Starting from Nothing – The Foundation Podcast

Guest Name Interview – Bryan Franklin and Jennifer Russell

Introduction: Welcome to Starting from Nothing – The Foundation Podcast, the place where incredible entrepreneur show you how they built their businesses entirely from scratch before they knew what the heck they were doing.

Now, here’s your host, Andy Drish.

Andy: Welcome everyone to another episode of Starting from Nothing – the Foundation podcast. Today I’ve got with us Bryan Franklin and Jennifer Russell, the dynamic duo.

Bryan and Jennifer have mentored and advised some of the world’s top business executives and they’ve helped seven companies reach over a billion dollars in revenue. They’ve also developed an exclusive mastermind for entrepreneurs called L7 Leadership that have shown hundreds of entrepreneurs how to achieve scalable growth in their business.

But what I’m really excited about guys is -- So, Dane and I went through L7 last year and it was probably one of the most transformational experiences that we’ve had as a partnership together. Bryan and Jennifer, I think you two are two of the best people I know when it comes to understanding transformation at the human level. And that’s what I’m really excited to bring you guys on the show today. So, thank you guys for taking the time and thank you for coming on today.

Jennifer: It’s a pleasure to be here. We love this conversation and having it with you sounds like a lot of fun.

Bryan: Yeah. I’m a huge fun -- we are both -- of The Foundation, as you know, and the work that you guys do. I’m happy to participate and contribute to just the endless fountain of value that you guys give your customers in your list. Happy to be here.

Andy: It’s amazing. We’ll get in to some of the exercises that we did at L7 to share with people a little bit behind the scenes. Before we get in to that, I wanted to talk about at the beginning when people are just getting started out. When they’re starting the business, what are the common mistakes that people make when they’re just getting started?

You guys have worked with people from the ground floor of starting literally from scratch, to helping people scale to a billion dollars in revenue multiple times. And so you’ve seen the entire spectrum. At the beginning like, say, going zero to a $100,000 a year, zero to 500 grand a year, what is it that’s different and where are people making mistakes?

Jennifer: That’s great question. Let’s start?

Bryan: Sure.

I think, speaking broadly first like on a mindset level.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: One of the mindsets that many people have when they’re becoming an entrepreneur for the first time is that business and particularly their business is some massive Math problem that they have to figure out. They start to do business plan, they start to look at the spreadsheets, and then it’s like the conversion numbers and the -- just becomes a Math problem.

Well, they can plug in all the right variables then it’s going to spit out success on the other side. They attack it like a variable instead of treating it really like a heart connection with their customers. I think the proper place to start a business is by carrying about a problem or the opportunity that your customers have. Actually loving them, loving the problem, loving the solution, and caring whether or not they get somewhere with it. The customers do.

That will solve the Math problem for you. You really don’t have to worry so much about that problem if you’re driven by that. And if you’re too concerned with “Well, I think we need to raise the price for this number so that the margin is this.” If you’re thinking that way when you just start, you kind of sunk before you start.

Jennifer: Yeah. I just want to piggy back on that and say more because probably your greatest asset as an entrepreneur is your focus and attention, right? And the mistake that entrepreneurs make often relating to what Bryan just said, is having their focus on the wrong place; having all of their attention in the wrong place. So given that this is, like, one of your highest assets, right? Where you’re putting your focus and attention, being really deliberate about where that is such that you’re setting yourself up to be successful is critical.

When you’re focused on what you’re going to get out of it and the spreadsheets, and the numbers, and how much money you’re going to make, that is one kind of level of conversation and its one kind of level of influence that you have over the people that want to do business with you. Realize you’re creating like a field around you, a magnetic field around you.

Imagine if you’re talking about your business with everyone that you meet because how you think about your business is how you talk about your business, right? You betray yourself, right? You betray your thinking in how you talk.

If internally you’re organizing it as this Math formula, as you talk about it, the person in front of you becomes a Math formula. They are excited and committed to be part of it; to be part of your team, to be a customer, to be an influencer, to be a partner, right? It’s critical on a level more than just, “Hey, do the right thing and be sweet and kind to your customers. It’s really critical on a level of taking your attention, putting it in the right place so that you’re actually maximizing your influence.

Andy: This is why I love you guys. I’m expecting like, “Oh. Well, they don’t do this right or they don’t do this,” and it goes straight back to like …

Jennifer: (Crosstalk).

Andy: Yeah. It goes straight to like the love, and the heart-centered connection, and caring about the work that you do in the world. It’s so simple and it’s so brilliant at the same time.

Jennifer: It changes your whole decision-making.

So, okay, so yes, and how did that impact the copywriting that you’re going to write? When you’re focusing not on what are the best tips and tools to get the biggest conversions of my site. It’s more like, oh, how do I create the biggest outcome for the people I’m trying to help. Now, who do you want to pay? Somebody who’s focused on giving you outcomes or somebody who’s focused on how many conversions they’re making on their page? Not to say you don’t want to pay attention to those things. That isn’t the message.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: Message is really the orientation because then that orientation will go, “Well, wow! I’m focusing on outcome and results. In order to get those results, I need people to come. In order for people to come, I need to make sure I’m doing my pages in converting all that.” But it’s the order of the hierarchy, right? Have bigger problems, think broader up here in terms of what you’re trying to solve. That’s really the message.

Bryan: The other thing. When you really love your customer and you want them to benefit, you want them to solve their problem or take advantage of an opportunity, you want them to essentially get them point A to point B in their life or in their business or in some way, and you want your product, your service to help them facilitate that. If that’s your driver then which is creativity? Almost every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever worked with was wrong about what their business was when they started.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Bryan: They have the wrong product, they have the wrong market, they have the wrong something. Most of them had the wrong everything.

Andy: Do you have somebody that comes to mind?

Bryan: Well, sure.

