Mike Koenigs [00:00:00]:
All right, Dan, I am so excited for this episode. We actually just did it. So we're making the intro right now, and this is all about how to slow down time. What if you could change the meaning of time? That's what Dan has done. And Dan has developed a powerful psychology, and it's a tool that multiplies appreciation and gratitude that he credits with creating the best month of his life in 82 years. What I can promise you is you're going to get into a different mindset about how you perceive time, the past, the future, what's causing anxiety, but also what keeps you into the present.
Dan Sullivan [00:00:41]:
I've been coaching entrepreneurs for more than 50 years, and I find that basically when they're handling their time really well, they're happy, and when they're not handling their time, they're unhappy. And my sense is that there's actually a system for increasing your appreciation, your gratitude for your own time, the meaning of your time. And it's a very simple system. You do it 50 days in a row and you're, you're a new person in relationship to time.
Mike Koenigs [00:01:08]:
Very good. Well, this is Capability Amplifier. This is Dan Sullivan. I'm Mike Koenigs, and this is how to slow down time. I know you're going to enjoy it.
Dan Sullivan [00:01:22]:
Hi everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here, and this is Capability Amplifier. amplifier. And I feel very fortunate to have Mike Koenigs as my partner on this because he's on a tear. He's way ahead. And I got to be cool and calm about this. But I came up with a new idea and we've talked about this previously, but we're way ahead of the game. So I'm going to tell you about our latest progress.
Dan Sullivan [00:01:59]:
And it's a new book we have, which is called Yesterday Creates Tomorrow. And it's been a huge hit. Everybody I talk to really loves this idea. So I just want to bring everybody up to date on it because the book is now available. So if you're interested in reading the book, we'll give you the link and you can actually download the book. Download the book. Mike, I think this is the big idea. of all the ideas I've come up with, and it has to do with time and how people look at time.
Dan Sullivan [00:02:36]:
And it seemed to me, I got 2 insights about it. One is that when I was a child and I had good parents and I went to good schools and I learned how to read, I learned how to write, I learned how to do math. There were lots of different subjects, but nobody ever taught me how to handle time. Okay. And the way I looked at it was that you had a past and the past kept trying to tug you backwards to relive some experiences that you already had. And then there was the future and some of it was exciting and some of it caused anxiety. And so I thought it through and I says, you know something, this past and future thing is really interesting because I don't know anyone who's ever spent even a second in the past or a second in the future. We all just spend our time in the present.
Dan Sullivan [00:03:39]:
So we just have a whole bunch of todays and why don't we use today to do something different with time? So this is the basic idea here.
Mike Koenigs [00:03:51]:
All right. So you remind me of a story my friend John Assaraf told me the other day, because we were talking about fear of the past and fear of the future. And I was having some anxiety. Some of it had to do with the previous episode we did, which is a huge project, larger than I've ever dealt with, with more unknowns. than I am used to dealing with. It's like when I look at how do I reduce anxiety, stress, fear, it's collapsing the number of unknowns. And I think that's a very human thing to do. Anyway, what Dan— he showed me was an hourglass.
Mike Koenigs [00:04:37]:
And there's an old story that Bob Proctor used to do from stage, which is— He would show you the bottom of the hourglass where the sand had already fell. And it's like, there's nothing you can do about that. And then up here where all the sand is on top, you can think about it and you can what-if all you want and you have no idea. All you have is right in the pinch, the fine grains of sand that are right there right now. And so when I heard you right now, there's that simple visual metaphor. And of course, all the gurus and the Zen monks, they're always talking about the present. And if you remember that old Ram Dass book, Be Here Now, that was huge in the— I guess it probably would've been the '70s. And I remember reading that book for the first time because it was unusually printed and it really got you out of your core and your center, because things are written in circles.
Mike Koenigs [00:05:40]:
But it's really a beautiful journey. And every time I reread it, it means something different. So practicing your yesterday creates tomorrow has been something that is a topic in my own home with my son, with Vivian, on a regular basis. So what's changed since the last time we talked about this? And why do you feel that it's your, your best work? What, what is it consistently? What's different? That's really it.
Dan Sullivan [00:06:15]:
Yeah. Well, there are 3 things. The first one is that I thought this was an idea that I should practice on my own for quite a bit of time before I start talking about it to other people. Okay, so I started on December 2nd, 2025, that when I woke up in the morning on the first day, I said, you know what I'm going to use today for? I'm going to do everything I can today so that tomorrow morning when I wake up, this was a great yesterday. So I did that on December 2nd for the first time, and then On December 3rd, when I woke up, I said, okay, and I said, okay, so what did I do yesterday that made it a great yesterday? Okay, and I got a number of things. And I did this for about 2 or 3 weeks. And then I said, something's missing. Okay, it's getting, first of all, it's getting a little bit boring.
Dan Sullivan [00:07:16]:
It's getting a little bit boring doing this. So I said, you know what I have to do? I'm trying to judge a qualitative experience, but I don't have quantity to do it. So what I said is, I'm going to give myself numbers for the things that I did. Okay. And I started with the actual yesterday. And I said, I'm just going to give myself 3 numbers. I'm going to get a 1, I'm going to get a 5 or a 10. And a 1 is something I do every day, brush my teeth, get up.
Dan Sullivan [00:07:48]:
You know, I get up in the morning and when the alarm goes off, I'm out of bed fast. It doesn't take me much time. I'm asleep and then I'm awake and I put my shoes on. I go around the house and this was wintertime in Toronto. And I said, we've got 3 fireplaces. I'm going to turn the fireplaces on. I'm going to turn on all the lights and then I'm going to come back to bed with Babs. Okay.
Dan Sullivan [00:08:14]:
And so I counted up the actions and I said, that's about, you know, I did about 12, did about 12 ones right there. So I'm going to give myself 12. Okay. And then I started going through the day and there's activities that I'm doing that are part of my, my role at Strategic Coach, but I've done them before. So if I've done it before, I'm going to give myself a 5. for that type of activity. But there's brand new things I'm doing today, and anything that's brand new is going to get a 10. So the first couple of weeks that I did the scoring, and the scoring made a real difference.
Dan Sullivan [00:08:53]:
There was something about the scoring of my activities that had a huge impact. And the reason is I had to actually visualize the activity and make a judgment what the score was. Mm-hmm. So I Going back and taking the experience, and I was back in the experience, and I had a feel for it. Okay. Well, as I talk to you today, this is day 286, and I've done 286 great yesterdays. And I've just had the greatest year. I'm 82 right now.
Dan Sullivan [00:09:26]:
I'm in my 83rd year. And this was just the greatest, you know, 9, 10 months going on 10 months. This is just the greatest 10 months I've ever had. And all of a sudden, the other thing is time is slowing down. I just have this feeling that time's slowing down. Okay? So that's number one. Number 2 is I said, this deserves a book. And as you know, Mike, I write a new book every quarter.
Mike Koenigs [00:09:53]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:09:53]:
And so I have 3 team members, Shannon Waller, Hamish MacDonald, and Alex Varley. And I I told them this idea and they started doing it. Okay. And then Hamish created a scorecard, a paper scorecard that you could keep track of your 1s, your 5s, and your 10s. And that was great. And Alex said, well, if we've got a scorecard, why don't I create an app? And so he's created an app that keeps track of all your days. You can go, it's got a calendar and you say, what did I do 3 months ago? 3 months ago in June, what did I do? And it shows you what you did on this day 3 months ago in June. And there's just this thrill.
Dan Sullivan [00:10:38]:
And the other thing about scoring is that whatever score you got yesterday, you want to get a better score today. So all of a sudden I'm saying, you know, I'm just going to take all the ones and I'm going to give them a single number because I do them every day. And so I start off the day with a fixed number already. I'm on the scoreboard when I get out of bed. And they started talking about all the things that they were doing. You know, Shannon has been in a Shannon reduction mode. So she's gone from heavier than she wanted to be to where she wants to be. Okay.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:21]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:11:22]:
You know, she did this through a routine and through training and not eating as much. And, but she had a lot of clothes now. And she said, her real commitment is that I'll get rid of all the clothes that related to who I used to be and just have the clothes of who I am now. And she had 10 bags. So she put everything in 10 bags and she got a score for that. She put them in the trunk of her car. She got a score for that.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:50]:
Wow.
Dan Sullivan [00:11:50]:
She got to the office and all the clothes were gone in 60 minutes. They were gone. Everybody wanted some of the clothes. And she said, I've never done anything like that in my life before. And I said, the reason is you gave yourself a score. You never gave yourself a score before. Okay? And so that's number 2 that we did. And we're writing the book.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:16]:
So that's the project that will be complete tomorrow because we get the books tomorrow for my free zone groups. And the other thing is we had a big company meeting right after Labor Day. We have a real company meeting and I took the entire team through it. And now the team's coming up to me and said, this is amazing. This is an absolutely amazing experience. I'm getting more done. I feel, I don't feel I'm not being dragged back. backwards into the past.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:46]:
I'm not being dragged forward into the future. I'm just concentrating on today. So that's my progress report. And you know the Kolbe profile?
