Do you believe confidence is a prerequisite for success, or could it be the reward for taking bold action? In this episode, Gord Vickman and Dan Sullivan discuss The 4 C’s Formula®, a four-step process of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence, and share how to embrace fear and uncertainty as essential steps toward growth. What happens if you outsource one or more to technology?

Show Notes:

• High achievers commit to action before feeling confident. Others wait for confidence to act.
• Commitment means pushing through challenges to develop new capabilities.
• New capabilities always lead to increased confidence.
• When you gain confidence, you can restart the 4 C's process at a higher level.
• With greater confidence, you can make bigger commitments.
• Building new capabilities on top of existing ones compounds your confidence.
• AI is now an option to skip steps, but will that damage the process?
• Growth stops when you stop developing new capabilities.
• All genuine capabilities must be earned, and true confidence follows capability development.
• Our 21st-century progress is built on the capabilities developed by countless predecessors.
• Confidence feels good. Courage feels scary.
• Courage is necessary when you lack capability.
• Once developed, a capability becomes a permanent asset.
• Whether consciously or not, all achievers have used The 4 C's Formula.

Resources:

The 4 C’s Formula by Dan Sullivan

Casting Not Hiring by Dan Sullivan and Jeffrey Madoff

Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Learn more about author Ryan Holiday

The Strategic Podcast Network

Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman examine the intersection of emotion, artificial intelligence, and human consciousness—and explain what will always set humans apart. What does it truly mean to be conscious in a world increasingly overwhelmed by technology?

Show Notes:

• The entire human experience of being an individual is consciousness.
• The scientific community still doesn’t understand why humans are conscious or how to measure consciousness.
• By 2026, experts predict 90% of online content could be AI-generated.
• AI lacks the multi-sensory and emotional depth of the human experience. It can never fully replicate human consciousness and interaction.
• Technological advancements often fade as fads because they can’t substitute the richness of human interaction.
• Humans tend to project significance onto new technologies that simply isn’t there.
• Google Images has started delivering AI-generated results.
• AI is a capability, and it becomes increasingly more useful the more you view it through this lens.
• Our ability to advance AI technology is limited by the physical resources this technology consumes.

Resources:

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

Perplexity

Thinking About Your Thinking by Dan Sullivan

Most business owners grow by hiring the right people, but a theatrical approach offers unique advantages that accelerate your success. Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman discuss the groundbreaking concepts in Dan’s new book, Casting Not Hiring, and share the simple tool that virtually guarantees success when you bring someone new into your company.

Show Notes:

There are two possibilities for bringing new people into your company: hire them, which is the corporate model, or cast them, which is the theatrical model.

The emphasis in casting is on the uniqueness of the individual and the role, whereas in hiring, it’s the job that matters, not the individual.

Treating your business as a theatrical performance means there’s a constant series of new projects, just like there are new plays in theater.

The people you bring into the organization are the organization.

Walt Disney is a great example of an entrepreneur who did casting, not hiring.

The most important question in casting someone is, do you match up?

All of Strategic Coach® thinking tools are positive.

As the world becomes more technological, live theater becomes a more valuable experience.

The way that start-up entrepreneurs bring people on board in the first three months determines whether they're going to be successful.

Resources:

Book: Casting Not Hiring by Dan Sullivan and Jeffrey Madoff

Perplexity

The Collaborative Way®

Podcast: Inside Strategic Coach

Podcast: Anything and Everything

Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical

Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman discuss the importance of partnership between AI and humans—finding a balance between technology and the human touch. Dan also shares his insights about where ideas come from and the differences between creativity, wisdom, and intelligence.

 In This Episode:

• Dan and Gord share the importance of AI-human partnership, addressing concerns of AI replacing human creativity.
• Where does Dan get his ideas? Through conversations with ambitious people and those who faced setbacks, as well as by thinking about his thinking.
• Intelligence manifests in Unique Ability®, like Larry Bird's situational quickness and unpredictability in basketball.
• Human creativity links unrelated concepts, while AI focuses on patterns and predictability.
• What’s the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom?
• Journalism's decline linked to AI's inability to replicate the classic journalist’s three Ws: waiting, wondering, and wandering.
• News reporter Barbara Frum interviewing the Shah of Iran's consort, tapping into the listeners’ reactions in a way that AI never could.
• Dan sees AI as just another tool, not a replacement for human thinking, and emphasizes maintaining agency and partnership with technology.

