Episode 61: "What do you even do..?!"

Trying to bring order to chaos. I talk about this podcast and explain the method to what appears to be madness. I go into the nature of my work - what I do, how I do it, and who I do it with. 

If you're a dentist and looking for more dental specific content, I have another podcast called, The Sovereign Dentist. I'd love to see you there. 

More can also be found on my YouTube channel. 

Transcript

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0:01

Welcome to The Sovereign Guide. I'm your host, Alistair MacDonald. Let's get started.

Speaker 0:08

Do you notice how every second post from an influencer trying to shill something on social media begins with the phrase, "I get asked all the time...," dot, dot, dot, Or, "People often reach out to me and wanna know...," dot, dot, dot. No, they don't. No, they don't. It's just an intro post to get the opportunity to start shilling and promoting your stuff. Make no bones about it. I'm not upset about it. I don't judge it. Having said that having said that, it is true that I get asked all the time this one simple question: "What the hell is it that you do?" Or the cleaner version, "What is it exactly that you do?" My response is typically the same, whether it's sitting on a plane next to somebody or somebody I meet at a conference I speak at. My response tends to be, "About what? About what?" That frustrates them more because of course in the Western world, particularly the United States, we're hellbent on categorizing people according to their work. So once we know their work, we can as- associate some level of income, wealth, power, authority, reputation, impact, what have you. Then we can categorize them further, and then we can assign them a particular spot in the hierarchy of our minds. This doesn't happen in Europe, but it happens in the United States routinely. So it's a reasonable question given that anybody looking at my modest social media profile or what have you would not really be particularly clear on what I do, and I'm gonna explain exactly what I do in the next few minutes, and I'm gonna do it for a couple of reasons. Number one is because I have come to an epiphany of some sort where I realized that what I've been sharing with you here on this channel, this podcast, may not really have made any sense. I hear from several of you to say, "Great. I love them. Keep it going." But I also know that there's probably no real cohesion, no central narrative around which you can organize these thoughts, and so I'm not helping you, and I'm not helping myself either in being able to elucidate that path clearly. I also wanna do it because it will help my thinking in terms of what I share here. The truth is the bulk of what you might have heard on any of these podcasts so far have been, as I say, a meandering kind of smorgasbord, this giant buffet of completely disparate topics from economic cycles to parenting to interest rates, to investment markets, to geopolitics, to conflict in business, to partnerships, to mergers and acquisitions, to exit plans, and so on. All of these things are covered, which would obviously lead one to ask the question, what is it exactly that you do? The other reason that I want to do this is to be very clear about what I don't do, which is to say if you have ever considered reaching out for us to work together or even inquiring about it, I want to be really clear about who I'm really not for. And this is without judgment. It's without any sort of assignment of better or worse, greater or less. Just I'm not really positioned to leverage or make a big difference for you in certain realms. I have a number of channels of contribution in my life. In no particular order, I, together with two incredible business partners that I'm so grateful for, their humility, their contributions, their authenticity, own a number of dental practices in the greater Toronto area. I am not a dentist. I have previously owned a veterinary clinic. I am not a veterinarian. But that is one of my interests. Outside of that, I have a mastermind group that is oriented toward essentially individuals that have practices, which is to say dental practices, veterinary practices, surgical practices, and even most recently, accounting practices. These individuals and I have been working together in this mastermind dynamic now for six years. And it is the source of some of the greatest joy in my life. The quality of these individuals, their intelligence, their contributions, their wisdom just blows me away more and more every single week. We get together twice a year for one of our sovereign gatherings. We just wrapped one up a couple of weeks ago right here in Puerto Rico. And it was as rich and as vibrant as they have always been. Another channel is those of the graduates, essentially, where the sovereign doctor, the sovereign dentist, essentially moves up to conversations that are oriented toward bigger, more interesting problems. This is what I'm increasingly referring to as sovereign guides. These are individuals that themselves are leaders and guides in their own lives, in their families, in their businesses, in their communities. Those that have been called to lead and looking