Mike Koenigs [00:13:01]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:13:02]:
So Kathy Kolbe, great genius of how to put yourself in a position where you're using your best abilities to get your best results. But there are 4 profiles. One is a fact-finder who has facts that they have to get before they'll take action. Then you have a follow-through who have to create a system before they take action. Then there's quick starts who just take quick starts.
Mike Koenigs [00:13:29]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:13:30]:
Who just take action before they find out the facts or create the method. Then you have implementers who use their hands to actually get things done. Over the last week, all the follow-throughs are coming through and saying, you know, I create a list every day, but then I cross it off when it's finished. And she says, now what I'm doing, I'm not crossing it off. I'm giving myself a score and it makes all the difference in the world. And so I'm going to give you the book today in PDF form, Mike, so that you can take a look at it and you can use it over the next 2 weeks because you got a big project on your hands. And you might, it'll be really interesting to see you use it. But anyway, I just think this is the neatest thing that I've ever created.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:23]:
I'm, so what I'm—
Dan Sullivan [00:14:25]:
And I've been excited. You've known I've been excited about this for almost a year now. So the excitement is lasting.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:34]:
Yes. Well, it's, I think what is interesting about this is, first of all, you told me within— we did our first episode about this very, very soon after you started it. And I can't remember exactly how many days into it, but it was days.
Dan Sullivan [00:14:58]:
It would've been within 2 weeks. I think it was within 2 weeks. I think it was before Christmas last year.
Mike Koenigs [00:15:04]:
Yes. And what I find interesting is I've never been— this is not entirely true, but I've found that I'm not always motivated by keeping score. I didn't train my brain that way growing up. I played sports growing up and we played baseball and everything. We had score. And I'm curious about the psychology of the different people in the organization and how score matters to them. So that's just one idea. And also how putting a number on the experience changes the behavior, where in the past, many of your tools have been writing Like X number of wins.
Mike Koenigs [00:15:57]:
It's like what worked and what didn't work. You're pretty finite. So this psychology of scorekeeping, and that to me is a huge distinction about what makes this work and what makes it— and how you even started out with arbitrary numbers. Now you've gotten a lot more solid about having some more specificity to it.
Dan Sullivan [00:16:21]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:16:22]:
So can you talk about the specificity, the scorekeeping, the motivation side, and how that relates to different psychology?
Dan Sullivan [00:16:31]:
Yeah. Well, for example, today we're doing 2 podcasts with Mike and Dan are doing capability. So right off the bat, a podcast gets a 10. It's brand new, but I just get back in touch with Mike, and that's worth a 20. So the total score is 40 for this session right now. There's a 40 right off the bat. And people say, well, how do you do that? And I say, I gave it a 30 and it wasn't enough. So I upped the score to a 40.
Dan Sullivan [00:17:07]:
So what it is, you say it's arbitrary. It's always arbitrary. Okay. But it's a feeling of, This is the right number for the experience I just had. The other thing that's really interesting, you can do it on negative experiences as much as positive experiences. So for example, in January, Babs and I had a week in Chicago. We were flying back to Toronto and Toronto had a blizzard and it dropped about 10 inches of snow in about 5 hours. Screwed up the airline schedules amazingly.
Dan Sullivan [00:17:45]:
We were supposed to leave at 2 o'clock to go back to Toronto, 2 in the afternoon, and it was delayed an hour. Toronto's an hour earlier, so it was 3 o'clock. Okay, so we— it's about an hour and a half from gate to gate, and by the time you, you know, they've been on the runway for a while, they take off, they fly, they're on the runway for a while. And so when it was delayed for the 4th time, so we were supposed to take over, we were supposed to take off 5 hours, actually 5 hours at 2 o'clock. We took off at 7 o'clock, a completely different plane, different flight. And, but right at the beginning of this experience, which I had been through before in previous years, I said, okay, I'm just going to be cool and calm about this entire experience. I'm totally out of control. I have no control over this situation whatsoever.
Dan Sullivan [00:18:41]:
Long story short, by waiting on runways and flying and everything else, we get to Toronto at 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock Toronto time. We were an hour on the runway at O'Hare taking off to go to Toronto. We landed and we were an hour and a half on the runway before we got to our gate.
Mike Koenigs [00:19:01]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:19:01]:
So we got to the gate and I said, I bet there's, I bet the jetway doesn't work. Jetway didn't work. They had to bring in a team to get the jetway. That was 45 minutes waiting in the plane. And I said, I bet the bags don't come. And we went down, we waited for an hour. We got the bags 3 days later. And I was cool.
Dan Sullivan [00:19:25]:
I was calm and everything. And I gave myself a 50 for the experience of just putting up with that experience. So Babs, we were about halfway through this experience, she says, you're being really relaxed about this. She says, I've been through experiences like this with you, and the toughest part of the experience is being with you when it happens. So you're putting up with a jerk for a half hour. You get points for putting up with the jerk and just Being cool and calm about it. So it doesn't matter whether it's a negative experience or a positive experience, you get a score for it. So yesterday I got a 340.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:08]:
I did amazing work yesterday. Okay. And—
Mike Koenigs [00:20:13]:
And that was creating, putting, or was it putting up with someone else's BS that gave you the big score? It wasn't both.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:20]:
I had a clinic here in Chicago I had to go to and the order had come through, but they didn't give me an appointment. So that was 2 hours. And then finally I got it and it was, I was waiting. So it was about 4 hours of my life to do it. And I said, hey, I said, this is great. I'm running up the score. I'm running up the score here. Doesn't matter what happens to me.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:44]:
I get scores. Okay. And now people say, well, how can you give it a score? And I said, you give it a score. And they say, well, what does that mean? It says, because you've just evaluated, you've just put a— you know, the word appreciated is an interesting word in English. Appreciate means to increase on the one hand, but it also means to create the value of something. Okay? So real estate, the price of real estate appreciates. That means that It's worth more. It's worth more.
Dan Sullivan [00:21:23]:
Stock market uses the word appreciate, but we also use appreciate to convey the sense of gratitude. Gratitude. So it's got 2 meanings. And so I've been living in a total appreciation experience more and more as I go through the scoring. And then I have a running total of all my scores divided by the days. And on average, On the average right now, I get 133 scores for the day. So I mentioned before, Alex Varley, who's our team member, he created an app for it. The app does all this for you.
Dan Sullivan [00:21:58]:
All you have to do is list the activity, give yourself the score. And so the 1, 5, and 10 scoring system lasted for about 6 weeks. It lasted 6 weeks. And I said, no, I gotta open this up. I can give myself any score I want. But it's like training wheels for the bike, you know, to learn how to ride a bike. It's helpful if you have training wheels. But when you get your Harley, you don't need the training wheels anymore.
Dan Sullivan [00:22:32]:
So it's all in your sense of what the value of the day was. And every morning you look back and you say, boy, that was a great day. If you have 50 great yesterdays in a row, today takes care of itself. So you stop trying to control the future. Your experience yesterday actually controls the future.
Mike Koenigs [00:22:57]:
Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. So I'm going to summarize some of the big concepts. So one of them is after doing something for 286 days, times feel slower. And part of that's because you're paying more attention to it and you're in a state of appreciation. I would also add gratitude. That is the— you're just present for each moment. And then another big important part of this, the motivator that keeps you going is you start keeping score Effectively, as soon as you wake up.
Mike Koenigs [00:23:39]:
So there's, you get into this mode and this practice and this habit of paying attention to little things that incrementally matter. And by listing them, that's making you more conscious and sensitive. And you've said before that your ADHD disappeared as soon as this happened. So it puts you in a state of focus.
Dan Sullivan [00:24:00]:
It took about 6 months. I'm clinically diagnosed. I went to the Amen Clinic in Newport Beach, you know, You know, I've got a 10-ring circus going on in my brain.
