system? And he said, well, I was dealing in a high crime area. And when I got to bank robbery number 16 and somebody put a gun to my head, he says, I believe that this was an appropriate time for creating my own game someplace safer. So, you know, this is probably over a 25-year period now, looking back. And he's just a phenomenal banker. And he has a great mission that everybody, and the vast majority of people who really don't have experience with banks, that they should have a great banking experience. They should have all the advantages that banks can bring to personal life, to business life. And he's well-known right around the world. He's been a pioneer in banking online, what's called FinTech, you know, that a lot of this can be done with your phone, you know, and everybody's got a phone.
 
And so he says, well, let's just take the capability they already have and bring all the banking capabilities to their phone and everything could be done like that. But David's been, you know, I've seen him every quarter for 20 years. He just has a wonderful understanding of banking, but he has a wonderful sense of the kinds of benefits that banking can actually bring into people's lives. And he just gets enormous pleasure. And that's his mission. And then the question is, can you do it at a really good margin?
 
John Bowen: That's the thing. I mean, he tells the story of going to Tijuana on a bus to go do volunteer work building houses. And actually, it wasn't voluntary. I think he got a little bit of money for it because he talks about his two paychecks. He got one, all kinds of satisfaction building the house, but at the same time, got a little bit of money. And he said, you know, one of the opportunities is, can I combine mission and margin? And that creates energy. And this is really, it's a multiplication, and that's what everything we do. We want it to be a multiplier. And when you do that, I mean, David, I've got the numbers here. His growth has been over that time period, 178x. So he's flown past a 100x and he's led the charge on the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. And this is what to me is very important.
 
And I found it on our business too. It's easy in some of the businesses, you know, I'm in wealth management in that industry and it's very easy to get skeptical if not cynical. The same with banking. There's some very talented people working at the largest firms and what David found and I've found is, you know, these senior executives want to work with you and they're willing to take a little bit of a pay cut to come in and really make an impact and have a bigger purpose. So this is where that multiplication, Dan, you know, comes about. If you can share your motivation and it's combining mission and it's got to be sustainable. We can't do it as a non-profit. So your ability to attract people and get that emotional paycheck for yourself and for others is huge.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and the thing that I've noticed, there is a sense of gravity as you get older. And I began paying attention when I got to about 60. And that is that, why did people lose their motivation for being an entrepreneur? And I think the big problem is they didn't make the switch that for a period of our entrepreneurial lives, it's about our success. All the measurements are about our success. And when I got to about 60, I said, I have to change gears here. And now it's entirely about what my capabilities do to grow other people's success. And so that emotional paycheck that as I get into my eighties now, it's all about empowering other people to have greater success in their life. That's the basis of our partnership here, why we did this in the first place. We want to enable thousands, hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to have greater success in their life. I mean, our success is just a by-product of making other people more successful.
 
John Bowen: Yeah. And what we find, Dan, and you've seen this over and over again, your businesses and my businesses, the more value we create for others, you know, totally not being selfish at all, what happens is the more successful our businesses are too. And this is where, you know, we really want everybody to start thinking, okay, we need to have a big purpose. What are we doing? What's the impact? How are we going to change? And that's where the energy comes. And in the book, we write about an energy audit. And I want to talk about that for a second, Dan, because I would challenge everybody that's listening to this or watching this podcast is to review the last week and identify the three areas that generated the really solid energy for you. And then do the reverse. What are the three activities that drained energy? And once you start identifying those, guess what we're going to advise you to do? You know, more of the things, you know, we can delegate, we can outsource, we can just stop. So much of what we do is we don't take the time to design our business in a way that we're getting full energy. And that motivation is just regenerating this energy over and over again. And you get an amazing emotional paycheck, just like David did.
 