for tools for the world of complex problems. These are a cluster of individuals, all of whom have come through that kind of training, that kind of indoctrination process of the sovereign doctor, the sovereign dentist, to move up to bigger, more interesting, more complicated, and more weighty problems. I think that that's all we can hope for in life. Everybody wants to have no problems. No, you don't. No, you don't. You just don't want the same problems over and over again. And this group of individuals have identified that. They believe, as I do, that the best we can hope for, the actual evidence of expansion and growth and contribution to the world, will be made evident, made true by the presence and emergence of complex problems. The stuff we get to work on, the stuff we get to create and cross-pollinate is absolutely at the center of my own intellectual frontiers, as they are on theirs. Outside of that, I have a small group, a handful, of private clients that I work with in different industries. These individuals make a more meaningful investment in that work, as I do with my contributions toward them. We have specific scheduled time with a very consistent frequency where we get together to solve any and all of the problems that they could possibly pull out of the bag for me. And every single week, I have no idea what they might bring. To say that this keeps me on my own frontier, keeps me sharp and engaged, is an understatement. Finally, I am the chairman of an international counter-wildlife trafficking operation. One that has been in existence for 13 years, that I have been the chairman of, the privilege of being the chairman of now for 11 years. We specifically protect elephants and anchor species in the most high-consequence, low-resource areas of Africa. Currently, eight different national parks in six different countries throughout West and Central Africa. Our work is centered on regions that have been disrupted by collapsing economies. Famine, drought, natural disaster, civil war, terrorism, poverty. This work is extremely complex. We have teams of teams of individuals with incredible talent and backstories, in special operations and intelligence communities scattered throughout West and Central Africa, bringing real change to the communities that are counting on these wildlife species to sustain their own ecosystems. As I say, it's been 11 years now, and, uh, that work has been a true north for so many aspects of my life for so long. It would be hard to imagine not being a part of it. I have been an entrepreneur since I started my first business at 18, turning 19. By now, you might be familiar with some aspects of my story, but it's unlikely you know all of it. But you know enough to know that I'm of course oriented toward that world. Previous iteration of this podcast was called The Full Cycle Entrepreneur. Some of my meanderings have spoken about the cyclicality of the boom bust part of markets and economies and so forth. These are all part of a much larger conversation that I'm having every week, multiple times, with high-performing individuals interested in high impact work, dealing with high consequence environments. The world is awash with experts. Thankfully, experts are here to help fold time for us, help us avoid making unnecessary mistakes. Folding time, as I refer to it, to help me jump ahead and learn from the scar tissue of others. These experts are in multiple domains, but it's been my experience that the bulk of them deal with certain types of problems in the world, and I want to be very clear about what those problems are through the lens with which I see the world, and you can see, and I will show you exactly who and how I can help the most and where I make the biggest difference and who I'm really not for. I believe that there are essentially three types of problems in the world, and certainly in our businesses. You'll recognize these. You deal with them every day. The first are simple problems. Simple problems are called that because the answers to them, the solutions, are known. Simple problems can be resolved by a checklist or some particular protocol. The relationship between cause and effect with a simple problem is obvious to everybody, and there might be even a single best practice way to solve it. There might be a couple, but it can be reduced to a very simple solution. What am I saying? I'm saying that simple problems are linear and most important, repeatable They're repeatable. These are the problems that show up inside your practice, your business all the time. The goal of solving simple problems is consistency and efficacy. I just want to be able to predictably produce the same outcome over time. Nobody carries this flag and promises to fix this more than Michael Gerber's E-Myth, one of the most enlightening and misguided books in the history of entrepreneurship. The E-Myth has an incredibly accurate diagnosis with a horrendously ineffective prescription. I should speak about that maybe another time. What's an example of a simple problem? A flat tire. Changing a flat tire. There's one correct way to do it. You literally can pull out the manual, you know that manual you bought from the business guru? You can pull out the