Mike Koenigs [00:24:12]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:24:12]:
And all of a sudden I'm not doing that anymore. I'm just saying, okay, what's the next experience? Okay, and what kind of score is this experience? So I've really simplified time in a way. But the other thing is that what I realized is that there's a lot of people in the world who are trying to get my attention. There's a lot of things in the world that's trying to get my attention. And ADD is that you emotionally connect with something in the future that has not existed, that doesn't exist yet. It's in a future today, maybe, maybe not. But the moment I get emotionally engaged with it, and I know you do this too, you get emotionally engaged with it, it wants you to pay attention to this thing that hasn't existed, doesn't exist yet.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:03]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:04]:
And if it was one thing, it would be okay, but it's 20 things. So I have 20 things trying to get my attention that don't exist. And now I've forgotten about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I've got a method for handling tomorrow regardless of what it is. And when I get to the day in the future, I know how to handle whatever that day is. So there's a sense of agency that this time system has gotten to me. So, you know, it's really interesting.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:37]:
And I'm wondering if all the overwhelm in the world is coming from news reports, it's coming from movies, it's coming from all sorts of situations, but they don't actually exist. Hmm.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:54]:
Man, you're starting to sound like A Zen guru here.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:59]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:00]:
And so I have another observation for you.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:03]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:04]:
Oh, go ahead. What were you going to say? Finish that thought.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:07]:
No, I was saying that Eastern thought, because that sort of Zen is from how did they handle time? And then Americans have their own time system, which is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I haven't got enough. I want more life, I want more liberty, and I want more, you know—
Mike Koenigs [00:26:28]:
Property.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:29]:
Happiness. Yeah, happiness. And so I'm just wondering if the whole AI thing is probably what printing did to the human mind back in the 1500s, you know, that all of a sudden a person with a book was having a conversation that people from the outside couldn't control what kind of conversation you're having with the words that are on the page. I think this is the printing experience multiplied by 1,000 with AI.
Mike Koenigs [00:27:01]:
Yeah, many orders of magnitude. I'll give you an observation after I finish my observation of you, which has to do with limiting that, an exercise that I've done over the past 60 days. So the next observation I have is How your mechanism, like, so if the normal mindset would be, well, yesterday sucked, I failed, I lost, I got in a fight, I'm sick. And your mechanism instead is turning your reaction into a score, which is the one thing you can control. And you cannot control this. And I think a huge part of this exercise, and back to what Bab said, or your Chicago airport experiences, when you're not in control, what you can do is control yourself and score it. And that becomes a behavior and a habit, which is, I think, really, really important. And then I'm going to ask you one more question.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:11]:
Let me see if I should frame this. Oh, I'm going to tell you what I was going to tell you, and then I'm going to ask you the big question. With regards to this AI, the glut that went from printing to the internet to now AI and the volume of attention distraction And the value of content is actually lower now because of AI. That's what I feel. On one hand, we're compressing our capabilities to produce more content, but the quality is reducing. And I just read something that right now test scores amongst young people has gotten worse in the past 2 years measurably.
Dan Sullivan [00:28:57]:
Wow.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:58]:
ability to think is lower. And I think it's very similar to what happened with phones. And there's proof of that now that the distraction level, the anxiety levels increased, et cetera, and how more and more schools are banning them. And one country, someone guessed it out loud, I haven't verified this, but they said some country is effectively Going to pen and pencil and paper, which part of what's happening is some basic skills are just disappearing, and it's because of tech dependence. So I think that's observationally accurate, and now it's being proven with hard data. So that leads me to, well, I don't know, any comments about that? Oh, here's what I was going to say though. I did an experiment because I've been working on this huge project for about 60 days. It's consumed all my attention, and it's a form of a reinvention with this massive project in Europe.
Mike Koenigs [00:30:03]:
I stopped consuming outside content. So, um, and I've noticed that my anxiety level of feeling like I'm going behind or running behind because I'd use these tools or consume massive volumes of videos and content to learn more and be more effective and up to date with AI in particular. And it was useful until it turned into, even with lots of AI, even with my ability to discern, the amount of noise and junk and repetitive uselessness got so bad in the past 6 months. That's when I've noticed the biggest shift, that when I cut myself off, I've become significantly more productive and focused. And I— that, like, when I— as I've been listening to you today, I have a lot more things to score myself on with this exercise that I didn't before. And that's what I've found very helpful and useful throughout this. So any comments before I ask you the big question?
Dan Sullivan [00:31:13]:
Well, my sense is that we create things as humans. Technology goes right back to the first stick and the first stone. And I read a great book called The History of Money by David McWilliams. He's a former central banker from Ireland. And he said, the first thing that humans did that changed humans was we discovered how to control fire. And he said, and fire, he says, up until probably just a couple thousand years ago, the big deal was we knew how to control fire and that changed civilization. I mean, just from the standpoint of food, that we reduced the amount of calories through fire because it was easier to digest and make use of food. And that made all the difference in the world.
Dan Sullivan [00:32:20]:
It changed society. It became about farming. We had big agricultural thing that we could control where food came from, how we consume food. And then we got really fancy with it. You know, French restaurants are extreme. I know you have Spanish restaurants that you go to. That's a real—
Mike Koenigs [00:32:42]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:32:43]:
But he said the big breakthrough was money. He says money is the amazing technology that people have created. You talk about AI, but underlying AI is money. It's just money. We can get money easier than we could ever, for some, and for some, they're getting cut off from their ability to create money. So I would say that we're living in one of the great, great, great, greatest so far crossovers where the human brain has to adjust itself to an entirely new capability. One of the things I appreciate so much about dealing with you, you're like, An old explorer, you're going into new territory. You're mapping out entirely new territories.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:30]:
Your project that you're going to be doing in a week and a half or so, you're showing them a different way to use time to make more money.
Mike Koenigs [00:33:40]:
Okay.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:41]:
And money is just the greatest invention that we've ever created because we're calculating the future possibility of money. Yeah. When we were talking about your project, you know, you said, this is the biggest money project I've ever pulled off in my life. And after I pull it off, the future is totally different related to money. But it comes down to time. Time and money are totally connected with each other.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:09]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:10]:
Okay. And it's very interesting, the employment The employment numbers are really interesting. First of all, the prediction that all the jobs are going to go because of AI has proved not to be true.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:29]:
Yeah, it's total nonsense.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:32]:
Yeah, totally not true. As a matter of fact, the employment numbers are up. And what I think is happening is that there's a difference between someone who has the skill now that is really a needed skill and the abundance of opportunities if you have a skill. On the other hand, there's 4-year graduates or postgraduates who learned a lot of stuff that has absolutely no value in the marketplace.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:58]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:59]:
And they are angry. They are very, very angry. And these are young people. They're mainly 18 to 35. who have tons of education that did not prepare them to actually be paid when they get out of college. The anger, the Democrat social, Democratic social movement right now, they're really angry. You told us we did this and we got to junior kindergarten and then got to kindergarten and got to first grade and got to high school and got to college, that we had an escalator to the top. And we can't even get a job at Walmart.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:40]:
Yep. Yep. It's because it's someone else's job to predict the future for you. And, but yeah, instead of—
Dan Sullivan [00:35:51]:
They didn't tell you about being useful.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:53]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:35:54]:
All right.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:54]:
Yeah. Creating value. That is the— I said in a— boy, we're going off on a tangent here, but let's do the tangent.
Dan Sullivan [00:36:03]:
I'll bring it back. I'll bring it back.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:05]:
Because I'm going to ask you, The big question. But I was in a room, uh, I went to a, like, a little mastermind that a friend of mine who's a restaurateur, hotelier, uh, been in hospitality for a long time, really interesting guy, and he's great at building community. So he put together a community of people interested in talking about AI, but it wasn't going to be tech talk. It was going to be how's it affecting civilization?
Dan Sullivan [00:36:35]:
Psych talk.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:36]:
Yeah. And I thought, yeah, I'll go to it. And a lot of them were very AI positive. And of course, some of the gloom and doom stuff came up because there was this big report recently that a guy from Anthropic predicted the end of civilization. It got amplified and there's substantial evidence that that is a plant by an organization that's pressuring for political control. This guy worked for Anthropic for several weeks. He's a low-level employee. Same with OpenAI, wasn't there very long.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:13]:
And he has associations with a group that is basically the gloom and doomers who are all anti blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that doesn't matter so much other than a reasonable amount of skepticism, but this thing got amplified from a social media account that had no past history. Suddenly it got seen 150 million times in a few days. So who knows? And I'm not going to defend one way or another, but here is my point.
Dan Sullivan [00:37:44]:
It's all guessing and betting. It's all guessing and betting.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:47]:
Inside all this, here's my observation. First of all, AI has actually created more complexity, not less, more confusion and more overwhelm, not less, more junk being provided, produced by people who are lazy.
Dan Sullivan [00:38:04]:
We have a term for it we call AI slop.
Mike Koenigs [00:38:06]:
Yeah, yeah. That is the term. And fewer people verifying their work and hiding behind the slop, just like in the past you'd have The least productive hiding behind bureaucracy and rules instead of actually creating value and output. I think that's just a natural tendency of a lazy mind. And so this is just another lazy mind amplifier if you allow it to be so, just like anything else in the past with technology. So It's all a matter of where you focus your attention and also being trained to create value. And I don't think that's just— that is a skill. It is a skill that requires constant reps.
