S2 E13: Becoming Driven with Dr Doug Brackmann

Honey, I Blew up the Business. Wow. We've got a killer podcast from Dr. Doug Brackman. One of my favorite books I read in the last year I was gifted it by my cousin was the book Driven, authored by Doug. He's a psychologist. He's got two PhDs. He's an author of understanding and harnessing the genetic gifts shared by entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs, pro athletes, and maybe you. Yes, you, dear listener, I'm a Driven. I think many entrepreneurs are a driven, and so this is a great gift. Also somewhat of a curse. The way that this is framed in the book Driven is something that I think we can all really learn from. He's got a forthcoming book, actually, called Sheep, Wolves and Shepherds. His specialization is helping highly driven individuals take back control of their lives. Something I could have done with When I blew my business up. I'm Dan Kirby, your host of Honey, I Blew up the Business. Because that's what I did. I didn't have control of my lives. In this podcast, we'll get really into how you can do that. How to own your wolf, he calls it. I. My wolf blew my business Up. I turned it around, though. Thank you, Tech department, my business. They sponsor this podcast, by the way. Thank you, guys. We turned it around. We nearly lost it, but we turned it around. Now it's better than ever. I don't want to do all that again. That's why I'm speaking to Doug. That's why I'm speaking to all these guests. I'm trying to help me, Frankly, I run a business. I don't run a podcast really full time. This is a side gig. I'm trying to help you specifically because if you're an entrepreneur and you're listening to this, you will be confronting a lot of difficult, often isolating experiences. And my mission is to help you to build a tribe, a community around this podcast of people who can help each other. And if you like that mission, then you can help me, because you know how it works. The algorithm, if you give us a five star review, will promote our podcast to other entrepreneurs and other founders will learn and be able to get some support from what we're doing. So help me help you and help other people like us do a good thing, Become part of the community. Without further ado, let's get into today's podcast. Exciting. It's Friday and we're gonna have a podcast. Ready? Three, two, one. Welcome to the podcast. Dr. Doug Brackman. He's here, dialing in live and direct from. Well, where are you? The west coast of the usa. I was in San Diego for years and years and years and I moved to Nashville, Tennessee about four years ago, three and a half years ago, right before COVID So aha, that, that. There we go. So I, I didn't actually know I knew you were in San Diego, but like, but Nashville, home of the music, very, very exciting. Yeah, yeah. It's mid middle us and I absolutely love it. Very, very different and the people are much about a. It took me at least a year, year and a half to actually learn how to drive again without all the urgency and chaos around me of Los Angeles and San Diego. So it's been, it's been quite an adjustment to a much slower life. But now I, now I'm into it. It's wonderful. Well, as a highly driven person driving fast around Los Angeles, we don't want to have that mixture. Oh my life. Doug here has written an incredible book and he's got a forthcoming book which I hope to get into, but the book called Driven. He is driven and I would identify as a quote driven. I was actually gifted this book by my cousin who sent me a copy just randomly out of nowhere. I've not even spoken to him for several years. After I'd completed a multi day ultramarathon event last year there was, let's call it highly requiring a high drive about how am I drive to get around the damn thing? It was in the Sahara desert. It was kind of quite out there. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I did it and he said hahaha, check this out, you're one of these. And sent me the book and Driven, which we'll explain what sort of goes in that in a second. And I subsequently gifted this book a good half dozen times. And it's a really, I would say important book, particularly for entrepreneurs. The audience listening to this podcast, you will be a driven. And so I'm going to get into all that, what is a Driven, how that all works and what have you. And we'll hopefully get onto the new book and where I want to jump off actually is that I've heard you say that this book is an attempt to explain yourself or to work with yourself. And I read sort of in your late teens, you realize you had to do a lot of self work before you started dishing out advice to other people. So what was your self work that was going on My origin story. So yeah, I did, I wrote Driven. So I'm not alone. That's truly the impetus for it. And if any psychologist ever Tells you they don't get into psychology to figure out their own book bs, they're lying. So as I often say, driven. We have to do the work and I'll talk about what the work is, but we have to become self reflective or we literally blow up our lives. And often we blow up our lives to the point that we have to look at ourselves. So it's, it's kind of a self fulfilling. But I, yes I, at 16, 14, really 12, I go back before that second grade, I remember vividly sitting in my classroom and feeling very clear that why don't these people understand how much crap, how this is stupid, how