manual, and you can follow it step by step, and you will get not just the result you want, but the same result every time. There is no need to innovate. There is nothing to change. No analysis is required. The only thing really is compliance, compliance with the established procedure. This is how it's done to get where you wanna be. That takes us up to the next tier, complicated problems. Whereas simple problems are known, we know the problem and we know the solution, complicated problems are knowable, but not necessarily simple. It's a technical problem. This is important. The language here is critical. Cause and effect with complicated problems definitely exist, but they're not obvious. So what do we do when we're dealing with a complicated problem for which the answer is not obvious? We need an expert. We need an actual expert that can analyze the system to find the right answer. This might be, say, a particular aspect of the revenue cycle management in your business. It's helpful here to have an expert who can look in from the outside and say, "Here is your procedural problem." Because the nature of complicated problems is that they are logical, super logical, but they're multilayered. They've got multiple components, and so consequently, there might be several good ways to solve it, as opposed to a best practices way, which you get with a simple problem. As opposed to a simple problem, the end goal here, the real objective, is to start optimizing and increasing efficiencies. The simple stuff is solved. it's known. It's predictable. That's what we care about. Complicated, it's we wanna optimize and make more efficient What's an example of a complicated problem? We identified that the example or an example of a simple problem is changing a flat tire. Well, if changing a flat tire is a simple problem, then a complicated problem would be building a commercial jet engine. Unlike the tire, it has millions of parts, it's incredibly difficult, sophisticated equipment and machinery, but it is still ultimately a machine. If you have the right engineers, enough time, you can actually map out every single interaction. So a simple problem is known, a complicated problem is knowable through expert analysis and a procedure. We start stringing together multiple pieces of code or supply chains, et cetera. These are complicated problems. Finally, there is the top of the pyramid, the most sophisticated of problems, the ones that create the biggest downstream negative effects, and when solved, have the biggest upside possibility. These are the complex problems. As opposed to being known or knowable, these are, we could almost think of them as emergent. Complex problems are adaptive problems. Cause and effect are only ever visible when we look back, only in hindsight. We're like, "Oh, that's what did it," or, "That's why it didn't go the way we wanted." Complex systems, excuse me, complex problems live inside living systems, people, financial markets, ecosystems, international trade, negotiations, conflict, all of the areas where the players change their behaviors based on your actions. One party is responding to the other and vice versa. Complex problems are nonlinear, and they're what we could refer to as dispositional, meaning they have a certain probability of going one way or the other, but it is never specific. This whole ecosystem, this giant organization is tilting in one direction or another, but there's, as a result, never a guaranteed outcome. No matter how desperate you are, how adamant, how pressed for change, you can be assured of zero guarantees, no assurances that this is gonna go the way you want. The goal for complex problems, all we can hope for is resilience or what we might think of as anti-fragility. But most importantly The thing that nobody pays attention to, I alluded to in a previous episode, pattern recognition. Want an example of a complex problem? Try raising a child. Try managing a team of humans. No manual. There's no manual that works every time, but the gurus have got one to sell you. The experts, the coaches have got just the thing. Haven't you noticed that these do not solve complex problems? You know how many individuals reach out to me and tell me their problems as if it's the first time it's ever existed in the world? And I ask them what they've tried previously, and they say, "Well, I bought Jim Bob's system." That system is built for complicated problems. It's like reaching out to a software engineer because your business partnership is collapsing. It's not going to work. to give you an idea of what complex problems look like in the face of all of your expectations, think about your first and second child. What worked for your first child might very well fail radically with your second. You can't fix a child like a jet engine. You can't switch out a part like a flat tire. You've got to investigate. You've got to probe. You've got to try a certain approach, a parenting style, a sense you've got to develop of how they see the world, how they've reacted to previous rewards and punishments. You've got to respond. You have to adapt your approach. As I say, resilience, I would add adaptability and pattern recognition. To compare all three of