Dan Sullivan [00:39:04]:
So here's another observation, and it relates back to my scoring system for your yesterday's. And that is that we don't use numbers in relationship to our own experience, but other people use numbers related to our experience. So we're— we have everybody who's scoring us, but we're not scoring ourselves. And that's the definition of Oberwohl, where you get scored from the outside, but you're not scoring from the inside. What I've noticed is that the more and more I score from the inside, the less their scoring system—
Mike Koenigs [00:39:38]:
Okay, I want to repeat that. What I've noticed is that the more and more I score from the inside, the less their scoring system matters, meaning the outside scoring system. Yes. Yeah. Self-judgment, self-regulation, self-improvement, it's all— yeah. And the only hallucination that really matters is your own perception, right? Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:02]:
Well, it's a perception, but it's actually a skill system. I can evaluate my experiences every Regardless of what other— first of all, nobody else outside of me knows what my experience is. I'm the only one who can give a score to my own experience. And I do have a natural desire, if I got this score yesterday, I want a bigger score today.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:33]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:34]:
I found I'm really cool and calm because I'm getting a 40 for this experience I'm having with you.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:42]:
Maybe one great question, I'll make it a 50. It's been awesome too. Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:47]:
Yeah, I think I just upped it to 50.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:49]:
Okay, good, good. Yeah, this has been super, super fascinating. So I'm going to give you one challenge I have. I'm curious what your reaction would be, and then I'm going to ask that question. So I carry around, I have a couple different notepads I carry around. One's my scoring journal, and then one is my, it's really my mindset health journal. And I do it in the analog. Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:41:14]:
Analog is good.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:15]:
Yes. And it, it, I've found it to be really useful. So again, inside of this break from a constant barrage of outside noise, the physicality is important. And also, I did an interview with Stephen Kotler, and he talked about whenever you're deep in doing any kind of AI stuff, you need to draw. You need to stop and draw periodically. And he said that's super important for your brain health. I thought, okay, that's interesting. So I've been experimenting with that yet also.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:51]:
I don't have any Long-term observations yet, except it's an interesting mental exercise. But what I have found is with the scoring, because I'll leave my notebook, I'm not always carrying it around everywhere I go, I'm not consistent. And so that is the battle I've had is just like making sure I'm doing it every day and logging as much as possible. And when I listen to you, Boy, this is not about comparison, but you are really deliberate and you're doing a lot of entries. And I think you told me that you use a spreadsheet with tabs. Well, you're using the app now, right?
Dan Sullivan [00:42:36]:
Mm-hmm. Well, I've got a little thing that I just do on the computer. You know, it's just a— it's a little desktop app. And, I just keep track of the days. And, every Saturday, I see if my weekly— my daily average has gone up. And, I do the scoring 4 times a day. I do it when I get up, usually 6:00, 7:00 in the morning. I do it at 11:00.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:03]:
I do it at 4:00. And, I do it before I go to bed. So, that's become a habit. You check in 4 times because you forget things. You forget things and this captures that.
Mike Koenigs [00:43:15]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:16]:
But the big thing, I want to talk about a podcast I did with a very famous psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman. I don't know if you've ever read, and he's considered the positive, the creator of positive psychology. And 2 of our clients have done work with him. And so one of them put me in touch with him and gave Martin Seligman, the book, The Gap and the Gain.
Mike Koenigs [00:43:43]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:44]:
Okay. Because the gap is how do you measure your progress? If you measure against the ideal, you haven't made any progress. If you measure where you started from, you are always making progress. So the key to being in the gain, having a positive experience, is turn around and measure backwards. So I'm, in the morning, I'm turning around and measuring what happened yesterday. Okay. So I had a really interesting 1-hour podcast with him as a result of my client giving him the book. And he says, I wish I'd had this 20 years ago.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:20]:
He said, I wish I'd— he said, this would've made a big difference. He's in his 80s. I'm in my 80s. And so he— his whole insight was that most psychology is based on unhappy people. All the different ways that cause people to be unhappy.
Mike Koenigs [00:44:39]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:40]:
Well, you can understand why you're unhappy, but it doesn't make you happy. And so I asked him at the end of the podcast, I said, is it still happiness that you're after? You know, and he says, no. He says, I think happiness is a result of something else. Happiness is a result of having agency. And agency means that whatever happens, you know that you can respond to it correctly. No, and Viktor Frankl's great book, Man's Search for Meaning, has a great insight in this because he was in a Nazi death camp for 4 years and he survived. His wife was killed on the first day. And he said, it's not necessarily a happy experience, but you feel that you're in control.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:28]:
You said this just a few minutes ago. Regarding my plane trip, I wasn't in control of anything that happened, but I could be in control of my response.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:40]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:40]:
I just added scoring to my response.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:46]:
Yes. This is a perfect transition.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:49]:
You screwed up my life. You screwed up my life. You know, I'm 12 hours late. I didn't get my bags. Nope, nope, nope. I'm totally in control of how I respond to that. I thought it was fun because I had a number. So it's interesting because I think that what AI is challenging us to do is develop a new way of thinking about our experience.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:16]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:17]:
You want to go crazy, we'll do it for you.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:20]:
Yes. Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:22]:
If you want to feel very clear, very simple, very, very optimistic, we can do it for you.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:29]:
Yes. Yeah, this is, this is, um, what I teach everything. Uh, I have a, I have a slide that I show all the time, um, and it's, you're closer than you think and you're further because of how you think. And that is the— I always say AI is a mindset game. It is not a tool game.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:59]:
Totally a mindset game.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:01]:
And learning what to give up and what to release control of and where to ask and when to and when not to. This comes down to human reasoning. So Here's my last question for you, Dan. So you're 82. You said you're calling these some of the best months of your life.
Dan Sullivan [00:47:25]:
And part of it's the best month. The best.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:28]:
Okay. That's even better. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:47:30]:
I'm out going on 10 months.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:32]:
Great. So what do you think you discovered about time that you wish somebody had taught you when you were 20? Or if you were talking to your past self?
Dan Sullivan [00:47:49]:
Yeah, that is probably— it's up to you to determine what time means. You know, first of all, it's my definition of what time means. So I've just changed what time means for myself. And that this is, you know, The Declaration of Independence was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the actual phrase came from a philosopher named John Locke, and he says it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. But they couldn't do that in 1776 because there was slavery in the United States and human beings were property. So they couldn't solve the problem of slavery in 1776. It took another—
Mike Koenigs [00:48:34]:
100 years.
Dan Sullivan [00:48:34]:
Took another 90 years to actually deal with the issue. But your time is your property, and if it's your property, you can do anything with time that you want. So I've just created a new time system, and now it's my, you know, my time is my property, and I have a scoring system that tells you what this activity is worth, what this situation's worth, my response to this experience, what's yours. Then I'll just put a number to it. And you don't have to agree with it, but you don't know what my experience is and you don't know what the basis of my scoring system is. It's mine. And if you do it, yours is yours. So what I think I'm doing right now is that I'm creating a way for humans in the day of AI to have time as their property.
Dan Sullivan [00:49:35]:
That's, I mean, that's what I've done for myself.
Mike Koenigs [00:49:38]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:49:39]:
And then I'm sharing what I'm doing. I said, do you think this would work for you? I don't know if it works for you or not. It works for me. And, and I'm getting more and more insights. But, but the interesting thing was the people who make lists are immediately just, instead of crossing out what they completed, they're just putting a number and they're saying, this makes me a lot happier.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:05]:
And when is this book available?
Dan Sullivan [00:50:08]:
It'll be available tomorrow. That's great.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:12]:
So we're going to put a link. And Gord, let's make sure we get that link from you as soon as possible. Right now, I'm going to just say the shortcut link that we're going to set up is capabilityamplifier.com/book. That'll be the short link where you can get the book for free. And Dan, this has been—
Dan Sullivan [00:50:38]:
This will be a PDF. This will be a PDF version, but there's a little link in the PDF where you can hear the audio version of it. You can watch the video version of it, and there's a scorecard that you can fill in, but it's called Yesterday creates tomorrow.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:57]:
It's great work. I'm super excited for it. I can't wait to dig in and continue to refine how I think about it and how I use this process. So thank you, Dan. This has been a fantastic episode. And if you know someone who's either struggling with managing their emotions, managing their time, their anxiety, their ADHD, this could very well be the tool that puts them back in control of their mind, their behavior, their habits, their actions, whether it's a young person or someone—
Dan Sullivan [00:51:36]:
82.
Mike Koenigs [00:51:37]:
Yeah. Well, what a, what a great episode. Thank you, Dan. This has been a blast.
Dan Sullivan [00:51:42]:
Thank you, man.
All right, Dan, I am so excited for this episode. We actually just did it. So we're making the intro right now, and this is all about how to slow down time. What if you could change the meaning of time? That's what Dan has done. And Dan has developed a powerful psychology, and it's a tool that multiplies appreciation and gratitude that he credits with creating the best month of his life in 82 years. What I can promise you is you're going to get into a different mindset about how you perceive time, the past, the future, what's causing anxiety, but also what keeps you into the present.