this is not really a good use of our time. They were being trained to be compliant little creatures where my nature is not to be compliant. You know, we buck the system. And so it, it became very clear to me that I didn't feel, nor did I sense that I fit in. And that kind of theme ran through my life until at 17, I discovered how to ether base free base cocaine. And that absolutely just from the first time I smoked coat came to a lock psych ward was less than four months. So it was very, very quickly evident that I was not in control of my life. That the, when we get into this, the elephant literally was taking me for a ride and I couldn't get off. So at 17, 18, I, after dropping out of high school and literally blowing up my life, nearly killing myself, went into a lock psych ward. And about four or five days into the lock psych ward as the amphetamine psychosis cleared, it quickly became apparent to me that I wasn't crazy. And you know, there was something going on with me that, that was different than most. And, and then I went into addiction recovery. And very quickly I was maddocked and had all these new labels for what I thought I might be. But very quickly got realized that not having an education and not having a path forward was not going to work. So I went back to high school, finished very quickly and then went into undergrad and discovered psychology. And this was the late 80s, early 90s is when I started graduate school. And they came out with a Time magazine article that talked about for the first time the dopamine receptor number 2drd2a1 allele gene. And that set this course of really trying to deeply understand what the hell was going on with me and why. There were certain people, I guess somewhere between 3%, 8% of the general population that have a very similar personality construct. But we all feel very unique and very different and very out of the herd of human beings, we are different. And when I finally put this all together in 2010, 2011, and was just reading everything I could, this guy Tom Hartman, who coined the hunter farmer theory, just spoke to my soul like there's an explanation, you know, there's a logical reason why I am the way I am. And for the first time in my life I started to put this together, that I was not broken, that I was not, you know, mentally ill, so to speak. That there is a damn good reason that we exist on this planet and we're incredibly important for this planet. So it culminated in Driven. And it's ever since writing Driven, which came out 2017, the research has continued. And my next book is really looking at, you know, first Driven was written to the drivens. This one is written about drivens and how we, you know, really it's a call to action. We need to step into society. So some of the listening to your story, they're kind of, you've had this, you were this misfit that channel this energy into sort of self destruction and you kind of very quickly kind of, that's quite a good quick turnaround. Four months. Yeah, well done. That's like a. You're gonna like, you're gonna like blow yourself up. And interesting side note, in 1981 I was 14 years old, 13 years old, and by chance was on vacation with my family and went to Picadilly, went to London. Oh wow. Saw the punks and I said that is what sings to my soul. And wound up going to 250, 300 punk shows and, and it fit in with that misfit out, you know, outcast. And so it's, it's been my theme ever since. That's so interesting. I had a punk phase when I was in my mid to late teens. Again it spoke to me very much that kind of outsider looking in, you know, the whole kind of sticking up the two fingers and you know everybody like that's kind of like I've always been, that's been me. And I think probably a lot of people listen to this. Are the, a lot of entrepreneurs are the kind of outsiders looking in or the people that don't quite fit in. And this is sort of the driven, you know, you sort of this almost 20, 30 year exploration period from the blow up of your mid teens and the sort of self destruction kind of mode to sort of exploring and doing the work to understand what you are and what you can then do with that. And I do want to come back to that sort of what you do with that piece. So how do you sort of summarize what is a driven person so simply? We are. Well, theory goes four or five thousand years ago, most of the human species adapted to the agricultural revolution. And if you think about what the agricultural revolution did, as a species, we went from small hunter gatherer groups of maybe 30, 40, 60 people at the most, into these massive societies. And the brain, because we are an adaptive animal, human beings are the brain adapted to a sedentary, predictable, safe world. And that sedentary, predictable, safe world. Think about a W2 job. It is, you know, routine. You do the same thing every day and it's, it's basically a farmer. And they're very risk adverse. They love predictability. What worked yesterday is going to work tomorrow. So let's don't change anything. And it's kept them alive. And Tom Hartman, it was very clear he had a profoundly add, ADHD son, was trying to understand why this very resilient set of behaviors would constantly come back. And he, you know, he actually went into germ theory and talked about how germs also have, you know, 1%, 5% of germs have this very unique, different way of interacting with the environment because