LinkedIn, for example, because I work with coach Reid Hoffman and the executive team at LinkedIn and the then CEO Dan Nye and his staff. When they started LinkedIn, they were really convinced that the whole value of LinkedIn would be the credibility that you can lend to someone when you introduce them. In other words, if you introduce us to someone and you’re an awesome guy, then they’re going to think we’re awesome.

Andy: Yup.

Bryan: That was the central idea of LinkedIn; that was what they built it for. That place is very little of any role in the current value or product or the way LinkedIn is used. Yes, people do introduce people to their other connections but quickly people develop so many connections that they didn’t know that that news became impossible.

So one of the first pieces of value that LinkedIn offered was that you didn’t have to keep track of where you roll it, that’s why contacts work anymore. Everyone’s changing jobs every two to three years.

Andy: Yup.

Bryan: Particularly the executive level, and you used to happen to know all of that about -- If you have 500 contacts, every week you’d have your assistant going through and verifying, “Do you still work there?” [Unclear 00:08:47] to figure out where the people that you need to be contact with still work.

One of the first problems that LinkedIn solved was solving that so that people could rely on LinkedIn as their own contact database which means that when you get an email from LinkedIn, you actually treat it as valuable because it’s an email from someone that’s important to you or that is important to someone that’s important to you. And they might not recognize the email because it’s changed but you know the person so you answer it. Which has made an awesome tool for recruiting, an awesome tool for marketing, an awesome tool for prospecting.

So, recruiting and prospecting has become the highest revenue pieces for LinkedIn but that was nowhere on the radar of the initial idea of [unclear 00:09:33].

Andy: What do you think would have happened if they would have just cared about the numbers?

Bryan: If they not cared about the people who wanted to own their visual identity online and what they were actually doing, they would have continue to build features and enhance the part of the site that had to do with their idea which means it would have gotten less and less use and eventually it would have just gotten to business.

Andy: Why do you think -- Go ahead.

Bryan: … for someone is what allows creativity for solving that problem.

Jennifer: Right. And then you’re not boxed in to, you know, well, I’m a social platform provider so I couldn’t possibly offer blogging or advertising or any other ancillary service that might actually help them also. If you’re thinking about yourself as, “Oh, I’m an info product marketer. So the way that I help the people that I help is through info products.”

The moment and opportunity that comes, it’s something totally different. You went “Oh, sorry, that’s not my business.” And that kind of inability to pivot and be flexible in a society like ours that’s growing and changing and trending so fast, [unclear 00:10:43]. You’ll have less and less opportunity over time.

So, if you know that primarily you’re about helping the people that you help, and then secondarily you have the strategy that’s underneath that, then you can see the creativity there. It’s like, “Oh, well, one year it might be an info product, the next year it might be a platform, the next year might be event, the next year might be seeing them face to face. It might be going to their house and doing their laundry. I don’t know.”

Bryan: Software.

Jennifer: Software. (Laughs) That ability to pivot is really important.

Andy: [unclear 00:11:15] into this this quickly but it feels right. Let’s talk about the role that identity place in entrepreneurship. How does a person’s identity evolve and shift as they’re building or scaling a business?

Jennifer: Yeah. I have something to add about this. To me you create a kind of a distinction between like a business owner and an entrepreneur. Imagine, if you will, a scene where you got the business owner and the entrepreneur walking down a path along a riverbank and they’re both walking down the path along the riverbank. As they’re walking, they see across the river this gorgeous Eden, this Mecca, right? Now both of them are going to see opportunity over there, right?

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: And both of them will likely say, “Huh, we should build a bridge,” right?

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: But here’s the difference. So, the business owner goes and does what a business owner does and he creates the bridge. First he tries to put together a plan, and then he tries to get the architects together, and source the materials, and start to build and all of that.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: What happens for the business owner that sees it in that way is if some problem comes, the money isn’t right, the material start caving in, something happened, the bridge collapses; they go, “Well, sorry. This opportunity failed and I’ll move on to the next one.” It doesn’t …

Bryan: If it doesn’t pencil out, yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah, right. It doesn’t pencil out, we ran out of money, whatever it was, and that’s kind of the business owner’s standpoint.

Now let’s look at the entrepreneur. To me the role of identity with an entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur literally becomes the bridge, right? The “you” and what you do becomes the same thing. There’s such an overlap that it’s not compartmentalize thing that during nine-to-five I work and I’m a CEO of the company and the rest of the time I’m something else. You literally become the bridge.

So, what happens when the architect doesn’t give the right material or the money runs out? It doesn’t matter. If you meet an entrepreneur, like it doesn’t matter. This is where I’m going. This is what I’m doing. This is who I am. Because they become the bridge -- it’s still there. You can literally still get across because they are literally becoming part of it. I think identity plays that kind of key role.

The entrepreneurs that I’ve met that are successful don’t have that that this is this project that they do. They have it that they are it. It’s part of who they are. And that deep compartmentalization is what gives you the energy, the drive, the motivation, the magnetism, the influence.

Andy: I remember just getting started and I remember struggling with the identity of an entrepreneur. Because in my mind an entrepreneur has a successful business at some level and I didn’t.

Jennifer: Right.

Andy: So if somebody’s in that position, how do you shift your identities or your identity is there even when the tangible thing isn’t there yet?

Bryan: Well, Jennifer didn’t say identify as an entrepreneur. In fact wanting to identify as an entrepreneur is problem going to do you more harm than good at any stage. Because then you want to think of yourself as successful which is going to get in the way of doing the things that you need to do to be successful. Like in the twilights, right?

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: Oh, an entrepreneur doesn’t get a bank loan. An entrepreneur doesn’t have a job so I’m not going to do anything that looks like a job -- That’s just going to get in your way.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: [unclear 00:14:50] that you identify as the solution to the customer’s need. I am the bridge. I am the ability to cross this water. And so if the bridge doesn’t work, I’m going to try a rope swing. And if a rope swing doesn’t work, I’m going to create an airline company. I am that which crosses this river. I’m not the method by which that we cross. I am the ability to cross. And so it’s identifying as that.