Dan Sullivan [00:00:41]:
I've been coaching entrepreneurs for more than 50 years, and I find that basically when they're handling their time really well, they're happy, and when they're not handling their time, they're unhappy. And my sense is that there's actually a system for increasing your appreciation, your gratitude for your own time, the meaning of your time. And it's a very simple system. You do it 50 days in a row and you're, you're a new person in relationship to time.
Mike Koenigs [00:01:08]:
Very good. Well, this is Capability Amplifier. This is Dan Sullivan. I'm Mike Koenigs, and this is how to slow down time. I know you're going to enjoy it.
Dan Sullivan [00:01:22]:
Hi everybody. It's Dan Sullivan here, and this is Capability Amplifier. amplifier. And I feel very fortunate to have Mike Koenigs as my partner on this because he's on a tear. He's way ahead. And I got to be cool and calm about this. But I came up with a new idea and we've talked about this previously, but we're way ahead of the game. So I'm going to tell you about our latest progress.
Dan Sullivan [00:01:59]:
And it's a new book we have, which is called Yesterday Creates Tomorrow. And it's been a huge hit. Everybody I talk to really loves this idea. So I just want to bring everybody up to date on it because the book is now available. So if you're interested in reading the book, we'll give you the link and you can actually download the book. Download the book. Mike, I think this is the big idea. of all the ideas I've come up with, and it has to do with time and how people look at time.
Dan Sullivan [00:02:36]:
And it seemed to me, I got 2 insights about it. One is that when I was a child and I had good parents and I went to good schools and I learned how to read, I learned how to write, I learned how to do math. There were lots of different subjects, but nobody ever taught me how to handle time. Okay. And the way I looked at it was that you had a past and the past kept trying to tug you backwards to relive some experiences that you already had. And then there was the future and some of it was exciting and some of it caused anxiety. And so I thought it through and I says, you know something, this past and future thing is really interesting because I don't know anyone who's ever spent even a second in the past or a second in the future. We all just spend our time in the present.
Dan Sullivan [00:03:39]:
So we just have a whole bunch of todays and why don't we use today to do something different with time? So this is the basic idea here.
Mike Koenigs [00:03:51]:
All right. So you remind me of a story my friend John Assaraf told me the other day, because we were talking about fear of the past and fear of the future. And I was having some anxiety. Some of it had to do with the previous episode we did, which is a huge project, larger than I've ever dealt with, with more unknowns. than I am used to dealing with. It's like when I look at how do I reduce anxiety, stress, fear, it's collapsing the number of unknowns. And I think that's a very human thing to do. Anyway, what Dan— he showed me was an hourglass.
Mike Koenigs [00:04:37]:
And there's an old story that Bob Proctor used to do from stage, which is— He would show you the bottom of the hourglass where the sand had already fell. And it's like, there's nothing you can do about that. And then up here where all the sand is on top, you can think about it and you can what-if all you want and you have no idea. All you have is right in the pinch, the fine grains of sand that are right there right now. And so when I heard you right now, there's that simple visual metaphor. And of course, all the gurus and the Zen monks, they're always talking about the present. And if you remember that old Ram Dass book, Be Here Now, that was huge in the— I guess it probably would've been the '70s. And I remember reading that book for the first time because it was unusually printed and it really got you out of your core and your center, because things are written in circles.
Mike Koenigs [00:05:40]:
But it's really a beautiful journey. And every time I reread it, it means something different. So practicing your yesterday creates tomorrow has been something that is a topic in my own home with my son, with Vivian, on a regular basis. So what's changed since the last time we talked about this? And why do you feel that it's your, your best work? What, what is it consistently? What's different? That's really it.
Dan Sullivan [00:06:15]:
Yeah. Well, there are 3 things. The first one is that I thought this was an idea that I should practice on my own for quite a bit of time before I start talking about it to other people. Okay, so I started on December 2nd, 2025, that when I woke up in the morning on the first day, I said, you know what I'm going to use today for? I'm going to do everything I can today so that tomorrow morning when I wake up, this was a great yesterday. So I did that on December 2nd for the first time, and then On December 3rd, when I woke up, I said, okay, and I said, okay, so what did I do yesterday that made it a great yesterday? Okay, and I got a number of things. And I did this for about 2 or 3 weeks. And then I said, something's missing. Okay, it's getting, first of all, it's getting a little bit boring.
Dan Sullivan [00:07:16]:
It's getting a little bit boring doing this. So I said, you know what I have to do? I'm trying to judge a qualitative experience, but I don't have quantity to do it. So what I said is, I'm going to give myself numbers for the things that I did. Okay. And I started with the actual yesterday. And I said, I'm just going to give myself 3 numbers. I'm going to get a 1, I'm going to get a 5 or a 10. And a 1 is something I do every day, brush my teeth, get up.
Dan Sullivan [00:07:48]:
You know, I get up in the morning and when the alarm goes off, I'm out of bed fast. It doesn't take me much time. I'm asleep and then I'm awake and I put my shoes on. I go around the house and this was wintertime in Toronto. And I said, we've got 3 fireplaces. I'm going to turn the fireplaces on. I'm going to turn on all the lights and then I'm going to come back to bed with Babs. Okay.
Dan Sullivan [00:08:14]:
And so I counted up the actions and I said, that's about, you know, I did about 12, did about 12 ones right there. So I'm going to give myself 12. Okay. And then I started going through the day and there's activities that I'm doing that are part of my, my role at Strategic Coach, but I've done them before. So if I've done it before, I'm going to give myself a 5. for that type of activity. But there's brand new things I'm doing today, and anything that's brand new is going to get a 10. So the first couple of weeks that I did the scoring, and the scoring made a real difference.
Dan Sullivan [00:08:53]:
There was something about the scoring of my activities that had a huge impact. And the reason is I had to actually visualize the activity and make a judgment what the score was. Mm-hmm. So I Going back and taking the experience, and I was back in the experience, and I had a feel for it. Okay. Well, as I talk to you today, this is day 286, and I've done 286 great yesterdays. And I've just had the greatest year. I'm 82 right now.
Dan Sullivan [00:09:26]:
I'm in my 83rd year. And this was just the greatest, you know, 9, 10 months going on 10 months. This is just the greatest 10 months I've ever had. And all of a sudden, the other thing is time is slowing down. I just have this feeling that time's slowing down. Okay? So that's number one. Number 2 is I said, this deserves a book. And as you know, Mike, I write a new book every quarter.
Mike Koenigs [00:09:53]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:09:53]:
And so I have 3 team members, Shannon Waller, Hamish MacDonald, and Alex Varley. And I I told them this idea and they started doing it. Okay. And then Hamish created a scorecard, a paper scorecard that you could keep track of your 1s, your 5s, and your 10s. And that was great. And Alex said, well, if we've got a scorecard, why don't I create an app? And so he's created an app that keeps track of all your days. You can go, it's got a calendar and you say, what did I do 3 months ago? 3 months ago in June, what did I do? And it shows you what you did on this day 3 months ago in June. And there's just this thrill.
Dan Sullivan [00:10:38]:
And the other thing about scoring is that whatever score you got yesterday, you want to get a better score today. So all of a sudden I'm saying, you know, I'm just going to take all the ones and I'm going to give them a single number because I do them every day. And so I start off the day with a fixed number already. I'm on the scoreboard when I get out of bed. And they started talking about all the things that they were doing. You know, Shannon has been in a Shannon reduction mode. So she's gone from heavier than she wanted to be to where she wants to be. Okay.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:21]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:11:22]:
You know, she did this through a routine and through training and not eating as much. And, but she had a lot of clothes now. And she said, her real commitment is that I'll get rid of all the clothes that related to who I used to be and just have the clothes of who I am now. And she had 10 bags. So she put everything in 10 bags and she got a score for that. She put them in the trunk of her car. She got a score for that.
Mike Koenigs [00:11:50]:
Wow.
Dan Sullivan [00:11:50]:
She got to the office and all the clothes were gone in 60 minutes. They were gone. Everybody wanted some of the clothes. And she said, I've never done anything like that in my life before. And I said, the reason is you gave yourself a score. You never gave yourself a score before. Okay? And so that's number 2 that we did. And we're writing the book.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:16]:
So that's the project that will be complete tomorrow because we get the books tomorrow for my free zone groups. And the other thing is we had a big company meeting right after Labor Day. We have a real company meeting and I took the entire team through it. And now the team's coming up to me and said, this is amazing. This is an absolutely amazing experience. I'm getting more done. I feel, I don't feel I'm not being dragged back. backwards into the past.
Dan Sullivan [00:12:46]:
I'm not being dragged forward into the future. I'm just concentrating on today. So that's my progress report. And you know the Kolbe profile?