the environment changes. And so basically, you know, germs waiting for the next ice age, or human beings waiting for the next ice age to come and blow up, the agricultural revolution was the ADD or the ADHD person. And so, you know, from a very simple understanding, you know, driven, we are the ones that will survive with the zombie apocalypse. We are the ones that will survive when the farming, predictable, safe world goes away. And so we are, you know, we are the ones, we are the change agents in society. So we're incredibly important. And what, you know, the brain structure changes. Very simply, most people coming out of all the massive volumes of ADD and ADHD literature, you put a normal 90, 95% of the population in a functional MRI, you see the front left, so the front left part of the brain lights up, which is the executive function of the brain, left prefrontal. And it's the logical, linear, rational, executive decision maker. And so they see the world as a series of sequential steps. You put your finger in the ground, you put a little corn in it, you add it, you water it, you wait patiently for it to grow. When it finally grows, you can harvest it. And then when it's harvested, you can, you put us in the functional MRI driven cdd, adhd, the back of our heads light up and so we use our eyeballs as the dominant part of our, our sensory system to go through the world rather than our thinking. Byproduct of that is we have something called hypo frontality or, or an underactive left prefrontal little dots of energy all across our frontal lobe. And so this is where you know, the, the farmers of the world have three maybe five concepts in their brain at the same time. Where drivens, maybe seals in particular, people that are highly driven. 7 to 13. So we are literally having three times as much thinking happening at the same time in our brains. Wow. And I used to call this the entrepreneurial mind. And you know, we, we see connections between various concepts at the same time. Where farmers, you know, don't makes us very tangential and very, you know, different thinking. You know, me sitting in that second grade class, like what the hell? It just didn't make sense to me. Like where's the through line for this logical reasoning that they're using? They, they look to me like a tangential little bouncing rubber ball of energy and just. I needed to sit down and be quiet. Yeah. It's so funny because you get. Suddenly you become the problem, right. And you one oh, you'd be perceived as a problem. And I've had this a bit on my. Even recently actually. I was kind of. I'm. I'm like that I have like 25 different tangential thoughts simultaneously and you know, 99 of them are just ridiculous. And then one of them is like amazing, amazing. And you have that kind of very much that. But you have this situation where you start to feel like you're the pain in the ass, you're the difficult one, you're the this, you're that and you have this sort of really. Well, I, I'm not. Well, you. I have this feeling I'm very lucky because I've kind of engineered my life where I've got, I've got a good support system now and a good tribe of people I knock around with. But can you speak on that? This the knock on effect across the shadow side of that. The brain is just one small part of how we're different. It's really our reward system is what gets us in the most trouble. So the dopamine receptor DRG2A1 allele gene 1991, Time magazine. Oh my God. We found the alcoholism gene. Turns out that that gene is actually associated with a whole host of other things. It is the boredom gene. Very simply, it is. The farmers don't feel bored watching things grow where we as driven immediately feel this sensation in our body that there's something missing or wrong or needed in the present moment. And really the. You know, why I believe driven is important as a concept to really take to heart for driven people is that our identities are so different than the farmers. And you know, as society went from these hunter gatherer groups, where you had to be good at a whole lot of different things if you were going to survive in the wild, where in society you can become a butcher or a baker or candlestick maker, you can become this very narrow, specialized thing, identity, and you put us in a functionality and our identities, we don't have that simple identity all over the maps. So, so in kind of like a very simple terms, you've got someone who's going to be an expert in depth at a particular field, be it butchering, butchering, baking or candlestick making. They have to sit and study and go real deep on a single thing. Whereas somebody like a driven or entrepreneur is kind of going, what about this? What about, oh, I'm going to go down a wormhole over here. And, you know, you should Explore, as Navy SEALs say it, you know, we, we are, you know, masters of everything we, we. Anything that lights this dopamine, anything that gets us excited, we can just dive deep on until it becomes boring, until we get pretty good at it. And then it's like, yeah, but, yeah, but what about this and what about that? But what gets driven really in trouble is this lack of identity. You know, we go into a typical psychologist's office, we can look crazy because we're all over the maps and we're impulsive and we're. But more importantly, we don't have a logical identity. But what is the most consistent thing that I have felt all my