Andy: Got it. Which goes back to starting by caring about what you do and caring about the customers.

Jennifer: Right.

Bryan: I want to say, you know, it’s possible to be financially, I’ll say, successful in terms of what you would think of externally. It’s possible to have more income than expenses and put profit in the bank and not being an entrepreneur. Just be a business owner and not care about the customer. It’s possible to do that.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Bryan: But two things: one is our strength is you won’t be happy and the idea of success has with it included some sense of satisfaction and fulfillment which will be [unclear 00:15:52], and all of the things being equal. Two companies competing in the same space where one is just not caring about the customer and just kind of doing the Math problem that’s going to be profitable. And the other have the identity of the solution and actually love the customer. That second company is going to challenge the first one [and that sort of thing 00:16:14].

Jennifer: Now, we could take this connotation in a lot of directions. There’s a lot more kind of first time mistakes that we could also talk about. We only gave you one. We’ve probably got a list of half a dozen or a dozen.

Andy: Are there any other big ones that jump out at you that you feel like we should talk about?

Jennifer: The role model assets one?

Bryan: I think …

Jennifer: [unclear 00:16:44]?

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah, [unclear 00:16:46].

Bryan: It’s actually a nice segue from identity. We think one of the big mistakes everyone makes is they try and do too much. They try and define their company too broadly.

Andy: Too broadly.

Bryan: Yeah. They try and solve too big of a problem. I’m going to be the portal through which everybody does, or I’m a coach and I solve every kind of coaching problem.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Bryan: Then Jennifer telling me she doesn’t agree.

Jennifer: That’s all right. That’s the fun of having two of us, right?

Andy: It is.

Bryan: We’ll give you a little angel-devil on this one.

Andy: Awesome.

Bryan: Two different points of view.

Jennifer: I love wearing black and white. [Unclear 00:17:29].

Bryan: There’s a resistance to narrow your focus, to pick a niche, to do the first thing first. That resistance usually, in my experience, comes from not wanting to identify too small. In other words, I don’t want to just be a coach for hotel managers, I want to be an executive coach that can coach any executive, or CEO, or any high-level person, or any wealthy person that cares about anything. I don’t feel like I can fit in to the definition of a coach for hotel managers. It doesn’t contain all of who I am so I don’t want to create a business which is that narrowly focused.

I’m trying to offer everything at once. Where most successful businesses pick something like that that they do successful first and then allow the success of that first thing to evolve over time.

Okay, well, I’ve got the number three most successful hotel manager coaching business in the country and so now I’m going to do hotel CEO’s. And it’s much easier bridge to go from that to that then, yes, I’m a pet psychologist that can help your cat with her psychological problem, and reticular, and also I have a software product that is a portal for everyone to get their nutrition advice, and I also can coach you on your athletic performance, and also any kind of family entanglement issues, and I hope you make money.

Andy: Jennifer, what’s your take?

Jennifer: I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that so I don’t want to completely undermine what Bryan said because I think there’s truth there. If people can’t readily identify who you are and what it is that you do so they go, “Oh, I know exactly who needs what you offer,” then you’re losing the opportunity. If it starts to get too nebulous then people are like, “I don’t know who to recommend to you. You help everybody do anything they could ever want to do.”

Andy: Totally.

Jennifer: Well, who do I send to you?” You see how your mind goes blank.

Andy: Yeah, I remember …

Jennifer: Anything you want to do, do it better.

Andy: I remember talking with Derek at L7 around -- because he was doing marketing consulting kind of for everyone, and then do you remember when he was like, “I do it for people who sold diamonds for jewelers.”

Jennifer: Yes. And everyone had …

Andy: Everyone had somebody to recommend them to.

Jennifer: Yeah. So there’s a lot of power in that. So clarity around what you do and who you do it for is absolutely critical.

The one place where I was kind of giving him a look was -- having your concern be broad enough and add high enough level that you’re attracting some of the highest A players in the business, right? You’re not going to sit down with Branson and have him pay you any mind if you’ve got some company that’s solving something that he doesn’t care about.

But the moment that what you’re solving is for the kinds of people that have a lot at stake and that has, you know, not even just local implications but national implications and even global implications. When you’re starting to play at that level, that’s the level by which you’re going to attract the highest

and most influential people. Is that advice for the person starting out? Perhaps not.

Bryan: However, I think we could sympathize both.

Jennifer: Okay, let’s sympathize both.

Bryan: Because I think …

Jennifer: Let’s sympathize both.

Bryan: When you’re talking about why, the why of what you’re doing, that means to be the broadest, most global concern that you possibly can congruently believe in.

Jennifer: Right. Yeah, like in our bridge example, it’s being the person that have the ability to walk across the bridge instead of being necessarily the rope swing, or the bridge, or the airline company, right?

Bryan: If you think about how or what that’s where -- when you start out, you want to start it small as you possibly can. Way smaller than your identity would allow you to.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Bryan: Or comfortable with. But the why has to be broad.

Jennifer: Yeah. The why has to be big. The why has to go after people that have a lot at stake if you want to have the easiest time being successful. If you’re going to sell a service that gives them a very small incremental change in their life, or their income, or their affiliation, or their ability to get sex, or money, or power, or any of those things. If it’s a small incremental change you’re making for them, then their interest level is low. So then your price needs to be low.

Andy: Yup.

Jennifer: If you’re helping them literally save their life, or save their relationship, or have a lot more power and control, they have a lot at stake, then boy are they going to be paying attention and they’re going to be really willing to put down real serious investment into it. I like to tell entrepreneurs to move in the direction of going towards providing something where people have a lot at stake, have more at stake rather than this.

