Success Traps Are Harder To Escape Than Failure Traps

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, I love listening to you because I always pick up these little gems and they often turn into our Inside Strategic Coach topics. And so you said something the other day on one of our 10x Connection calls. You said, success traps are a lot harder to get out of than failure traps. And my little antenna went off and I was like, oh, I want to have a conversation about that. So I'm curious, what's a success trap, what's a failure trap, and why is one easier or harder to get out of than the other?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I observe people who have a lot of success in their life, and especially observe people who are successful really quite early in their life, like in their twenties and thirties, you know, they make a pile of money. It's almost like they have a real gift for creating new things that people like. And then because I'm 60 years beyond 20, I observed, can they keep reinventing themselves? Can they keep jumping from one success to another? I noticed that probably with 90%, 95% of them, they're more successful before 40 years old than they are afterwards. That doesn't mean they're not wealthy after 60, but it's passive income. They have good investments. But the actual creativity and the initiative and the actual selling part of their career, generally there's a certain amount of wealth that they have, and then they sort of stop. It becomes a social recognition, it becomes sort of a status thing, and then they stop.
 
And they're much less interesting as entrepreneurs after 40 than they were from, let's say, 25 to 40. They were really interesting. They were creating a lot of good stuff. But then they reach a level, I don't know if it's a comfort level, or they had lifestyle goals and they got to a point where they had the house they wanted. They lived in the neighborhood they wanted. They belonged to the clubs that they wanted to. Their children go to the school. They have one house, they might have three or four houses. Then it becomes the rest of their life is they're on boards, which are boring, and they float. They're on automatic pilot. And I just found it interesting that it's very, very hard to get out of the success trap because things are so good, but you don't really have the purpose anymore. You don't have the motivation to keep growing.
 
Shannon Waller: And describe a failure trap to me. How does that work? It's kind of the opposite. It's incredibly uncomfortable is what comes to mind for me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you can use the same person, okay? Everything's worked for a long period of time. The world changes in some way and they get tremendous setbacks and they have a crisis, okay? And a lot of them, they have enough wealth that they can still lead a comfortable life, okay? But they can't turn it around. And then there are a few people who, when they take a knock like that, they wake up. It's almost like they become 25 again and they jump to the next level. They reinvent themselves. They reinvent their company. They create a brand-new value solution in the marketplace. Then they have the same drive and they have the same jump as they had before. And it didn't matter how much money they had, but it was an internal crisis they had. Might have been an external crisis, you know, they might have lost status, they might have lost property and everything else. But they take off again and then they grow. And generally if they do that the first time, they've had a setback, they don't stop growing and then they just keep growing. But it took a real crisis to get them out of their comfort.
 
Shannon Waller: Going back to the statement at the very beginning, a success trap is harder to escape from than a failure trap.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because it's comfortable. It's comfortable. Failure is not comfortable. Failure is scary. Failure is a real hit. Failure is painful. Failure is frustrating. Those stimulants prompt new learning, significant decision making, entirely new approach. So generally speaking, I don't take people as seriously who are growing and succeeding in their thirties as people who are growing and succeeding in their sixties.
 
Shannon Waller: Hmm. Because that sounds like it says something very different to you if they're still doing it in their sixties. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I know that they've learned how to turn failure into a new form of success. They've got an internal capability of doing it.
 
Shannon Waller: That's interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It's like really hotshot 20-year-olds, you know, they're in their twenties and them, I don't know anything about what their success is about. And part of the reason, if you look, the investments that people receive from their parents, from the community that they're in, it might be the educational community that they're in. It could be just knowing a lot of great people. They're 30 and they're a huge success, but you don't know how much of it was them or it was just they were someone who looked like they were worth investing in. But my sense is that just like the bodies, you know, when you're born, you're given a lot of muscle and that muscle continues to grow until you're 30. After 30, muscle doesn't grow unless you're consciously working weightlifting, aerobic, and everything else. So you see someone at 30 who's in great shape, but at 40, not so much so. And that is that they didn't do anything to use the muscle that they were given, literally given, by nature up until 30, and then they've lost muscle, they've lost fitness, they've lost energy. So I'm just using the physical analogy to say what happens with people. But my sense about it is that they were using entrepreneurism not as a source of freedom to do something greater and greater and greater, but it was a freedom from where they had come from. They had a series of measurements, usually lifestyle measurements. you know, net worth, where they live, what kind of home they had, what kind of circles they got. And that was the ultimate, that they got to their lifestyle goals and there was no more need for growth.
 