these, we could basically say, okay, a simple problem is the recipe, and the only thing that needs to happen is the cook, the chef needs to be compliant. They need to follow the instructions because if X, then always Y. Complicated problems, that's a rocket, and we're gonna need some expertise. In this case, if X, then usually Y, but we'll need to run some experiments. A complex problem, that's a garden, an economy. What's required here is not compliance, and even expertise is not going to help you. How could I possibly be qualified to own a veterinary hospital or a dental practice? It is not compliance, and it's not expertise. It is judgment. Judgment We said simple, if X, then Y, always. Great. Complicated, if X, then usually Y. We'll run a few experiments. Complex, if X, then let's see how the system reacts, and keep running scenarios. What has this got to do with you? What has it got to do with me? On your entrepreneurial journey, you will move from broke, desperate, ignorant, to sophisticated, powerful, and resourceful. What passes for most business mentorship, guidance, coaching, and so forth, is entirely oriented around simple and complicated problems. I have these. I have these in my business. You have them in yours. And that's fine, and there is a standing army of individuals that wanna sell you just the thing. This is the person that'll say to you, "Well, what you need is my nine-step process to get more patients." Or, "What I've got for you is my 27-step protocol that's going to turn your associate doc into a rockstar future business partner." Zero chance. Do you spot why? Because it's got one of those things in it that makes a complicated problem complex. It's got a human involved. Look at all of the problems inside your business right now. You might think, because people will tell you that because they've got solutions to sell you, that what you need is a checklist. What you need, this is one of my favorites, is a script. Yes, that's the problem. You must have a script for the people answering your phones because a script obviously is always gonna cover every... No, it's not. Why? Because it's got a human involved. In medicine, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice, yet this happens constantly. What you need is dot, dot, dot. So you are sold these products, and you are sold on them as being the panacea. I am not against these products. I'm a big fan. I have checklists of my own, protocols of my own for simple problems. I also have ways of investigating, auditing, inquiring where my complicated problems are breaking down. The expertise that I don't have, I have to hire and find and bring in and authorize and empower to go in there and fix and help me discover where it's broken But there is nobody to help you with the complex problems. And the danger is every time you think that you can solve a complex problem with a complicated tool, you are not just setting yourself up for frustration and crappy results, but you are probably wasting either massive talent from the humans on your team or massive amounts of time with the wrong people on your team. I don't work with the simple problems inside individuals' businesses, and it's absolutely not because I am above it. It's not because I don't have them. It's just that they bore me to tears. I can and am and do get involved in complicated problems because I have them too. But the world that I really love are the complex problems. Back in the spring of twenty twenty-two, I had all of my docs come out to meet up in Nashville, Tennessee, and we followed the usual format. Friday was all about business practice stuff, and I had kind of a come to Jesus moment on Friday night, as they call it. The moment where I realized that I couldn't really continue on in good conscience. I couldn't continue to do this without becoming some form of a dancing monkey, somebody trying to teach the same stuff over and over again and pretending that it's exciting for me or useful for you. I stayed up late that night, and I realized that when I met with these incredible docs the next day, these people that have become very dear personal friends of mine, I had to speak the truth, even if it was going to end this working relationship and fold the entire mastermind down. Saturday morning, eight thirty, everyone's got their coffee, room's buzzing. I walk out to begin our proceedings, and I opened with a truth That was a complete Russian roulette gamble. I stood up in front of these people that are so dear to me, and I said, "We've been working together now for a little over two years. There is not a problem in your business, in your practice that we have not solved, not a tool that you still need that we don't have, not a strategy or an answer to any sort of puzzle that might emerge inside your day-to-day practice. And I'm here to tell you with love And with respect, I'm as tired of your problems as you are. The room fell silent. And I'll be honest, I got this kind of twist in my gut. I thought, oh man, what have you done now? And there was a chuckle and another laugh in the back. But you could have heard a pin drop. And then a clapping started. A clapping, laughter, and the whole room erupted. That moment was a fundamental