life is there's something missing or wrong in the world. Possibly something missing or wrong with me and that core of my identity, you know, that that is a feeling, that's a sense that there's something missing or wrong with me. And then we have a society on top of that that looks at us like, yeah, there's something missing or wrong with you. You're impulsive, you got too many hobbies, your, your resume. Look, every 18 months you change jobs. Like, what is wrong with you? Why can't you just stick with something which confirms that inner feeling of mine and that that's, you know, these are the addictive genetics. Because any, anything that actually makes me feel satiated, I can become addicted to, and cocaine is one of them. And I haven't touched it 37 years now. And it, it is, you know, the message of me and you know, driven is, is there's nothing wrong with you. And doing the work is really taking apart that identity and coming up with a new way of actually being in the world, of experiencing the world as a driven person. And you know, I, I do it in driven. You know, you want to send a driven person to hell is ask them, try, ask them to figure out who they are because it's, who are you? It's like, well, I don't wait. And I simply answer the question and driven with it, with what you are. And what you are very simply is a Homo sapien. You're an animal, you're a monkey. And then with some biological understanding about how work and, and those things, very quickly driven becomes a massive superpower because we're not locked into the simple farming world way of thinking. And we can start to harness this drive and really channel this drive into, into outcomes that are way beyond what a farmer can do. So this is, this is I think a great jumping off point, the channeling of the energy, the, the focus, the, the drive. And you, you touched on in passing the, about the elephant. And there's a couple of things here, Just, just again, my brain is now hypo functioning like sparking up because a few things. The work, right, the elephant, the channeling of this stuff, okay, Just, just like if we're going to work on ourselves, how do we kind of make all this sort of, how do we make all this fit together? What, what, what is the elephant, the elephant metaphor is, is the first explanation that I could find about how human beings work. And it comes from Buddha, Buddhism, Siddharthra, he was a, he was just another psychologist. You know, they turned him into a messiah figure, which is unfortunate. I'm sure he would have hated that. But he observed that human beings are very much like an Indian elephant with a whole bunch of monkeys up on top trying to control it. And this was my doctoral dissertation, actually this was my doctoral work, was, was about self sabotage. And so what, what is this elephant and monkey metaphor? And it very simply, it's why does January suck at the gym? Because everybody's monkey mind is temporarily controlling the elephant. And you got these gorillas up in your head banging on the elephant, telling, go to the gym. And then you got cheerleaders up there and you know, go, come on, go to the gym. But what happens? Typically, I just did this research again to update a slide and by February 14, Valentine's Day, US 78% of people don't even remember their New Year's resolutions. They go back to sleep. So what's happening there is this battle between the monkeys and the elephant and who's really in charge. And you know the classic Buddhism question is, is, you know, well, where are you in that? Where is Dan or Doug in that? Are you the monkeys? Are you the elephant? And I give the answer in driven. It's obviously both and then I capitalize and. And underlap it because you're obviously both and neither. And it's that third element where all the work happens and that third element, you know, and they've been talking about it for 30, 40,000 years. You have mind, body and soul. The joke I always say, if anyone ever tells you they have the soul thing figured out, run. Because it's a cult. It is not. And so that third element. And if you read David Goggins or any of the other great drivens, you see and what you just did in, you know, your ultra and I did iron man's for 10 years. I triathlete as it's a challenge to our souls to overcome the resistance of our body. Not listening or buying the monkey mind BS that is trying to tell you that's. Do you know what? Right, I'm just going to. Little interjection on here. Yeah. Here's what happened with me. This, this big race I did. I was never a runner. Quotes on quotes. I got presented with the opportunity to do the. It's known as the world's toughest foot race. Yeah, yeah. Six marathons, seven days in the Sahara, self sufficient. You carry all your own gear and food and stuff. And I was like, yeah. And I was like, initially, yeah, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And then I was like, no, no, no. Actually, you know, I could, I could say yes. And this was like. This was like a kind of wrestling with my soul. Like my body was like physically I wasn't capable. I'd never done anything like that before. I was like, nah, this is going to happen. Because my kind of soul was like, yeah, are you going to do this? And that's. And I completed it last year. Now the point being is this whole. This, this is the work, right? And me doing that thing, fine, whatever. That's not the point. Point here. But Goggins