Shannon Waller: So they're not as interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: They're actually very boring. And usually they're a bit depressed.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, that's interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: They're a bit depressed. And, you know, it happens a lot with children of wealthy, successful people, too. You know, the person who created the wealth may have been not from that economic class at all. They might have been born poor or didn't have very much growing up. And they wanted that. They observed that there were kids who came from wealthy families and they wanted the outcomes that the children did. And I think that's a double trap because you didn't even create the wealth that you're enjoying as a child of a wealthy person. You didn't even create that. But the other thing is that the parent who actually created the money says, my kids aren't going to have to go through what I went through. Well, what did you go through? You went through everything that made you more capable and confident as an entrepreneur, but you don't want your children to have that kind of challenge in their life. So you're going to pay for their eternal comfort, but they're never going to amount to anything. And all the money goes into therapy.
 
Shannon Waller: I mean that seriously. I know, it's true. So it's interesting, Dan, and I think weightlifting is a really great metaphor for what we're talking about, because it's until you experience resistance, you don't grow. Muscle fibers literally get torn when you are lifting weights. That's why you need to do every other day.
 
Dan Sullivan: You get more muscle, you have micro muscle tears.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, but then what happens is your body fills it in, and that's how you increase muscle mass. You can't do it any other way. And I think you and I are part of some conversations about comfort from stage, and people are used to being comfortable, but it doesn't actually stimulate growth. And I think that's almost an underlying issue to what you're talking about.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, growth has to come from within, you know, like growing muscle, the desire to be, you know, not to lose muscle, to actually maintain muscle and grow muscle is an internal disposition. You have to do it on your own. So that for me, at 80, I'm much more ambitious than I was at 50. And health-wise and fitness, I'm better at 80 than I was at 50. Because for me, the game is growth. The greater growth is the game. We have a nice lifestyle, but none of our lifestyle was ever a goal. It was just a by-product. I don't play in any clubs.
 
Shannon Waller: You're not on any boards.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm not on any boards. Generally speaking, I succeed below the radar. But the individuals that I'm encountering year by year get better and better. They're also growth entrepreneurs. So I have enormous wealth at 80, which isn't so much. I mean, the money's good, but the real wealth is just who I get to work with at 80. 100%. The kind of new thinking tools that we're creating, which I think are a lot more powerful than they were 35 years ago— today is actually the 35th anniversary of our first Strategic Coach workshop, yeah.
 
Shannon Waller: The day we're recording this is totally true. So Dan, I completely agree. The success trap is much harder to escape from than the failure trap. Failure trap, you actually have some discomfort and there's a repellent behind you to get out of those circumstances. But if I want to be a growth entrepreneur or if I want to be a growth-oriented human being, not even just entrepreneur, what are some things I can do, ways I can think, exercises I can work through that would not keep me too comfortable, keep me on that edge of always wanting to grow? I mean, the whole thing, growth has to come from within, so true. And what are some ways to not get subsumed by the comfort and the status and all those external things? What are some clues or some ways to, I would say, disrupt myself, that's not quite what I mean, but to keep myself growing?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, don't have the comfort and status as a goal.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, you got to choose your goals. And mine is that I'm constantly putting myself under pressure to be more capable a year from now than I am today. It requires courage because there's going to have to be things you're doing today that you have to stop doing.
 
Shannon Waller: And things you probably enjoy doing. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: We were at a conference, you and I were at a conference sitting next to each other, and one of the speakers had been, according to his story, had been a heavy drinker. And the moderator asked him a question and says, well, how did you get out of your alcoholism? And he says, well, first I stopped drinking. I said, note to self, if you want to get free from your alcoholism, don't drink alcohol, you know. So that's a risk because there's a great deal of comfort to our addictions. Comfort's a pernicious addiction because I've never heard anyone that their death was reported from too much comfort. In fact, the comfort was killing them all along. It's a slow suicide. After a while, you just don't have any get up and go. You know, there's a great phrase, you know, he's got a lot of get up and go. And that means that internally, without any external reason, they have an ability to set themselves, commit themselves to higher level of performance, higher level of reserve. And they're going through a period of courage that's not really obvious from the outside necessarily. So it's a very internal thing. I find it particularly sad about entrepreneurs because it takes an enormous amount of internal motivation to start an entrepreneurial career in a world where most people seek employment. You know, I just find people who were really on a great growth path who stopped. And when you meet them, it's really sad. I find it really sad. I mean, I'm sad for them. I mean, I says, why'd you stop? You know, and it shows you the people around them, encourage them to stop, stop doing this now.
 