shift in their and my own journey. April 2022. I couldn't continue on doing the same stuff, solving the same problems, and pretending it was okay that we stayed there. I just couldn't. And they couldn't either. I got a sense that if I can't sustain this, who else can? What are we doing? And is this my lot in life? That I'm going to be out there just solving the same problems for different people for the rest of my life? That sounded like a nightmare. And so in that moment, I try to invite them to join me on an entirely new frontier, diving into the world of complex problems. Almost to a person, they came up to me over the course of the next day, day and a half, and shared some version of this. Alistair, the truth is, I thought this was my last meeting. I feel like I got everything I needed. But this, I'm in for. Or, you put language around something I was feeling, but wasn't able clearly state. Thank you. They had reached a point where they were tired of their problems too. But they needed somebody on the outside to give them a little gentle nudge to ask themselves how much longer they're going to choose to stay exactly where they're at. Because I knew I couldn't. What followed from that was an explosion of creativity and tools and conversations as we've dived into the world of the complex. So, I can help you if you have complicated problems. And I have some patience for your simple problems. What I can't have patience for, to the extent that I can ever work with you or help you with your business, is to know that you have a tool that you're choosing not to use. Or know that you have a solution to your complicated problem that you're meaningfully and deliberately overlooking or ignoring. And saying that you want help. I can't participate in that. Because you shouldn't either. And I can only say this out of respect. In fact, for me to participate in you spooning up every night and cuddling up on your favorite problems, the ones that you love so much you never want to let them go. Would be an injustice. I can't do that to myself either, And I cannot in good faith allow those that I care about, that I say I care about, that I work for and with to do it either. It would be unconscionable. I started training in Brazilian jujitsu in two thousand, twenty-six years ago, and it has been a source of unbelievable value, not just metaphoric, but in so many ways in my life. And I was just a white belt, actually, a, a mature white belt nudging on blue when I had an incredible experience. Like most, I had been moving through my journey toward black belt, never really thinking I was gonna get there. After all, they say something like one and a half to two percent of those who begin jujitsu end up getting their black belt. Never actually thought I would. I thought I would top out at purple. At the time, there were hardly any black belts. Now they're everywhere. But I thought, I was just, "I'm gonna follow the path everyone else is doing." Go to class, learn techniques. Go to class, learn a move. Learn a move, learn a move, stick them all together, and I'll make my way there. But one day, I attended a very casual seminar by a man named Mark, and Mark came in. You could tell he had hopped in on the mat. He was not typically an instructor. The main instructor had said to him, "Hey, I've got something come up. Can you jump in and just teach these kind of white, white and blue belts?" And Mark came in, he's like, "Okay, sure," um, and he went to teach, uh, one of his favorite moves. But the way that he taught it changed everything about how I learn and have learnt ever since. He started from the end position. In this case, for the geeks out there, having passed the open guard in sight control, and he reversed the move to where we begin. I didn't know if he was high, if he had a head injury. I don't know what his thinking was. I'd never seen this before. Turns out he had no real experience teaching. He was just a legit badass black belt himself who had only ever learnt for his own consumption. He hadn't really taught anything. But what he revealed was how he sees things, which is moving from the end point backwards. That changed everything. I watched not just what he taught, but the concepts to making it happen, which is the only things that emerge when we reverse engineer something. And I was addicted On the way home, I was driving and I had this realization that the vast bulk of the world spends their lives, in the case of jujitsu, watching everyone was, you know, watching DVDs at the time. What's the latest technique that this guy is doing or this guy is doing? Look at this move called the De La Riva, named after De La Riva. There's a clue there. All of us is bolting together this checklist, this protocol, this script, this idea, this tactic. It was tactic, tactic, tactic. But I realized that I had just been mentored upstream beyond tactic, beyond strategy to concept. Ever since then, I have focused on concepts. When I teach jujitsu, when I teach business partnerships, investment protocols, anything and everything, I start with concepts. Why? Because once you understand principles, first principles, once you understand concepts, you can devise your own strategy. Not just that, but