and what have you. Fine. But the point is the work, the observer, the awareness of this elephant and the monkeys fighting the odd. I've been calling it the awareness muscle or my awareness muscle. The Work I'm doing like the workout. It's like, like doing the work to get my awareness muscle hench so I can actually deal with the damn elephant and the damn monkeys. Could you just talk on, on that? What was the work in that context for you? You know, as you said, it is a muscle and soul strength, you know, this capacity to, to observe your thoughts. And if you're driven, there's a lot of them and you know, and then you can see the impulsive elephant and which one are you? And it's that neither muscle, that ability to step back and see the fleshly resistance and fears and, you know, the reactions and not get on the thought trains going in our head that, you know, try to convince us to, you must do this or you don't do that. And it's in that third element that you are able to actually change, you know, is what it's all about. Yeah, And I think this is what, what I really resonated actually was your line in the book where it's. You actually say you should ask quotes. What am I doing? Not as an accusation, but a cure piece of curiosity. And that really resonated with me because I thought like, yeah, because oftentimes you sort of like body reaction or monkey reaction kind of thing. Did you speak on that gap? They observe a gap. The question finally coming to truth, you know, and if you're driven, it seems so obvious that you're really not in control of your life. But for farmers, that is, that is like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? You're not in control of your life because it, it's as an addict or as a, you know, as a person that clearly sees that most people are being driven by and acting as agents of their elephant and the monkey mind. And this is where the most recent psychology research is really coming to the forefront. Thank God that we're really not in control of their lives. And, you know, the elephant, this was my doctoral dissertation. The elephant and the monkeys have two competing goals. The monkey mind can create unbelievable worlds, you know, airplanes and cell phones and can imagine, you know, sea of naked women with all the money in the world. Every need you ever want met. But the elephant being a much older system, once the familiar. And I looked at, you know, lottery winners and all my work with entrepreneurs over the last 15, 20 years, are basically lottery winners. Their monkey minds can come up with unbelievably genius things, but their elephant doesn't know how to handle the success that you can create, more importantly, or the safety and security that you can create, we get bored of it. And as your title of your podcast says, we blow it up. Observer, though, to really feel this impulsive elephant and then become curious about what are you doing without the judgment, without the, you know, assumptions that you know what you're doing. It's called humility. And humility is the real work of raw curiosity. And, you know, what am I doing? And you take a breath, learn how to relax the elephants a little bit, manage that impulsivity, and then you become curious about what am I doing? What are, you know, as I teach my daughters, what you feel and what you think has zero impact on your life, what you do. And if you do the behavior and you get the outcomes, you have that life. And as a driven person that becomes, you know, it is a very simple thing to survive in this world. And as I say in driven, and I say much more clearly in my next book, we are wired for a chaotic world. We're wired for a world that's incredibly difficult to survive in. That's why you go run six marathons in six days. It's where we, as driven people feel most alive, the pinnacle of challenge. And, you know, but what are you doing? You're running. What are you doing? Another Iron man for. What are you doing? And you know, I sold my drive by. I sold it all when my daughter was 2. Because it's that curiosity around, what am I doing? Yeah, yeah. And I think that's really important. I think it's just. It's just a direct, very deep question when she kind of get like, sort of the observer, the awareness. But actually I get curiosity of like, what are you doing? And it's a good question because I look back and think, what was I doing? Because I actually, it was like some sort of fever dream I had in the desert is like, what was that all about? And, you know, so I really resonate with this and what I want to get into actually now because I think we've sketched out this sort of terrain and this powerful set of forces that are sort of roiling within us. And maybe you can kind of start to sort of direct or channel or control or ride the elephant a bit neater. But how does we. How do we channel that drive? What would we do with this energy? Because again, this, I think this is something I died is blow up. And it was. I mean, a lot of it, I think, was to do with, you know, actually the reason for my blow up in my business wasn't. I don't think the Kind of boredom thing. But I think at some point I just wanted to just, just in the middle of it, almost break it all even more. It was a weird damn psychology of like the chaos was like, actually this is kind of. I'm sort of enjoying this. Let's just make it worse. So I want to get. So there's this sort of shadow side which I'd