Mike Koenigs [00:13:01]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:13:02]:
So Kathy Kolbe, great genius of how to put yourself in a position where you're using your best abilities to get your best results. But there are 4 profiles. One is a fact-finder who has facts that they have to get before they'll take action. Then you have a follow-through who have to create a system before they take action. Then there's quick starts who just take quick starts.
Mike Koenigs [00:13:29]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:13:30]:
Who just take action before they find out the facts or create the method. Then you have implementers who use their hands to actually get things done. Over the last week, all the follow-throughs are coming through and saying, you know, I create a list every day, but then I cross it off when it's finished. And she says, now what I'm doing, I'm not crossing it off. I'm giving myself a score and it makes all the difference in the world. And so I'm going to give you the book today in PDF form, Mike, so that you can take a look at it and you can use it over the next 2 weeks because you got a big project on your hands. And you might, it'll be really interesting to see you use it. But anyway, I just think this is the neatest thing that I've ever created.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:23]:
I'm, so what I'm—
Dan Sullivan [00:14:25]:
And I've been excited. You've known I've been excited about this for almost a year now. So the excitement is lasting.
Mike Koenigs [00:14:34]:
Yes. Well, it's, I think what is interesting about this is, first of all, you told me within— we did our first episode about this very, very soon after you started it. And I can't remember exactly how many days into it, but it was days.
Dan Sullivan [00:14:58]:
It would've been within 2 weeks. I think it was within 2 weeks. I think it was before Christmas last year.
Mike Koenigs [00:15:04]:
Yes. And what I find interesting is I've never been— this is not entirely true, but I've found that I'm not always motivated by keeping score. I didn't train my brain that way growing up. I played sports growing up and we played baseball and everything. We had score. And I'm curious about the psychology of the different people in the organization and how score matters to them. So that's just one idea. And also how putting a number on the experience changes the behavior, where in the past, many of your tools have been writing Like X number of wins.
Mike Koenigs [00:15:57]:
It's like what worked and what didn't work. You're pretty finite. So this psychology of scorekeeping, and that to me is a huge distinction about what makes this work and what makes it— and how you even started out with arbitrary numbers. Now you've gotten a lot more solid about having some more specificity to it.
Dan Sullivan [00:16:21]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:16:22]:
So can you talk about the specificity, the scorekeeping, the motivation side, and how that relates to different psychology?
Dan Sullivan [00:16:31]:
Yeah. Well, for example, today we're doing 2 podcasts with Mike and Dan are doing capability. So right off the bat, a podcast gets a 10. It's brand new, but I just get back in touch with Mike, and that's worth a 20. So the total score is 40 for this session right now. There's a 40 right off the bat. And people say, well, how do you do that? And I say, I gave it a 30 and it wasn't enough. So I upped the score to a 40.
Dan Sullivan [00:17:07]:
So what it is, you say it's arbitrary. It's always arbitrary. Okay. But it's a feeling of, This is the right number for the experience I just had. The other thing that's really interesting, you can do it on negative experiences as much as positive experiences. So for example, in January, Babs and I had a week in Chicago. We were flying back to Toronto and Toronto had a blizzard and it dropped about 10 inches of snow in about 5 hours. Screwed up the airline schedules amazingly.
Dan Sullivan [00:17:45]:
We were supposed to leave at 2 o'clock to go back to Toronto, 2 in the afternoon, and it was delayed an hour. Toronto's an hour earlier, so it was 3 o'clock. Okay, so we— it's about an hour and a half from gate to gate, and by the time you, you know, they've been on the runway for a while, they take off, they fly, they're on the runway for a while. And so when it was delayed for the 4th time, so we were supposed to take over, we were supposed to take off 5 hours, actually 5 hours at 2 o'clock. We took off at 7 o'clock, a completely different plane, different flight. And, but right at the beginning of this experience, which I had been through before in previous years, I said, okay, I'm just going to be cool and calm about this entire experience. I'm totally out of control. I have no control over this situation whatsoever.
Dan Sullivan [00:18:41]:
Long story short, by waiting on runways and flying and everything else, we get to Toronto at 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock Toronto time. We were an hour on the runway at O'Hare taking off to go to Toronto. We landed and we were an hour and a half on the runway before we got to our gate.
Mike Koenigs [00:19:01]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:19:01]:
So we got to the gate and I said, I bet there's, I bet the jetway doesn't work. Jetway didn't work. They had to bring in a team to get the jetway. That was 45 minutes waiting in the plane. And I said, I bet the bags don't come. And we went down, we waited for an hour. We got the bags 3 days later. And I was cool.
Dan Sullivan [00:19:25]:
I was calm and everything. And I gave myself a 50 for the experience of just putting up with that experience. So Babs, we were about halfway through this experience, she says, you're being really relaxed about this. She says, I've been through experiences like this with you, and the toughest part of the experience is being with you when it happens. So you're putting up with a jerk for a half hour. You get points for putting up with the jerk and just Being cool and calm about it. So it doesn't matter whether it's a negative experience or a positive experience, you get a score for it. So yesterday I got a 340.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:08]:
I did amazing work yesterday. Okay. And—
Mike Koenigs [00:20:13]:
And that was creating, putting, or was it putting up with someone else's BS that gave you the big score? It wasn't both.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:20]:
I had a clinic here in Chicago I had to go to and the order had come through, but they didn't give me an appointment. So that was 2 hours. And then finally I got it and it was, I was waiting. So it was about 4 hours of my life to do it. And I said, hey, I said, this is great. I'm running up the score. I'm running up the score here. Doesn't matter what happens to me.
Dan Sullivan [00:20:44]:
I get scores. Okay. And now people say, well, how can you give it a score? And I said, you give it a score. And they say, well, what does that mean? It says, because you've just evaluated, you've just put a— you know, the word appreciated is an interesting word in English. Appreciate means to increase on the one hand, but it also means to create the value of something. Okay? So real estate, the price of real estate appreciates. That means that It's worth more. It's worth more.
Dan Sullivan [00:21:23]:
Stock market uses the word appreciate, but we also use appreciate to convey the sense of gratitude. Gratitude. So it's got 2 meanings. And so I've been living in a total appreciation experience more and more as I go through the scoring. And then I have a running total of all my scores divided by the days. And on average, On the average right now, I get 133 scores for the day. So I mentioned before, Alex Varley, who's our team member, he created an app for it. The app does all this for you.
Dan Sullivan [00:21:58]:
All you have to do is list the activity, give yourself the score. And so the 1, 5, and 10 scoring system lasted for about 6 weeks. It lasted 6 weeks. And I said, no, I gotta open this up. I can give myself any score I want. But it's like training wheels for the bike, you know, to learn how to ride a bike. It's helpful if you have training wheels. But when you get your Harley, you don't need the training wheels anymore.
Dan Sullivan [00:22:32]:
So it's all in your sense of what the value of the day was. And every morning you look back and you say, boy, that was a great day. If you have 50 great yesterdays in a row, today takes care of itself. So you stop trying to control the future. Your experience yesterday actually controls the future.
Mike Koenigs [00:22:57]:
Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. So I'm going to summarize some of the big concepts. So one of them is after doing something for 286 days, times feel slower. And part of that's because you're paying more attention to it and you're in a state of appreciation. I would also add gratitude. That is the— you're just present for each moment. And then another big important part of this, the motivator that keeps you going is you start keeping score Effectively, as soon as you wake up.
Mike Koenigs [00:23:39]:
So there's, you get into this mode and this practice and this habit of paying attention to little things that incrementally matter. And by listing them, that's making you more conscious and sensitive. And you've said before that your ADHD disappeared as soon as this happened. So it puts you in a state of focus.
Dan Sullivan [00:24:00]:
It took about 6 months. I'm clinically diagnosed. I went to the Amen Clinic in Newport Beach, you know, You know, I've got a 10-ring circus going on in my brain.
Mike Koenigs [00:24:12]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:24:12]:
And all of a sudden I'm not doing that anymore. I'm just saying, okay, what's the next experience? Okay, and what kind of score is this experience? So I've really simplified time in a way. But the other thing is that what I realized is that there's a lot of people in the world who are trying to get my attention. There's a lot of things in the world that's trying to get my attention. And ADD is that you emotionally connect with something in the future that has not existed, that doesn't exist yet. It's in a future today, maybe, maybe not. But the moment I get emotionally engaged with it, and I know you do this too, you get emotionally engaged with it, it wants you to pay attention to this thing that hasn't existed, doesn't exist yet.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:03]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:04]:
And if it was one thing, it would be okay, but it's 20 things. So I have 20 things trying to get my attention that don't exist. And now I've forgotten about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I've got a method for handling tomorrow regardless of what it is. And when I get to the day in the future, I know how to handle whatever that day is. So there's a sense of agency that this time system has gotten to me. So, you know, it's really interesting.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:37]:
And I'm wondering if all the overwhelm in the world is coming from news reports, it's coming from movies, it's coming from all sorts of situations, but they don't actually exist. Hmm.