Dan Sullivan: Your own paycheck, the ones that you measure in dollars, is now a by-product of just how well you're creating value for others. One of the tools that we have in Strategic Coach is called D.O.S., and D.O.S. stands for Dangers. Other people have dangers. They want to eliminate their dangers. They're fearful, and what you want to do is help them get rid of the fear in their life, and that releases energy for them. The other thing is they have opportunities which, for one reason or another, they're not actually capturing the opportunities and you're assisting them in to capture their greatest opportunities. And the other thing is they have strengths which they're not using because of the first two. And then you get them to direct their greatest strengths towards eliminating their dangers and capturing their opportunities. And then to pass it on that they're going to be solving their D.O.S. issues by helping other people solve their D.O.S. issues.
 
John Bowen: And really, sometimes we make business so complicated.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, if it's just about you, it gets very complicated.
 
John Bowen: Yeah. If it's just about you trying to make money, it becomes extremely complicated. But if it's you delivering value systemically and doing it in a way that excites you and excites your team, provides that motivation, is just so powerful. I want to bring everybody on the journey. I want to get on the bus together with our fellow entrepreneurs. And, you know, one of the things you and I have committed to is a 25-year partnership. And the reason is we just see the need of bringing together empirical research and applied experience. You know, what's really working out there and bringing those to you. And this is why we wrote the book, you know, kind of the starting of The Greater Game. We built a dashboard where we're gonna be sharing ongoing research as well as you can do an assessment. So I'm gonna just share that real quick that, you know, that your greater game starts now, you know, make the commitment to yourself to generate that motivation. Go to thegreatergamedashboard.com. We've got the QR code if you're on video.
 
And again, I'm going to take you, and every podcast, I want to finish on this, Dan, because I'd love to see people take the assessment, and I'm going to just go dive right into it. And this is a demo here, but with the idea of, you know, what is your 25-year vision? Where are you relative to everyone else? How are you doing on the Greater Growth Pyramid? We call it the GMI index. How do you compare to everyone else? And then financially, where are you relative to your gain, when you go in you can see how you're changing the moves that are important to you that are going to make the biggest difference right now? Talked about in the greater security, if you're not sure where you are, remember 59.2 percent of your peers aren't sure. Go ahead and sign up for a second opinion. We've got a group of vetted financial advisors to do Virtual Family Office, and they're going to take a look at eight different areas for you so you can see whether you are on track to have the confidence that you should so you can make bold moves.
 
The same with Strategic Coach. I've been with you since 2009 and, you know, I've grown every year and, you know, hanging out with fellow entrepreneurs and on this journey with the thinking tools, amazing. The multiplier range, you know, one of the things we want you to do is move very quickly up the multiplier to not be personality-dependent at all. We want you to have it be a true enterprise, and then one of the things we're going to be updating constantly, because we've got, not counting the people who are coming into the assessment or, but we're serving 500 plus entrepreneurs each month and you can see exactly where you stand right now— what's working, what's not. So Dan, let's wrap up this podcast as we move to one of, I know that one of your favorite, the next podcast is IP, Intellectual Property, which is just so important, but you know, we're on motivation. How would you close it off?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think the big thing here, we have a multiplier a little later in the 10 Multipliers, that's autonomy. But the moment that you engage with the dashboard, you're going to notice something happen. It'll happen the first time that you go through and just put in your numbers and see your comparison. You will become independent of your profession. You will become independent of your marketplace because now you're locking into what the best entrepreneurs in the world are actually doing, the 5.4 percent. I think this is very, very important, is that what slows people down is they become more and more entangled in just what is normal and average in terms of what can be expected of their entrepreneurial career. And just by engaging with this dashboard, you're instantly going to feel yourself freed up from average. You're going to feel yourself jumping to, let's go for the top.
 
John Bowen: Yeah, we always talk about what's possible. No, this is what's actually being done right now by your fellow entrepreneurs. So go to the dashboard, The Greater Game, do that, thegreatergamedashboard.com. Do that now and then join us in the next podcast where we're going to talk about the fourth multiplier, greater property. We'll see you there.