Andy: I think it’s beautiful. It’s always fun watching you two go back and forth and debate. Dane and I have had our fair share of conflict and it’s a really good thing.

Jennifer: [unclear 00:22:43] as well.

Andy: Bryan, you guys said something at one point during L7, I think it was the first weekend, talking about paradox and how great leaders are able to hold paradox and fill -- Julie and I last night were hanging out and we were talking about elevate and some stuff happening with it. For people listening, it’s an event [unclear 00:23:04] in the mountains. Bryan and Jennifer are going to be mentors at.

Lately I’ve been struggling with this idea between like the stoics and the epicureans. The stoics who sacrifice short term pleasure for a long term gain, and epicureans which are like YOLO, like let’s have fun right now.

Jennifer: It’s all about pleasure first, yeah.

Andy: Yeah, totally.

Jennifer: Like hedonism, when it gets array, going array.

Andy: Exactly.

Bryan: I don’t think hedonism can go array.

Jennifer: Look, says the stoic to the hedonist.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: Hedonist and stoic.

Andy: Well, first actually I want to talk about paradox in general and how it’s a good thing. In that example, I’m curious what you guys’ thoughts on that. So let’s start broader with paradox.

Jennifer: … holding paradox and why that’s a powerful leadership paradigm. [unclear 00:23:56].

Bryan: Sure. Yeah, it started with an observation that we noticed that the most powerful leaders, whole paradox. What we mean by [unclear 00:24:05] is you can experience the truth of each side of the paradox without reducing the truth of the other. You can feel them both simultaneously in your body at the same time.

Andy: Give us a real tangible example of that.

Bryan: Sure.

The universal significance paradox is an easy one, right? In the context of the cosmos, you’re a speck of dust. You could not be more insignificant. You’re unimaginably insignificant on a cosmological scale. Both in terms of time of 13.6 billion years of evolution, and in terms of size which is 13.6 billion light-years and universe. Literally beyond our comprehension how insignificant we

are and yet to our loved ones, to our next of keen, to our -- I have a nine-year old son, Spencer. It could not be more insignificant.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: I’m immensely significant. Everything I say matters, everything I do matters, [unclear 00:25:10]. Your both counts, it matters what you do. It matters how you use your life towards your consciousness, your willpower, your heart, your love, your intention, it matters. That is the paradox. You matter, you don’t matter.

When presented with a paradox, most people do one of three things. They either believe the one side. They basically go with the story that they’re not significant, or they go to the others. And when they interact with -- they are significant, they kind of dismiss that as naïve, or they do the other one, or they try to ignore. They put it in a black box, like a cognitive business box where they just -- That’s where the walls don’t meet the floor and I’m just not going to pay attention and I’m going to continue to pretend that that unresolved thing is resolved by some magic god, or superstition, or some other thing.

Those three choices rob you of the power of the paradox. And the power of it is that things only appear to be contradictory when you’re looking at them in a lower dimension than they are made of and here’s what I mean: take a two-dimensional drawing of a three-dimensional cube, right?

Andy: Okay.

Bryan: If you look at the drawing of the cube, you’ll notice that the lines are all at funny angles and they cross each other.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: You were to say that the lines represented on that page, each of them are perpendicular or parallel to each other. They’re all 90 degrees. It would obviously look false because trying to represent the cube which is a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional world.

If you hold the sensation of the truth of the 90-degree parallel, it actually pops out of two-dimensions, exists in your mind in three-dimensions, and you elevate from one-dimensional thinking to the next dimensional thinking. Where there is no conflict, where the paradox resolve itself.

Anytime you feel things in conflict, if you hold on to the truth of both, it pops you into a dimension of thinking that allows you to see a much broader and more sophisticated view which is what those leaders are doing and why they’re so powerful and compelling.

Jennifer: You know, if you talk about [unclear 00:27:34] a lot, I think, in your program, right? That capability is one of the, like, in your top list of what makes entrepreneurs really successful. What Bryan is talking about is that ability to multi-dimensionally prospect, to have that prospective view so that they can really see outside of space and time and create a new reality that wouldn’t have existed without you there. That’s what entrepreneurs are doing. They’re creating a whole reality saying, “Hey, do you want to live in this world where this is what’s happening?” And so that’s a great paradox.

I have another one [unclear 00:28:12].

Bryan: I want to go back to the one that he mentioned.

Jennifer: Which one?

Bryan: About the stoic and the epicure.

Jennifer: Oh, got it. Okay. Let’s talk about that.

Bryan: Because if you …

Andy: Before we go into that, I just want to share one thing.

Jennifer: Sure.

Andy: So Bryan and Jennifer, you guys have had so many ripple effects like have happened because of our interactions with you. One big one is holding the paradox of either your partner, or the person you’re with, or your team in the cases is what I’ve been doing it with most recently. A person being absolutely perfect and incredible just the way they are. And there’s like this next level of evolution, there’s this -- Is that where you’re going to go Jennifer?

Jennifer: That was exactly where I was going to go.

Bryan: [unclear 00:28:55].

Andy: We started doing this in the team and we built a culture where everybody is starting to hold this paradox together with each other. When we’re having that, everyone is holding that for each other and so we know where each other, like, what their geniuses, and we know what people are working towards, and it’s just phenomenal. And then all of the sudden like screw ups, failures, none of that is bad. It’s all a learning experience. It’s all part of the process, all part of the journey. It’s just magical, this stuff that happens from it.

Jennifer: That happens to be my favorite paradox …

Andy: Is it?

Jennifer: … to hold and play leadership paradigm as a relationship paradigm. And just to say more about what you just shared, Andy, it’s really the paradox between present perfection, almost like a mother’s love. This moment and you and everything in it is exactly perfect with how it is. It needs no changing, no modification of any kind to add to or subtract to its perfection. It is what it is perfect. And a lot of our Eastern religious cultures are all about teaching you how to be in the moment, right? And be presently perfect.