Resources: 

Larry Bird

Barbara Frum, from the CBC archives

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Strategic Podcast Network

In one of our most popular episodes, Dan and Gord discuss how entrepreneurs can leverage ChatGPT to save money, grow their business, and streamline the most boring tasks while keeping teamwork alive and thriving.

In This Episode:

• ChatGPT is the next level of written communication that started with the teletype.
• AI has not yet reached the level of being able to tell a good story.
• Great teamwork is completing any project through greater productivity and achieving greater profitability.
• If you’re wondering how an AI tool can be useful to your business, first ask how it can help make your team more productive, and second, ask how it can help increase profits.
• Garbage in, garbage out: AI results are only as good as the instructions.
• Dan points out that ChatGPT’s response is strictly positive because the company OpenAI is most profitable when we see its benefits and consume its service.
• Gord and Dan wonder what exactly we’re being sold. Is this just a toy to generate meaningless social media content or a tool that can allow anyone to be a creator of useful material?
• No matter what new technology comes up, Dan’s approach is always to keep a very smart human between him and that technology.
• AI might generate the first 80% of the content, but a very smart human can take it to the next 80%.
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Resources:

Learn more about Ray Kurzweil

Learn more about Mike Koenigs

There's a misconception that podcasting is a quick way to make money. But if you're only in it for the cash, you'll likely be disappointed. Start a podcast for the right reason: to create value for your audience. When you focus on creating great content for your listeners, the money may show up in other ways. Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman explain how Strategic Coach® has seen consistent growth for decades by doing just that.

In This Episode:

• Most entrepreneurs develop the courage to become entrepreneurs because they’re good salespeople.
• Marketing is what allows you to have the opportunity to be in front of someone.
• If you see a problem, set out to solve it, whether you get paid for it or not.
• You should do it because it’s valuable, regardless of the money you make.
• Don’t listen to the people who are trying to throw you into “The Gap” by saying, “Oh, you must do this because everyone else is doing it!”
• Don’t force people to learn something new in order to get value from you.
• A podcast is like a message in a bottle. Most will sink, but others wash up on a beach where somebody will read it and say, “I’ve been looking for that!”
• Existing clients listen to our podcasts faithfully. They come to the workshops and talk about the subjects that the podcasts cover.
• The goal of the Strategic Podcast Network is to attract people and marinate them in the content in the hopes that they become successful, talented, ambitious entrepreneurs.
• It’s not tough to make money if your focus is on making other people successful.

Resources:

The Strategic Podcast Network features all our shows in one place

10xTalk podcast, featuring Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish

Joe Polish’s Genius Network®

Inside Strategic Coach podcast, featuring Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller

Joe Stolte is the CEO and co-founder of Daily.ai, an innovative artificial intelligence newsletter that designs, writes, and tests itself to cater to user preferences. He shares with Dan and Gord the ways AI is “eating software”—posing an existential threat to huge software businesses like Google, yet creating exciting new opportunities for entrepreneurs.

In This Episode:

• Never before has a new technology been adopted as quickly and widely as AI.
• People are using AI passively without realizing it, but many are also quickly finding active, strategic, intentional uses for it.
• Investment in technology is often about placing bets rather than backing quality innovations.
• Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are in a symbiotic relationship.
• Large software companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Google are having to shift their thinking around user experience.
• Thousands of talented tech workers have been laid off, which could lead to many simple, smart, easy-to-use innovations.
• Short-sighted, user-hostile thinking is an organizational culture cancer.
• News media being funded by subscriptions leads to giving subscribers only what they want to see, creating echo chambers and divisiveness.
• Strategies for growing an email newsletter: You can pay with your money or with your time—and either is fine. (Ads aren’t “dirty.”)
• “AI is like a really, really good intern: You wouldn't ship intern work to the marketplace.” —Joe Stolte