Mike Koenigs [00:25:54]:
Man, you're starting to sound like A Zen guru here.
Dan Sullivan [00:25:59]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:00]:
And so I have another observation for you.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:03]:
Yeah.
Mike Koenigs [00:26:04]:
Oh, go ahead. What were you going to say? Finish that thought.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:07]:
No, I was saying that Eastern thought, because that sort of Zen is from how did they handle time? And then Americans have their own time system, which is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I haven't got enough. I want more life, I want more liberty, and I want more, you know—
Mike Koenigs [00:26:28]:
Property.
Dan Sullivan [00:26:29]:
Happiness. Yeah, happiness. And so I'm just wondering if the whole AI thing is probably what printing did to the human mind back in the 1500s, you know, that all of a sudden a person with a book was having a conversation that people from the outside couldn't control what kind of conversation you're having with the words that are on the page. I think this is the printing experience multiplied by 1,000 with AI.
Mike Koenigs [00:27:01]:
Yeah, many orders of magnitude. I'll give you an observation after I finish my observation of you, which has to do with limiting that, an exercise that I've done over the past 60 days. So the next observation I have is How your mechanism, like, so if the normal mindset would be, well, yesterday sucked, I failed, I lost, I got in a fight, I'm sick. And your mechanism instead is turning your reaction into a score, which is the one thing you can control. And you cannot control this. And I think a huge part of this exercise, and back to what Bab said, or your Chicago airport experiences, when you're not in control, what you can do is control yourself and score it. And that becomes a behavior and a habit, which is, I think, really, really important. And then I'm going to ask you one more question.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:11]:
Let me see if I should frame this. Oh, I'm going to tell you what I was going to tell you, and then I'm going to ask you the big question. With regards to this AI, the glut that went from printing to the internet to now AI and the volume of attention distraction And the value of content is actually lower now because of AI. That's what I feel. On one hand, we're compressing our capabilities to produce more content, but the quality is reducing. And I just read something that right now test scores amongst young people has gotten worse in the past 2 years measurably.
Dan Sullivan [00:28:57]:
Wow.
Mike Koenigs [00:28:58]:
ability to think is lower. And I think it's very similar to what happened with phones. And there's proof of that now that the distraction level, the anxiety levels increased, et cetera, and how more and more schools are banning them. And one country, someone guessed it out loud, I haven't verified this, but they said some country is effectively Going to pen and pencil and paper, which part of what's happening is some basic skills are just disappearing, and it's because of tech dependence. So I think that's observationally accurate, and now it's being proven with hard data. So that leads me to, well, I don't know, any comments about that? Oh, here's what I was going to say though. I did an experiment because I've been working on this huge project for about 60 days. It's consumed all my attention, and it's a form of a reinvention with this massive project in Europe.
Mike Koenigs [00:30:03]:
I stopped consuming outside content. So, um, and I've noticed that my anxiety level of feeling like I'm going behind or running behind because I'd use these tools or consume massive volumes of videos and content to learn more and be more effective and up to date with AI in particular. And it was useful until it turned into, even with lots of AI, even with my ability to discern, the amount of noise and junk and repetitive uselessness got so bad in the past 6 months. That's when I've noticed the biggest shift, that when I cut myself off, I've become significantly more productive and focused. And I— that, like, when I— as I've been listening to you today, I have a lot more things to score myself on with this exercise that I didn't before. And that's what I've found very helpful and useful throughout this. So any comments before I ask you the big question?
Dan Sullivan [00:31:13]:
Well, my sense is that we create things as humans. Technology goes right back to the first stick and the first stone. And I read a great book called The History of Money by David McWilliams. He's a former central banker from Ireland. And he said, the first thing that humans did that changed humans was we discovered how to control fire. And he said, and fire, he says, up until probably just a couple thousand years ago, the big deal was we knew how to control fire and that changed civilization. I mean, just from the standpoint of food, that we reduced the amount of calories through fire because it was easier to digest and make use of food. And that made all the difference in the world.
Dan Sullivan [00:32:20]:
It changed society. It became about farming. We had big agricultural thing that we could control where food came from, how we consume food. And then we got really fancy with it. You know, French restaurants are extreme. I know you have Spanish restaurants that you go to. That's a real—
Mike Koenigs [00:32:42]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:32:43]:
But he said the big breakthrough was money. He says money is the amazing technology that people have created. You talk about AI, but underlying AI is money. It's just money. We can get money easier than we could ever, for some, and for some, they're getting cut off from their ability to create money. So I would say that we're living in one of the great, great, great, greatest so far crossovers where the human brain has to adjust itself to an entirely new capability. One of the things I appreciate so much about dealing with you, you're like, An old explorer, you're going into new territory. You're mapping out entirely new territories.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:30]:
Your project that you're going to be doing in a week and a half or so, you're showing them a different way to use time to make more money.
Mike Koenigs [00:33:40]:
Okay.
Dan Sullivan [00:33:41]:
And money is just the greatest invention that we've ever created because we're calculating the future possibility of money. Yeah. When we were talking about your project, you know, you said, this is the biggest money project I've ever pulled off in my life. And after I pull it off, the future is totally different related to money. But it comes down to time. Time and money are totally connected with each other.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:09]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:10]:
Okay. And it's very interesting, the employment The employment numbers are really interesting. First of all, the prediction that all the jobs are going to go because of AI has proved not to be true.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:29]:
Yeah, it's total nonsense.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:32]:
Yeah, totally not true. As a matter of fact, the employment numbers are up. And what I think is happening is that there's a difference between someone who has the skill now that is really a needed skill and the abundance of opportunities if you have a skill. On the other hand, there's 4-year graduates or postgraduates who learned a lot of stuff that has absolutely no value in the marketplace.
Mike Koenigs [00:34:58]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:34:59]:
And they are angry. They are very, very angry. And these are young people. They're mainly 18 to 35. who have tons of education that did not prepare them to actually be paid when they get out of college. The anger, the Democrat social, Democratic social movement right now, they're really angry. You told us we did this and we got to junior kindergarten and then got to kindergarten and got to first grade and got to high school and got to college, that we had an escalator to the top. And we can't even get a job at Walmart.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:40]:
Yep. Yep. It's because it's someone else's job to predict the future for you. And, but yeah, instead of—
Dan Sullivan [00:35:51]:
They didn't tell you about being useful.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:53]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:35:54]:
All right.
Mike Koenigs [00:35:54]:
Yeah. Creating value. That is the— I said in a— boy, we're going off on a tangent here, but let's do the tangent.
Dan Sullivan [00:36:03]:
I'll bring it back. I'll bring it back.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:05]:
Because I'm going to ask you, The big question. But I was in a room, uh, I went to a, like, a little mastermind that a friend of mine who's a restaurateur, hotelier, uh, been in hospitality for a long time, really interesting guy, and he's great at building community. So he put together a community of people interested in talking about AI, but it wasn't going to be tech talk. It was going to be how's it affecting civilization?
Dan Sullivan [00:36:35]:
Psych talk.
Mike Koenigs [00:36:36]:
Yeah. And I thought, yeah, I'll go to it. And a lot of them were very AI positive. And of course, some of the gloom and doom stuff came up because there was this big report recently that a guy from Anthropic predicted the end of civilization. It got amplified and there's substantial evidence that that is a plant by an organization that's pressuring for political control. This guy worked for Anthropic for several weeks. He's a low-level employee. Same with OpenAI, wasn't there very long.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:13]:
And he has associations with a group that is basically the gloom and doomers who are all anti blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that doesn't matter so much other than a reasonable amount of skepticism, but this thing got amplified from a social media account that had no past history. Suddenly it got seen 150 million times in a few days. So who knows? And I'm not going to defend one way or another, but here is my point.
Dan Sullivan [00:37:44]:
It's all guessing and betting. It's all guessing and betting.
Mike Koenigs [00:37:47]:
Inside all this, here's my observation. First of all, AI has actually created more complexity, not less, more confusion and more overwhelm, not less, more junk being provided, produced by people who are lazy.
Dan Sullivan [00:38:04]:
We have a term for it we call AI slop.
Mike Koenigs [00:38:06]:
Yeah, yeah. That is the term. And fewer people verifying their work and hiding behind the slop, just like in the past you'd have The least productive hiding behind bureaucracy and rules instead of actually creating value and output. I think that's just a natural tendency of a lazy mind. And so this is just another lazy mind amplifier if you allow it to be so, just like anything else in the past with technology. So It's all a matter of where you focus your attention and also being trained to create value. And I don't think that's just— that is a skill. It is a skill that requires constant reps.