But a lot of our Western cultures are of the opposite side of that paradox. And the opposite side of that paradox is something equally beautiful and it’s the evolutionary drive itself. It’s that force of evolution that says I believe that you can become even more. I believe that we can all evolve. It’s an ever changing dynamic universe that never stays the same and is always driving towards evolving, towards more and more and more complexity and more knowing of itself, right? And that’s also beautiful.

When you can hold that paradox in a healthy way that both you and your presently perfect, exactly how you are, and with the evolutionary force I believe that you, we, us, can be more, evolve more without one eroding the other. Think about how compelling a leader you become which you’re seeing firsthand.

Think about you in a relationship, just a broad and cross contextualize this idea. Imagine your partner rather than seeing her, “Well, you know, I put up with the things I don’t like but by and large she’s great.” Versus seeing, “Wow! She’s absolutely a perfect human being. And I have a future vision that I see for her that is the kind of woman she’s always dreamed of being and I’m in service and surrendered to both.”

Now that’s the kind of man saying that to me that I will devote my entire being to but one who’s either too far on one or the other. Either, “Hey, I want you to become this new vision” or “You’re perfect how you are. You never have to do anything, you never have to change.” I feel unstimulated. So there’s this beauty in that kind of paradox as leadership. So I love that you brought that up. It’s incredible you’re incorporating it.

For any of you listening to this podcast, like spending a few cycled times really holding that paradox is a good idea. I will often also refer to it as mother love and father love. We love differently. Not that we don’t love both ways. It’s not a gender like women can only love this way, men can only love that way. But there’s this mother, feminine love of present perfection and this father, paternal love of evolutionary drive and I believe in you.

Andy: It’s interesting because the more that I’ve held it and practiced being in that state, the more it almost becomes an unconscious pattern of like you’re actually living from that perspective. You’re not popping in and out of it anymore. You’re actually like that as the state of being for you.

Bryan: As long as you’re holding them both as true then you cannot exist at the two dimensional layer where you’re drawing the box with all the crossing lines.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: Because it doesn’t feel real anymore. What feels more real and accurate is the three-dimensional view.

Jennifer: Yeah. And from that place, they don’t appear as a paradox at all, they appear as truth with the capital T.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: They appear way -- that you’re perceiving more the nature of the universe …

Andy: It’s actually …

Jennifer: … or at least getting …

Andy: There’s no separation. Yeah, there’s no separation. They’re just like it is. It’s just one thing.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Bryan: That’s actually the mechanism that makes the paradox work is that there really only is one now. Like there’s only one here and now. There’s one moment.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: There’s only one unification of anything. It’s one. This is one thing. Existence is one thing. Anytime you have a separation, it’s an illusion which means that if you meditated long enough or experience it most fully, that separation will develop.

Andy: Take me back to the example. Because this is the one that I’ve been struggling with of like actually processing.

Bryan: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: The epicurean and stoic? Oh, great.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: One possible orientation is that as an epicure, I ignore or compartmentalize planning and future in order to get pleasure now. In other words, I’m going to eat this donut, I’m going to ignore the long-term negative effects so that I can eat it now. And I have to actively shut off a part of experience in order to

drive the enjoyment. Stoic does the same thing. I’m going to not enjoy now, I’m going to sacrifice my enjoyment now in order to get my enjoyment later. And both of those paths eventually are bankrupt and are unsatisfying.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: However …

Jennifer: Yeah, they both occur as a sacrifice and both of them are actually taking you out of the full experience.

Andy: Of the now.

Jennifer: Right.

Bryan: However, imagine a fervent epicure who absolutely is completely a 100% pleasure-driven for the now, but is also deeply considerate of all future possible effects. Not just for themselves but for all life and for all existence. So that person could actually not derive pleasure from anything that would cause pleasure now but proportionally cause harm later or cause harm to someone else. If you’re present to the negative effect you’re having, you can no longer direct pleasure from it.

Andy: Hmm.

Bryan: Hold the beauty of both, not want to right [unclear 00:35:36] wrong but both are beautiful and hold that to be true, use it kind of a rope ladder, you’ll climb up into the consciousness where you have whole awareness of the future and you actually enjoy the pleasure now of -- maximum pleasure now that also is maximum pleasure in the future.

I engage in no act that sacrifices now and no act that sacrifices the future. It can create a new creativity about options that weren’t even there when you were trying to choose between sacrifice by not eating the donut or eat the donut. You might realize, you know what, what actually is more pleasurable right now is sex or is self-expression or creativity or …

Jennifer: Or the juiciest, ripest mango because it’s totally like your body is wanting hydration and maybe a little bit of energy and you go, wow! I want the organic mangoes straight off the tree.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: It’s the donut that I want.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: Or I want like a cool glass of water with a splash of lemon in it because you realize fundamentally what would serve the whole system, right? You as an entire system which is both now and in the future and is also like every

aspect of your body which is your pleasure senses and your body and how your organs and everything else function. All is [unclear 00:37:00] thing, one integrated thing, where every decision you make impacts the rest. And when you try to make a decision outside of that, that’s where you get into problems.

When you make a decision of eat the donut and outside of the impact that it’s going to have on your blood glucose levels, and your kidneys, and your digestive system, and your fat retention, and the spurts of energy, and your brain, and all those things, you’re making decision outside of the system that it resides in.

Bryan: It’s actually impossible to enjoy the donut when conscious of it.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Andy: Oh, when you’re conscious of the long-term negative effects that will be there.

Bryan: Actually just keep in conscious how it feels in your body as you’re digesting it. Literally feel.

Jennifer: Yeah. I mean wait five minutes.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: Like it’s in your stomach.

Andy: And you’re always like, “Ugh, God! Why did I do that?”

Jennifer: We don’t mean to patronize the donut but …

Bryan: I’m with donuts.