Resources:

Learn more about Joe Stolte and Daily.ai

Dan Sullivan’s AI newsletter is The Spark

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Peter Zeihan, author and geopolitical strategist

Joe Stolte is the CEO and cofounder of daily.ai, an innovative artificial intelligence newsletter that designs, writes, and tests itself to cater to user preferences. Dan, Gord, and Joe explain all of the ways entrepreneurs can benefit from AI that might not be obvious, and share what questions content creators should be asking themselves before trying different things.

In This Episode:

You learn more from start-up failures than successes.

People project their belief systems onto what’s going to happen in the future.

AI plays a crucial role in content marketing by shifting the focus from outputs to outcomes, emphasizing personalization and enabling one-to-one marketing versus the one-too-many conversation we’re used to in marketing.

With generative AI, the cost of content creation is rapidly approaching zero.

Generative AI allows anyone to create content, which means we’re going to get a lot more content coming into the world than we’re even seeing now.

There are three forms of truth: what a company thinks the market wants, what the market says they want, and what the market actually wants.

Almost half of the content people are pumping out right now serves to push people away from the sale. This is because it’s not useful, and it’s intrusive.

Data has a feedback loop to improve what's going out into the market to actually give people what they want, when they want it, through the channels that they want it.

The biggest problem with any new technology is that it’s unfamiliar. You simply have to normalize the experience of engaging with it.

Resources:

Learn more about Joe Stolte and daily.ai

Dan Sullivan’s AI newsletter is The Spark

The advanced AI assistant discussed is Perplexity

Podcast: 10xTalk with Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish

Book: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy

Unique AbilityⓇ

Article: Time Management Strategies for Entrepreneurs (Effective Strategies Only)

Article: How To Sell Transformation Using This One Question

Statistics show there’s no shortage of people pitching their expertise and services, but no one’s really paying attention to them. Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman explain why so many pitches get ignored and how to actually engage with the people you’re pitching to.

In This Episode:

People can pay attention to only one thing at a time.

Nobody’s looking for answers. They’re looking for questions.

Instead of thinking about a marketplace, you can focus just on relationships.

The pitch can’t be about you. It has to be about the client.

People who work in competitive organizations might keep their future aspirations a secret.

Everyone has developed pitch filters as well as content and entertainment filters.

There's a crisis growing in the technological and marketing worlds where it’s taking more effort and more money to not get a result.

Having questions that get another person to think about their future is 100 times more powerful than any answer you could give them.

Resources:

Your Life As A Strategy Circle  by Dan Sullivan

Learn more about Strategic Coach

Article: The 4 Freedoms That Motivate Successful Entrepreneurs

Walter Payton – Hall of Fame NFL running back and philosopher

Anything And Everything - Podcast with Dan Sullivan and Jeffrey Madoff

Dan Sullivan and Gord Vickman share some secrets of teamwork that Dan highlights in his new book, Everyone And Everything Grows. When a crisis hits, your team should be positioned to come out stronger for the challenge. Learn how Strategic Coach® pulls it off, how technology assists, and how an amazing company culture makes the whole thing possible.

In This Episode:

Video conferencing platforms like Zoom aren’t communication tools, they’re transportation tools.

Competitive internal politics always interfere with company culture and great communication.

Build your team so they don’t have to spend any energy on defending themselves.

At Strategic Coach, when something doesn’t work, it’s usually not an individual problem but a system problem or a structure problem.

There are only two teams you should be on: the winning team or the learning team.

At large corporations, everything grinds to a halt because people spend more time trying to avoid mistakes than actually creating things.

Resources:

Everyone And Everything Grows by Dan Sullivan

The Impact Filter™

The Experience Transformer®: How To Transform A Negative Experience (Video)

Unique Ability®

Welcome To Cloudlandia podcast with Dan Sullivan and Dean Jackson

AI As Your Teammate by Evan Ryan