like to think sort of talk about on this podcast of entrepreneurship. Like there's kind of, yeah, lots of success, but there's also this dark demons and angels kind of competing. So how do we kind of channel this drive, the drivenness. And perhaps this is help, help you go into your new book. Perhaps. Yeah, this, this will get pretty deep pretty quick. The unconscious is not a mystery. It's right below your nose. It's the elephant. And a passion of mine is really understanding trauma and trauma, healing and trauma. The hippies are right. And I'm, I won't quote Sid Vicious, but I'm not a hippie. But the hippies are right. The trauma is recorded in the body. And our shadow, Carl Jung said, is our body. And is this particularly for driven, you know, and the imposter syndrome is probably, probably one of the best examples of it that no matter, you know, getting finishing dual PhD and having Dr. Jim Spire in my doctoral dissertation chair shake my hand. Congratulations, Dr. Brackman. First time I ever got called doctor. My inner world, my body, the elephant sent these massive signals up that my monkey mind interpreted as haha, he bought it because it didn't feel the way I thought it should. I still felt this emptiness. I felt this kind of lack. I felt like not enough. And it's in that not enough that, that all of the work happens and you know, what am I doing? Am I trying to get rid of this feeling by doing more, by running more, by earning more, by, you know, getting another wife. I mean there's there, there's a lot of ways that drivens try to get rid of this deep ache in their soul and their body that they're, they're not enough. And it's the change of identity that I find and that really helps most. But then channeling that energy into, as I do in driven. Talk about, you know, it's a whole life perspective rather than a situational perspective. How do I have my whole life be reflective of this? You know, I love being alive. I Wish There was 10 of me on good days, you know, one fishing, one doing psychology, one writing another book, one, you know, hanging out with them, doing all of these things. But as a driven person I have the opportunity to really create a whole life that is fulfilling in all areas and it will never feel that way. And what a gift, what an absolute gift. And it is mastery to where I'm on a path of actually I'm not trying to make some feeling go away. I'm trying to understand how do I make my whole life better. What is better anyway? And those deeper questions about what is better, you know, and as I, my 16 year old daughter got a driver's license on Tuesday, peak life experience and they call them deathbed experiences. In my next book I want to remember that on my deathbed because it's not dopamine then it's, it's another neurochemical set of neurochemicals, but primarily around oxytocin, around filling my heart full of, you know, the most meaningful things in life. And how do I have that in, in work, how do I have that in family, how do I have that in fitness, how do I have that when I have fun? And so learning to channel this energy, channel this drive into building a whole life that is just absolutely, it's we'd say here in the US Baller. It is. I've got a baller life. I truly do. It's interesting we started joking around about driving fast or slow and actually part of what we're doing here is talking about the, the speed of one's mind and one's activity and thoughts and emotions and slowing that down a little bit and kind of going, asking the question, but the pause, the beat between thought and emotion and action and the squirt of neurochemical of dopamine to give you that kind of high that oh yeah, I'm doing another tweet or another thing and I'm just like that kind of. I resonate with this. I remember when I was doing a lot of self work and I was, I, I was became aware that I didn't feel that work was work unless I had this sense of like I've done three coffees and I'm on a real bad deadline and I've got like a train to catch in five minutes. That for me was work felt like that. And if I wasn't in that kind of heightened state then I wasn't doing work properly. And I was able to sort of step outside of myself and observe that and go huh, that's kind of like, that's a choice I'm making. But it's happening so fast that the sort of, the, the sort of so embodied so it's in my body. My body wants to feel that adrenaline rush or whatever, the caffeine rush kind of thing, that I was not in control of that. And so the embodied nature of that, the trauma in the body, the subconscious controlling me, was very real. And I remember distinctly thinking, yeah, actually that is a thing that I'm just identified with. And it doesn't have to be that, but it was slowing down. The algorithm running in my body, in my mind, help me as it slows down. And this is what I give the gift back to drivens that we're not telling you that's bad to operate 10 times normal speed and as driven, we do anyway. But learning to apply that drive into directions that create more opportunity for more fulfilling life and actually greater success in every area of your life is this pause. And you know drivens, when they hear this, well, you're telling me I can't, you know, I can't work that hard. What I'm telling driven is we're going to work that hard anyway. And you know, you're telling me not to be as driven as I normally am. No, I'm telling you to choose to drive in this