Andy: (Laughs)

Jennifer: However, you know. So don’t take us too literally around our stance on donut eating but listen to the heart and meaning I think of what we’re trying to get across.

Bryan: I use the donut as, obviously, a metaphor for anything but the stoic would forgo that the epicure would do, right? If you identify as either one, probably the stoic misses out on opportunities for enjoyment that actually have a very minimal long-term negative effect. But they’re just going to have it of self-sacrifice.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: Epicure misses out on the opportunity for the pleasure of the unfettered kind of free flow of forward progress that good planning affords you.

Jennifer: Yeah. This paradox is fundamentally, Andy, self-focused and others-focused. If we even go deeper into what is the stoic and the epicure. Well, the epicure is focused on pleasure for self and stoic is focused on pleasure for others.

Andy: (crosstalk)

Jennifer: Yeah. You can’t do one without the other. They atrophy and are unsustainable if you go too far to the extreme.

Andy: So what I love about this stuff I’ve learned from you two is that it’s almost -- You’ve given me a completely different understanding of freedom -- freedom and power. Freedom to consciously choose what you want in the moment, in every moment is how it feels. That’s what real freedom. So you’re not actually, you know, you’ve talked about this idea of arrested attention and how there’s something that keeps grabbing your attention and you’re not free from it.

Let’s talk about that concept and behavioral flexibility. And if you’re listening, I know we’re getting a little deep here, but this is the core root of entrepreneurship. Like at some level, like this is what the purpose of building a business is designed to bring up and designed to teach us about ourselves. And I think when you understand some of these concepts, the power that you have in the world and the ability that you have to create more things is just amplified so much more than if we talk how to get more traffic or how to get sales.

Jennifer: You can go online and look at our sites.

Andy: Yeah, totally.

Jennifer: Andy and Dane, you get all the stuff that you want and we’re happy to help you, and so are they, and so are so many others. But these kind of deep and rich conversations raise the level of consciousness of entrepreneurship as a whole.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: I’m excited to raise the conversation so, thank you. Yeah. Thank you for that invitation.

Andy: Definitely.

Jennifer: So let’s talk about freedom and arrested attention.

Bryan: You want to …

Jennifer: No. You start and then I’ll add.

Bryan: Well, you asked about arrested attention which is an unusual creation. We have to actually credit Nathan Otto for bringing it to us. It has interrogations

through his spiritual teacher who frame spirituality and in fact enlightenment really as a pursuit of more and more authentic freedom which is cool. Because sometimes we think enlightenment are --

Spirituality is a pursuit that some people are interested in or is a kind of a particular bent. But when you frame it as freedom I think we all inherently strive from the experience of more freedom which is in that sense where whatever naturally we do, whatever naturally comes up to you is the thing that’s needed in the moment and most cherished one, right? So you don’t have to constantly guard yourself or obey rules created by yourself or others so as you don’t inadvertently let your true nature come out and screw up things, right?

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan: That would be the opposite of freedom.

So, arrested attention is any repeated thought that you can’t easily dismiss. Well, some of the most subversive pieces of arrested attention are things that we have categorized in our brain as things we like because we obsess if we think about them.

I used to really like cars and I obsessively think about cars and catalogue, the cost features, and age, and condition of every car I saw at all time. But it was compulsive. If a Ferrari drove by, I would cease to be able to continue the conversation because my attention would just be grabbed by it. Obviously sex and a beautiful woman, those are other very common things that grab people’s attention. In fact, they kind of locate around sex, money and food are the areas where people have most of their attention arrested.

If you catalogue all the thoughts that you have repeatedly that you can’t be dismissed, whether they’re apparently pleasurable or not, that’s their catalogue of the ways you were bound, the ways you were not free.

The exercise of liberating yourself of becoming really, truly a free person is to find out what fantasy or what you’re trying to prove, what do you want -- What lie about yourself are you wondering is true or not. What the insecurity are you trying to combat with that kind of conversation and start to untie that so that if a Lamborghini or Ferrari drives by which is the case now, I might look at it and appreciate it and appreciation would watch over me for a half a second or so. But I would have no problem continuing to be engaged in whatever conversation I had because that would be more valuable to me than observing someone else’s object.

Andy: A real tangible example for people listening in my life was the experience of being around like very, very successful people for awhile. Like all my energy would go straight up in my head and I would get, like, what do I say? What do I do?

Dane and I just had a podcast yesterday and we talked about -- what happens is that when your attention is arrested on something, you start looking for the tactics or the strategies. So it’s like if you’re intimidated by talking to attractive women, it’s like what’s the pickup line? What do I say to them? How do I act? What do I do? And you start thinking about it. It’s a really good indicator of where your attention is arrested at.

Jennifer: Yeah. I guess what I would add is that we started this podcast and I said that your attention is one of the biggest resources you have as a human being. I’ll go even farther. If we were to use the metaphor of your universe, the universe, the reality that you’re perceiving is a function of where you’re focusing your attention. Kind of like a flashlight.

Imagine the universe as a warehouse with every possible thing inside of it. Your experience of the universe all depends on where you’re pointing your flashlight because that [unclear 00:45:14] is lighting up a very small fraction of the entire universe, but that small fraction is what you’re able to see and interact with and perceive, right?

And so what we want is for you to get really good, like become ninjas, with your attention. Learn how to put the flashlight exactly where you want it. If you’re continually being pulled around, then those influences are basically creating your reality, you aren’t anymore. So we want to welcome you in to actually taking back and creating your own reality based on where you’re putting your attention. There’s less of you able to be present than you’re sitting there reacting to reality versus literally generating it and creating it.

So to take this into the realm of entrepreneurship, you know, entrepreneurs are fundamentally creating something that didn’t exist. I said earlier that you are creating a new world that you want other people to live in to, that has this problem that you’re trying to solve solved. Because if you’re all the way successful then, like, everyone on the planet has solved this then that is the world that you want to create. That’s the world you want people to live in to.