Dan Sullivan [00:39:04]:
So here's another observation, and it relates back to my scoring system for your yesterday's. And that is that we don't use numbers in relationship to our own experience, but other people use numbers related to our experience. So we're— we have everybody who's scoring us, but we're not scoring ourselves. And that's the definition of Oberwohl, where you get scored from the outside, but you're not scoring from the inside. What I've noticed is that the more and more I score from the inside, the less their scoring system—
Mike Koenigs [00:39:38]:
Okay, I want to repeat that. What I've noticed is that the more and more I score from the inside, the less their scoring system matters, meaning the outside scoring system. Yes. Yeah. Self-judgment, self-regulation, self-improvement, it's all— yeah. And the only hallucination that really matters is your own perception, right? Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:02]:
Well, it's a perception, but it's actually a skill system. I can evaluate my experiences every Regardless of what other— first of all, nobody else outside of me knows what my experience is. I'm the only one who can give a score to my own experience. And I do have a natural desire, if I got this score yesterday, I want a bigger score today.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:33]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:34]:
I found I'm really cool and calm because I'm getting a 40 for this experience I'm having with you.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:42]:
Maybe one great question, I'll make it a 50. It's been awesome too. Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:40:47]:
Yeah, I think I just upped it to 50.
Mike Koenigs [00:40:49]:
Okay, good, good. Yeah, this has been super, super fascinating. So I'm going to give you one challenge I have. I'm curious what your reaction would be, and then I'm going to ask that question. So I carry around, I have a couple different notepads I carry around. One's my scoring journal, and then one is my, it's really my mindset health journal. And I do it in the analog. Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:41:14]:
Analog is good.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:15]:
Yes. And it, it, I've found it to be really useful. So again, inside of this break from a constant barrage of outside noise, the physicality is important. And also, I did an interview with Stephen Kotler, and he talked about whenever you're deep in doing any kind of AI stuff, you need to draw. You need to stop and draw periodically. And he said that's super important for your brain health. I thought, okay, that's interesting. So I've been experimenting with that yet also.
Mike Koenigs [00:41:51]:
I don't have any Long-term observations yet, except it's an interesting mental exercise. But what I have found is with the scoring, because I'll leave my notebook, I'm not always carrying it around everywhere I go, I'm not consistent. And so that is the battle I've had is just like making sure I'm doing it every day and logging as much as possible. And when I listen to you, Boy, this is not about comparison, but you are really deliberate and you're doing a lot of entries. And I think you told me that you use a spreadsheet with tabs. Well, you're using the app now, right?
Dan Sullivan [00:42:36]:
Mm-hmm. Well, I've got a little thing that I just do on the computer. You know, it's just a— it's a little desktop app. And, I just keep track of the days. And, every Saturday, I see if my weekly— my daily average has gone up. And, I do the scoring 4 times a day. I do it when I get up, usually 6:00, 7:00 in the morning. I do it at 11:00.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:03]:
I do it at 4:00. And, I do it before I go to bed. So, that's become a habit. You check in 4 times because you forget things. You forget things and this captures that.
Mike Koenigs [00:43:15]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:16]:
But the big thing, I want to talk about a podcast I did with a very famous psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman. I don't know if you've ever read, and he's considered the positive, the creator of positive psychology. And 2 of our clients have done work with him. And so one of them put me in touch with him and gave Martin Seligman, the book, The Gap and the Gain.
Mike Koenigs [00:43:43]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:43:44]:
Okay. Because the gap is how do you measure your progress? If you measure against the ideal, you haven't made any progress. If you measure where you started from, you are always making progress. So the key to being in the gain, having a positive experience, is turn around and measure backwards. So I'm, in the morning, I'm turning around and measuring what happened yesterday. Okay. So I had a really interesting 1-hour podcast with him as a result of my client giving him the book. And he says, I wish I'd had this 20 years ago.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:20]:
He said, I wish I'd— he said, this would've made a big difference. He's in his 80s. I'm in my 80s. And so he— his whole insight was that most psychology is based on unhappy people. All the different ways that cause people to be unhappy.
Mike Koenigs [00:44:39]:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:44:40]:
Well, you can understand why you're unhappy, but it doesn't make you happy. And so I asked him at the end of the podcast, I said, is it still happiness that you're after? You know, and he says, no. He says, I think happiness is a result of something else. Happiness is a result of having agency. And agency means that whatever happens, you know that you can respond to it correctly. No, and Viktor Frankl's great book, Man's Search for Meaning, has a great insight in this because he was in a Nazi death camp for 4 years and he survived. His wife was killed on the first day. And he said, it's not necessarily a happy experience, but you feel that you're in control.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:28]:
You said this just a few minutes ago. Regarding my plane trip, I wasn't in control of anything that happened, but I could be in control of my response.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:40]:
Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:40]:
I just added scoring to my response.
Mike Koenigs [00:45:46]:
Yes. This is a perfect transition.
Dan Sullivan [00:45:49]:
You screwed up my life. You screwed up my life. You know, I'm 12 hours late. I didn't get my bags. Nope, nope, nope. I'm totally in control of how I respond to that. I thought it was fun because I had a number. So it's interesting because I think that what AI is challenging us to do is develop a new way of thinking about our experience.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:16]:
Yes.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:17]:
You want to go crazy, we'll do it for you.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:20]:
Yes. Yep.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:22]:
If you want to feel very clear, very simple, very, very optimistic, we can do it for you.
Mike Koenigs [00:46:29]:
Yes. Yeah, this is, this is, um, what I teach everything. Uh, I have a, I have a slide that I show all the time, um, and it's, you're closer than you think and you're further because of how you think. And that is the— I always say AI is a mindset game. It is not a tool game.
Dan Sullivan [00:46:59]:
Totally a mindset game.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:01]:
And learning what to give up and what to release control of and where to ask and when to and when not to. This comes down to human reasoning. So Here's my last question for you, Dan. So you're 82. You said you're calling these some of the best months of your life.
Dan Sullivan [00:47:25]:
And part of it's the best month. The best.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:28]:
Okay. That's even better. Yeah.
Dan Sullivan [00:47:30]:
I'm out going on 10 months.
Mike Koenigs [00:47:32]:
Great. So what do you think you discovered about time that you wish somebody had taught you when you were 20? Or if you were talking to your past self?
Dan Sullivan [00:47:49]:
Yeah, that is probably— it's up to you to determine what time means. You know, first of all, it's my definition of what time means. So I've just changed what time means for myself. And that this is, you know, The Declaration of Independence was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the actual phrase came from a philosopher named John Locke, and he says it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. But they couldn't do that in 1776 because there was slavery in the United States and human beings were property. So they couldn't solve the problem of slavery in 1776. It took another—
Mike Koenigs [00:48:34]:
100 years.
Dan Sullivan [00:48:34]:
Took another 90 years to actually deal with the issue. But your time is your property, and if it's your property, you can do anything with time that you want. So I've just created a new time system, and now it's my, you know, my time is my property, and I have a scoring system that tells you what this activity is worth, what this situation's worth, my response to this experience, what's yours. Then I'll just put a number to it. And you don't have to agree with it, but you don't know what my experience is and you don't know what the basis of my scoring system is. It's mine. And if you do it, yours is yours. So what I think I'm doing right now is that I'm creating a way for humans in the day of AI to have time as their property.
Dan Sullivan [00:49:35]:
That's, I mean, that's what I've done for myself.
Mike Koenigs [00:49:38]:
Mm-hmm.
Dan Sullivan [00:49:39]:
And then I'm sharing what I'm doing. I said, do you think this would work for you? I don't know if it works for you or not. It works for me. And, and I'm getting more and more insights. But, but the interesting thing was the people who make lists are immediately just, instead of crossing out what they completed, they're just putting a number and they're saying, this makes me a lot happier.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:05]:
And when is this book available?
Dan Sullivan [00:50:08]:
It'll be available tomorrow. That's great.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:12]:
So we're going to put a link. And Gord, let's make sure we get that link from you as soon as possible. Right now, I'm going to just say the shortcut link that we're going to set up is capabilityamplifier.com/book. That'll be the short link where you can get the book for free. And Dan, this has been—
Dan Sullivan [00:50:38]:
This will be a PDF. This will be a PDF version, but there's a little link in the PDF where you can hear the audio version of it. You can watch the video version of it, and there's a scorecard that you can fill in, but it's called Yesterday creates tomorrow.
Mike Koenigs [00:50:57]:
It's great work. I'm super excited for it. I can't wait to dig in and continue to refine how I think about it and how I use this process. So thank you, Dan. This has been a fantastic episode. And if you know someone who's either struggling with managing their emotions, managing their time, their anxiety, their ADHD, this could very well be the tool that puts them back in control of their mind, their behavior, their habits, their actions, whether it's a young person or someone—
Dan Sullivan [00:51:36]:
82.
Mike Koenigs [00:51:37]:
Yeah. Well, what a, what a great episode. Thank you, Dan. This has been a blast.
Dan Sullivan [00:51:42]:
Thank you, man.