direction, in that direction, knowing that you're going to get outcomes that that leads you to a life that you really want to live. And in my experience, working with, you know, non driven, we need them in our companies. We need farmers to do our accounting and do our taxes and you know, they're just as important to us, but they need us to think outside the box and create opportunities for them to go and farm in a different way. So it's not a better than or less than. Your new book is about shepherds and sheep and wolves? I believe so. It's. Yeah. The title of the book is Sheep, Wolves and Shepherds and. And here in the US we have the opportunity to see people claiming shepherdam over the sheep. I, you know, Fauci and all the others, I am a shepherd and I am not here where all the drivens around me, you know, we smell. It's like that doesn't smell. Yeah, I'm not so sure you're really doing what's best for us. And you know, I most, and I will say this directly in the way I get around the argument. Well, you're saying people are sheep and some people aren't. No, we're all potentially sheep. Even the most driven of us, all that think we're not, we are sheep too. And that's when you're stuck in your narrative, in your Left prefrontal. And you just want to sit down and not think for a minute. And I know what I'm doing and I'm okay. Many people live their entire lives that way as driven. We can't because we are, you know, impulsive. Elephants wake us up to the truth that we're really not in control of our lives, which gives us a massive advantage over most of the people in the, in society. And what this book is about is really the responsibility, but to shepherd. And the difference between a driver or somebody who is scaring the sheep into compliance. That's what drivers do at the back of the herd. They scare them. Where a true shepherd is somebody leading the flock and they want to follow you. And I use that model in my entrepreneurs. They fired Steve Jobs because he was driving people too hard. And all my entrepreneurs that I teach to really, how do you learn to lead? So it's much more about, you know, driven leadership than it is anything else. And it's learning to lead with heart. But you want to make a driven person crazy is. Is accuse them of being a wolf when they're really trying to be a shepherd. We feel that deep shame of. But if you want to work on becoming a better shepherd, you have to own your wolf. You have to own your shadow and own the part of you that is deeply in the body of, you know, fear and impulsivity and all of those things that is driven, we try to hide sometimes. And is that the work really? I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a founder. I'm listening to this podcast and I'm a leader and I've got this sort of, you can identify with a driven nature. How do they kind of become this? You say learning to lead with heart and owning your wolf, like, okay, how does, how do you go about doing that? It's a teach entrepreneurs every week. The rest of the world is not stupid, slow and lazy. They are different. And you know, you can't expect someone who is in a very simple, you know, cubicle type world to adjust to rapid change to, you know, live in this startup world forever. Because they want a very safe, predictable world. And if we scare them into compliance, yes, they'll comply. But the workplace becomes a very shame based, horrible place to be. And so giving and teaching, you know, they're different. And more importantly, they need a different world. They need a slower world. They need a more predictable world. That would make us feel insane, make us feel like this is not. They're not working hard enough is the way we see it. Where they're working hard enough for them. And so owning your wolf is that impulsive elephant that just wants to yell at people or squish people or tell them, shame them in compliance. Actually becoming curious about how do you actually help them see that you're really doing what's best for them. It's interesting because if your brain or mind is working at three, three times the speed of a normal person's kind of thing, then of course everything feels super fast for you because you're going super fast and others are just. They can't help it. You know, it's like, like trying to say, grow another arm. You know, you can't do it. But more importantly, too on top of that is I can't sit in a cubicle for eight hours a day. They can and they like it. And they can make us products and, and do services that we cannot do as drivens. And we need them. And if you can appreciate them and really value them for that and not judge it, you know, the judging is the wolf. The acceptance and the curiosity is the. Is the shepherd. And I think that's. This is. This is it. I think it's knowing one's strengths and weaknesses and designing a team that can help complement them and support them. And I'm a very much driven. And we have a. My business partner, my co founder, is a very much driven and we need people around us who can, you know, remember to do things and put. Put the stuff in the right folder and, and all that. And. And they like it. That's the piece that is driven. It's like, I can't imagine doing that job. They like doing that job. It makes them feel rewarded, it makes them feel satiated, and they need that safe, predictable. This is a really great. A guy I've interviewed twice now on the podcast is called Dan