Shannon Waller: Yep. Let's dive into that courage thing, because I've heard you say before, like, do something that scares you. Put yourself out there. Do something you haven't done before. Set yourself, and actually do this in the Program all the time, is set a higher goal for yourself. Set a much, much, much bigger goal that you do not know how to accomplish yet and put yourself into that space of commitment and courage, out of which comes capability and confidence. But that strikes me as one of the ways to escape that success trap, is to set yourself a much … you've joked about this for years and I enjoy using it in speeches. You know, entrepreneurs are really good firefighters, they're also really good arsonists. That's one way of keeping your adrenaline high.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, the entrepreneurs who are great are great. You track it back. How did that fire get started? Well, the person who's the firefighter actually started because it gives him a sense of urgency. It gives him a sense of purpose. There's a lot of adrenaline. There's a lot of dopamine when they pull it off. I mean, you know, we're our own drug producers.
 
Shannon Waller: We are. Our other way of doing that, and that can be a somewhat destructive way to do it, is to set bigger goals. So can you talk about setting or having big ambitions as being a way to kind of escape that success trap?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you know, what a goal is, is really a visual picture of yourself in the future, operating at a higher level of capability, okay? It's not an amount of money, it's performing at a level of capability where that greater amount of money would just be a normal result of your capability. Okay, so I never see my goals in terms of things that are outside of myself. I see my goals in terms of how I'm performing and what the impact of my performance is down the road. I had an experience when I was 11 which I've shared, I think, on some previous podcasts. And I grew up on a farm, a produce farm in Northern Ohio. I think I was not quite 11. I think I was probably 10. That was in February. I'm sure it was in February just because it was a crisp sunset. You know, it was five o'clock or so, which happens at very crisp blue sky. You know, very, very great day. And I was out just walking through the fields. sort of crunchy snow and airliner flew over and it was still the propeller age and it was a DC-6. I knew all the planes back then, probably from Cleveland to Chicago or it was coming across from New York to Chicago. DC-6 was a big plane, lots of passengers.
 
I was just watching and all of a sudden I had this sort of electric jolt And the question came into my mind, I wonder how far I can go. You know, and it was very catalyzing. And I would swear that since I had that experience at 10, 10 and a half, that that's what my life is about, that I grow this far. And then the question comes back, I wonder how far I can go now. I achieved this and I wonder, and it's constant. It's been constant ever since. I think I had it before, you know, but that was a very vivid experience. So at 80, it's just the stage I'm at now, and now I wonder how far. And the goals are so much bigger because I have so much more experience and I have so much more capability. I have so much more reach and everything else. But the experience isn't really that much different than when I was 10 and 11. It's the same experience. So I experienced myself as that 10-year-old asking the question, I wonder how far I can go. It's just that it's 70 years later.
 
Shannon Waller: I love every second of that, Dan. And it's a powerful question. And it's actually a great takeaway from this conversation.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, I wonder how far I can go, yeah. Because ambition is a skill. Ambition is not a destination, it's a capability.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, and that's actually going to be the subject of our next podcast.
 
Dan Sullivan: Awesome. I feel that. I'm always more ambitious than I was.
 
Shannon Waller: And I think ambition and having those provocative questions, being conscious of the comfort trap, the word pernicious is so much fun because it's so true, and recognize that comfort needs to be the by-product, it's not the goal. All of those other things that you get, you know, the status, the money, the house, the lifestyle, if that's the goal, that's one thing. But if it's a by-product of your ambitions, it's a very different story. So there's a lot to think about in here, Dan. I really appreciate some of the fine points. And my big takeaway is your question. I wonder how far I can go. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Shannon.