you can come up with your own tactic, your checklist, your script, your protocol, your thumbprint on your business. If you understand concepts, if you spend the bulk of your time on principles, you will have become De La Riva, who invented the De La Riva guard. Start with principles, move to strategy, roll out tactics. That's what I do. Why do I do that? As I say, I have simple problems, I have complicated ones just like you do, but it's the complex problems that are most interesting for me. That's where I spend the bulk of my time. So if you are trying to understand how any of this is connected, this giant necklace I'm trying to thread together, what you have experienced with these intermittent, bizarre, sporadic podcasts that I've put out have been evidence of that. When I am talking about the impact of tariffs on global trade, when I speak to the origins of the Shia philosophy and theology, when I jump to partnerships and talk about it at the macro conceptual level of first principles, I am showing you the kinds of conversations and work that I get to do with those that are tired of their same problems too, that have taken responsibility for languishing in the simple and the complicated, and invited themselves to a higher level of operating in the world of the complex. That's what I do. What you might have heard about the podcast on Blood versus Oil is an offcut, so to speak, of the work that I do with the sovereign guides to turn those conversations, those complex problems, into actionable business insights, so that we can come away from our weekend together in Puerto Rico or get off of our call, our digital campfire on Friday that we do live every week, with actionable insights to deploy in our lives and businesses. And here's the most compelling thing of all. You can build a perfectly functional, profitable, respectable business by bolting together a Frankenstein of all of the experts and gurus and so forth out there, and very little of you will be in that. Haven't you noticed? If we're all doing what everyone else is doing, listening to all the same experts everyone else is listening to, copying that, we're just a franchise, man. You're just a franchise with your own logo. Now, I don't judge this. I look at it and say it's tragic, because if you got into business for yourself, it was for yourself, to leave your thumbprint on the world, to have the team of yours deal with people the way you deal with people, to deliver products and services in a way that you wanted to consume them. If we keep doing what everyone else is doing, you're gonna look like everyone else is. You're gonna get the results everyone else is getting, and it's not even gonna be yours. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that you get to the end of a business built by bolting together the spare parts and Frankensteinian contributions of others, and go home to your spouse and your kids where you have applied nothing new, where there is no growth and progress. When in fact, the problems that are inside your business, specifically the complex problems, can also... the solutions for those are the exact same templates, philosophies, concepts, and principles that you will take home to your family. When you understand the difference between why your reprimands do not change outcomes in your business, and see how it's connected to the teenager that you're trying to navigate reprimands as well, and it's equally as ineffective, do you think maybe it's time for a concept upgrade? Once you live in the world, or at least live in the world, you spend as much time in the world of the complex as you are courageously willing to do As you can do, as much as you can, the rest of the stuff is easy. In fact, it's boring. You will soon get bored with it, but you will have a reason to get it solved 'cause you wanna rush back to the complex. You wanna actually spend time, as we do, talking about the kinds of things that make a really big difference and ask a lot more. It's not just about, "Hey, what's your process for, you know, getting somebody to a manager?" Now we're talking about jurisdictional arbitrage, international tax optimization, strategic allocations of physical assets, and maybe decentralized currencies. Amassing wealth but maintaining autonomy, sovereignty of finances, sovereignty of mind, where you're building an audit overshield for your business. You've got cash flow arbitrage, revenue cycle management solutions that you've created for yourself. This is what makes business fun. You stay down there with the simple and the complicated problems, and you keep being seduced by individuals that are profiting from you staying there, and you're gonna be miserable. Haven't you noticed how many successful miserable people there are? Haven't you noticed how those that defer joy don't get better at joy? You ever wondered where the angry old man came from that's sitting on his porch yelling at the kids to stay off his lawn? How does that happen? You're like, "You're 90 years old, man. When are you gonna be happy? What have you got to be mad about?" What he's got to be mad about is that he spent the last 90 years deferring joy, mistaking the seduction of hustle and grind for joy in the