Sullivan. He's an entrepreneurial coach. He has a book called who Not How. Yeah, in that book, he talks about this specifically. Like, you know, you're a bookkeeper, you think it's really boring. She thinks it's fascinating. Every day, every day is different. And yeah, see, everyone's got their own kind of unique ability, he would say, and as a team, you can go to build that. And it's something I'm working on at the moment with my business. And what I'm good at is just doing stuff like this and talking and evangelizing. And actually, we've been working on the kind of mission for our business and this is kind of energy that's being channeled now. This is so powerful now we've been able to sort of structure the things right so we've got the right people in the right seats so we can go and do our thing which is kind of this sort of just out being out there doing our thing and and it's so freeing. But it's the channeling of that and the integration of the sort of more shadow side that's what I've really benefited from. It is for drivens we never feel things are good enough and good enough is not a feeling. Good enough is KPIs and outcomes any in a P and L. And so just that shift of saying you know what is good enough for the farmers in the company and you tell them they'll do it amazing. And you know, but if you try to while it's never good enough they'll quit and they'll run away. So it's a very simple shift. But as a you know and as I am finding in the last since writing Driven I created an assessment online assessment and I'll ask the audience to get on my webpage and take it because it's going into my next book. Not all drivens are created equal and so there's different types of drivens and it's much broader spectrum than I that I initially imagined. And even in genetically there's 143 different genetic variables associated with just boredom. So you can be you know, highly bored or somewhat bored or not bored at all but it's much more complex and as we this human experiences I think it's un understandable but it's sure fun trying. Yeah and good for you and well done for keeping after it because I put for one I'm like getting a lot from the work you do so where can we find this test? Where can we find out more about you? So everything is landed on a place called imdriven.com iamdriven.com we'll put that into the show notes but please everyone follow that link and please everyone buy that book and or listen to that book. I have it on audible and unreal and in real book I've got post it notes in it and everything. Look at that. And then and I I've seriously though this is a great great piece of information for entrepreneurs or anyone who identifies with what you just described. It really is full of by the way I actually organizing my my task list by the method recommended in this book. I've been using the concept of the f buckets you talk about in here. I've used A lot of these tools and I'm really genuinely very grateful for the way you're doing and the concepts and the framing and the sort of way of channeling this drive that we have and channeling that for the good and channeling that so we can sort of, you know, take this energy and put it to good use and not be sort of blowing ourselves up or our businesses up. You know, that's not good now. So check out iam driven.com and, and get an ebook. When's an ebook going to be out? So it's were. Yeah, we actually driven was very, very, very masculine, actually co authoring this with my podcast or. Yeah, podcast co host Megan to Willager. And she's, she's a very driven woman. And believe it or not, there's a lot of driven women out there and they're, God bless them because I think being a driven man, we get much more of a pass being what we are. Being a driven woman is incredibly difficult. But it is, I think they're, they're the real change agents. I think if we got a thousand driven women together singing the same tune in the same direction, I don't think you'd be stopped. I think every man on the planet would get up the hell out of the way. So that's kind of my next charge in this book is going to take a much deeper look at various, various types of driven and also driven women. So if you're a woman and listening to this, you're not alone. Awesome. Well, keep your eyes peeled. Check out the book. Thank you so much for coming and sharing so openly and I'll see everybody next time. Thank you. Dan. Had a blast. Are you an impact startup founder? Are you looking to do good in the world? And do you want a team that to build your tech product? But importantly, do you want that tech product to actually do what you want it to do based on the vision you've got? Then maybe, just maybe, my company, the tech department, could be a good fit. And as a founder of a startup, particularly in the early stages, every penny you invest is critical. It's adding value, it's creating improvement to your business. So our difference is we focus first on improvement and that mindset shift is unique. And we turn that mindset shift into a method which we called the tech boot camp. And it works really great. We get great feedback from all of our startup clients. And when you've got your business profitable and you want to build your in house team, then we can help you with that too and hand over in a way that's not weird, and we're not hanging onto the code or anything stupid like that. 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