Now that takes you having free attention to deliberately point your flashlight towards something new which is not just being dragged around by your attention. So that concept, that idea of liberating yourself, finding, inventorying where your attention is rested, where you feel a lack of freedom and choice is a deep dialogue that we think everyone should get more self-awareness around, everyone should go into and find those thing and you might be surprised, you know.

Andy: Yeah, go ahead. It’s just so fascinating, the last three calls. I did one with Dane and then one with Peter Shallard before this and we’re just been getting much deeper. We’ve been going much deeper. As oppose to just interviewing people and having stories, it is so much more fun for me.

Jennifer: It’s juicy, isn’t it?

Andy: Yeah. It really is.

Jennifer: Well, these are the kinds of conversations that if everyone listening and we having the conversation really dive deeper into then these really do change the very nature of what we perceive and how we experience the world and they change the nature of the problems that we want to solve. Things that we want to solve are more aligned with consciousness and being aligned with humanity to begin with. Building an entrepreneurial endeavor around that kind of consciousness, around that kind of thinking, is going to be a gravity well, right? It’s relevant. It’s highly, highly relevant.

Bryan: I wanted to give you just one how, one piece on how [unclear 00:48:07].

Andy: Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Bryan: One thing I noticed is that my attention is arrested. It’s not immediately clear how to stop doing that.

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: Stop thinking about the thing I’m obsessively thinking about. You told the story about you’re around successful person, you’re going into all these strategy, you’re in your head, and one of the things you’re telling yourself is stop doing that.

Andy: Quit it. Yeah. It’s like don’t think of the pink elephant. It’s like, oh …

Jennifer: Yeah.

Bryan: The natural reaction when you have arrested attention is to go out of relationship with thing and into relationship with your fantasy of it. You’re around a successful person, you stop relating to the person and you start relating to your ideas about successful people and what they must think and this and that and the other. You start to interact as though those other ideas are real and you react phenomenologically, physiologically you react as if those things are happening to you.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Bryan: As if it doesn’t like you or doesn’t -- whatever. Think you’re impressive. It creates a strange response because from their reality that’s not true and so your reaction seem out of phase with reality and you seem awkward. That’s where awkward behavior comes from. Also talking to the girl at the bar and you’re like, “Uh-huh,” you know?

Andy: Yeah.

Bryan: He’s like a weirdo.

Andy: (Laughs)

Jennifer: (Laughs)

Bryan: In her reality you’re just some dude and in your reality she’s like on some pedestal and you’re not good enough for her and all these [unclear 00:49:50].

The fix is to get into relationship with the actual thing. Which means go closer enough or other way to it and find out what she really like, what’s the successful person really like, what’s their experience of their success, wow successful in fact are they, what’s their day like right now? Get into an actual state of relationship with them. The more in relationship you get, the less your attention will become arrested because, again, the closer you get to reality, the closer you get to the state of there being no problem.

Andy: So what does that work? Because it takes you out of the story and brings you back into reality or, like, what?

Bryan: Well, one reason it works is because there’s no bad news in reality. In other words the here, the now is always perfect and beautiful.

Andy: Yeah. So you talk to the girl and she’s like, “Get away from me.” That’s like bad news.

Bryan: True. One reason she might say that is she might be a bitch. Or like, “Oh, she’s got problems. She’s stuck up. She’s a bitch.” She’s wearing a lot of makeup so it looks really [unclear 00:51:09] but she’s actually got self-image issues because of how much makeup she wears and how automatically dismissive. That actually doesn’t feel good to be around. If you get into relationships, how it actually feels to be with her, not your projection of who she might be when she’s, like, looking at you …

Jennifer: Yeah, then there’s no disappointment because you realize that this is not a connection you want [crosstalk].

Andy: For people in The Foundation they’re doing idea extraction calls and sometimes they’re calling people up cold and talking with them and sometimes you get bitched out when you do that. And having the experience of, like, “You know what? Maybe they’re just having a really bad day.” realizing that it doesn’t reflect on you as a person.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: My favorite adage around that is from Bryan’s father who said something like everything, anyone communicating is love and anything that isn’t love is a misunderstanding.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: Right? Or it isn’t true. It isn’t about me. Yeah, isn’t about me. Yeah, that’s what he said.

Bryan: There’s only two messages: I love you and I’m afraid. I love you is for me and I’m afraid [unclear 00:52:16].

Jennifer: It’s nothing to do with you. Yeah.

Andy: Your father seems very wise.

Jennifer: He’s very wise.

Bryan: He just ignores everything that isn’t I love you.

Jennifer: Well, not ignoring it. It realizes it’s not about him.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: So the person who is bitching you out on the phone because you’re calling them and they didn’t want to talk, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s sometimes hard to depersonalize that. That’s the indicated action that we’re recommending.

Andy: Oh man! This has been awesome.

Jennifer: Good. Well, we love it. [unclear 00:52:48] like this all the time.

Andy: Anything else you guys want to cover before we wrap up?

Jennifer: Well, you had mentioned the hater flexibility and I don’t know if you want to dive in to that. That’s a whole another topic. We’re happy to talk about it.

Andy: We spend entire weekend on it at L7 so we can cover it like three minutes maybe?

Bryan: I could figure out how to talk about it in a kind of parting words.

Jennifer: In like three minutes or less.

Bryan: Yeah, in conclusion.

Andy: (Laughs)

Jennifer: (Laughs) [unclear 00:53:21] we could spend days on.

Bryan: But seriously, what if you, as the entrepreneur, and I’m speaking now to the listeners, and to you, Andy, although I think you already do this. What if you considered your own development and your ability to experience yourself as a different person than you thought you were, as the object, as the goal, and entrepreneur as a strategy to provide you with the challenges that force you to reach that goal?