future. You get good at what you practice a lot. If you're deferring joy a lot, if you're sacrificing time with your family now, you will get good at those things. This hustle fetish of today's environment is so, so pervasive, and it's poisonous. It's poisonous, and it's unnecessary. It is, as I've explained in my previous episodes on mastery, an anti-mastery plan. If you are still hustling and grinding 10 years in, you have definitively not improved at all. At all. How will we know that you're on the road to mastery? If you are doing the same stuff faster 10 years from now, you will hate your life Haven't you noticed? You know that person who's doing that, waiting for the big check, and then I'm out of here. These people are most commonly identified as those that cannot wait for, quote, their big exit, paying no attention to the fact that the big in big exits ended four years ago. It is my definition of mastery that the only way we know we are on track for mastery is if we can create the same or better results in less time. The sovereigns that I had the privilege of working with are focused on just that, creating margin in their lives. Not so they can slacken off at the beach. I've tried that. It gets old very quickly. So that they can step out onto new frontiers, run new experiments, test drive different ideologies and avatars and products and businesses. That's what business is meant to do for you. The alternative is what it's apparently doing to you. This is what I do, and this is my focus, and this is why I can do this till my dying day. The world is awash with complex problems, and what I love is that it is the world of the unknown, just high and low probabilities, no certainty, no guarantees, and that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of it. If you have simple problems, there are simple solutions. Don't disrespect yourself by being seduced into some ten-year-long or five-year-long commitment to solving them. Especially in an age of AI, those things can be solved by Tuesday morning. Giddy up. If you have complicated problems, I can help you. But I'll help you with one condition, that you will get those solved as fast as you can so that we can move you on to more interesting, better, more complex problems. On that condition, what I'm getting at is that I will invite you in to my Sovereign Doc curriculum and accelerated program of conceptual and principle-based learning and acceleration. So long as you are actually committed to creating more margin in your life, in whatever capacity that could be. More practices, more things, great. More time commitments, less mastery. I want to remind you of a principle that I shared just an episode or two ago. Your problem set will be defined by the capabilities of those you lead. Your team will not be any more capable than you create an environment for them to become. There's lots more here. But this is what I do. It's how I see the world, and it's why you've got this weird medley of topics over all these years. I am sharing this because as I touched on in the beginning, there's an element of discovery for me. I realized that I dropped these random, what I think of as pearls or ideas for your consumption, but I'm not stitching them together. every time you hear me share something that might be at the macro or micro level, you'll notice I have a bias for the complex because it's the complex stuff that keeps you up at night. It's not the absence of a protocol. And if it is, go back to sleep. You can fix that in 30 minutes. To make more sense of this and to save you some more time on your life, this has really taken more of your attention than I meant to. In the next couple of episodes, I'm going to give you a specific example of the difference of what happens when we start to investigate concepts and principles instead of just needing to be told what to do. What I'm going to walk you through is a very simple example of something you do all the time that continues to yield miserable results. Having laid this down, you know my instinct is to start with the complexity because then the complicated and the simple become exactly that, simple. Also, when you do that, it looks like you. It's got your signature. And that's what I want. I don't want my language and thumbprints all over your business. I want yours. Just like I want mine on mine. What I have to share with you didn't come from business school. It didn't come from a degree. I don't have one. I have no experience in university or college. And I'm so grateful for that. Though my route might have been a longer one than it needed to be, it was exactly as long as I wanted it. Because the tools and concepts and so forth that I teach came from the workshop of my life. They work. They had to work. They work for me. They've made an amazing life for me and those I love and support in my family. And I wish the same for you. I hope this makes sense. Let's move on to more interesting problems. I'll be there whenever you're ready.

Speaker 2 42:58

That's it for this episode. Thanks for being here. Hey, there's only two things that you have in your life, your time and your attention. That you've given both to me for these few minutes of today means everything. Cheers.