So, instead of being successful as an entrepreneur is the goal and in order to get there I have to change myself. What if changing yourself really is the

goal? And you picked entrepreneur strategically because you’re brilliant, because you know it’s actually going to present exactly the challenges you need to change yourself and exactly the ways you most want to be changed.

If that’s what’s going on then the fastest way to accomplish your goal of changing yourself is to adopt the attitude of maximum behavioral flexibility which is the ability to respond the most variety of different ways to any situation so you have free access to choose which way you like to respond. Which means if you want to be really forcefully angry, because you think that’s most effective, you’re free to do that. You don’t have a judgment that that’s wrong and I can’t, it’s not me.

If someone really offends you and you want to respond lovingly and sweetly and openly, you have that ability. So you just have maximum choices and that would be -- [unclear 00:55:04]?

Jennifer: Yeah. I’d love to say something about this topic.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah. It really ties in well with what we were saying before around arrested attention because if there’s a way that you can’t be, like that’s a limitation, right? That’s a place that you’re not willing to go in order to create the outcome or the result that you want to create. There would be more love between another human being or have them feel inspired or empowered or anything else you might want them to feel.

And I’ll tell you that when you take this into the leadership paradigm realm, the place that you won’t go is exactly where the people will hide. The people that you want to most impact will hide. Right? If you can’t be a motherfucker with someone, like you can’t bring them to the task because you won’t go there because “No, no, no, I could never do that. That’s not me. That’s a terrible way to be,” then they’ll hide there and you won’t ever have any traction with them.

So a really powerful leader is one that doesn’t need to use every way of being with every single person all the time but knows the right tool for the right job and is fundamentally willing to have the flexibility to move in between those tools at will at the right time in the right moment. All I can say that the most flexibility aspect of the system controls the system.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: That’s true from a kind of physics standpoint if you’ve got like a circuit.

Andy: Yup.

Jennifer: It’s the switch that can go on or off that holds the whole rest of the system which is just kind of sitting there, right, to conduct the electricity. Same is

true with the human beings to have a kid in a classroom, right? That kid is willing to be more behaviorally flexible than everybody else that’s sitting there at their chairs, behaving just like they’re supposed to behave because there’s a social contract saying this is how you’re supposed to be. The moment that kid is screaming and yelling he’s got everyone’s attention, he’d be more flexible than anyone else in the system. He’s controlling it.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: The teacher’s up in arms while the kids are laughing and pointing, like he’s got it. He’s definitely got the control. And until the teacher is willing to exert more behavioral flexibility than the child, that child will continue to run circles around him or her. That could be a negative example but what I’m saying is it applies in human systems as well as in physical systems.

Bryan: The minute the teacher gets on the floor and starts throwing kid-like tantrum and screaming and crying and making fun of the kid, imitating them like that, then that kid and the whole classroom is silent and the teacher is in control.

Andy: (crosstalk)

Jennifer: Now there are multiple ways of responding to that. One of them might be to emulate the kid and exaggerate and show them how they’re being, but another way might be to do something completely different. But the idea is that you are nimble, you’re agile. There’s a whole type of programming called Agile Systems and Agile Programming because of the reality that when you’re really nimble and agile can move in between then you have that maximal choice and you can really control the systems that you’re in and create the outcomes [unclear 00:58:10].

Andy: Which …

Jennifer: That’s the short version of what behavioral flexibility is.

Andy: Four minutes. It all ties in so much together because it ends up tying back to the idea of pure freedom. Like freedom of choice at every level, again, which I feel like so many of us get in to entrepreneurship because we want that and we desire that. I loved, oh my God! I loved the mindset shift of, like, the goal is to change yourself and the best way to do that is by becoming an entrepreneur, which is so true, and I think why people on The Foundation have made so much success because they think that way at some level, you know?

Jennifer: And if we could take it one level farther.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: The best way to do that may be is becoming an entrepreneur and the best entrepreneur you can be is the entrepreneur that is socially aligned with the whole of humanity.

Andy: Hmm.

Jennifer: Where what you’re doing for business is not externalizing harm to any other individual, rogue, nation, species, race where you really take a hard, hard look at what it is that you’re doing. And make sure that if you look at the entire global ecosystem and the entire system that you’re inside of, and make sure that you are either neutral or a net positive to that system with whatever you’re entrepreneurial endeavor is.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: And hopefully your entrepreneurial endeavor is actually even improving humanity in some major way. But really having scrutiny around that.

Andy: Yeah.

Jennifer: That is the kind of entrepreneur that we want to get behind and help and that is -- those are the entrepreneur that we get behind and help.

Andy: Guys, this is so awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jennifer: Anytime. Anytime.

Andy: If people want to reach out, how can they get in touch with you?

Jennifer: Yeah. We have a couple different ways. We each have websites under our names so that’s probably the easiest way to find us because we do lots of different programs and projects all the time. You can find Bryan at bryanfranklin.com and you can find me at jennifersrussell and those are two of the ways.

Now we’ve got a lot of programs. I work for the Critical Path, Critical Path Global, it’s a non-profit. You can find us there. You can find us on Mind Money Meaning which is some of our programs. We’re starting all sorts of new stuff all the time. So just find us on our sites. That’s the best way to do it. You can find us on Facebook and all that.

Andy: If you guys ever get the chance to spend time with Bryan and Jennifer, do it. I promise you within 30 minutes you’ll have some sort of life changing epiphany. It’s like guaranteed.

Jennifer: [It takes from you 01:00:45], Andy. Thank you.

Andy: Thank you guys for coming on and -- yeah.

Bryan: We’ll see you in a couple of weeks in Boulder.

Andy: Yeah. We’ll see you in Colorado in like three or four weeks. Thanks guys.

Jennifer: All right. Thank you.

Bryan: Take care, Andy.

Closing: Thank you for joining us. We’ve taken this interview and created a custom action guide so you know exactly what action steps to take to grow your business. Just head over to thefoundationpodcast.com to download it for free. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.