How to Deal with Constant Distractions with David Baker

Audio Transcription

In a world of constant and perpetual distractions, how do we deal with distractions? How do we focus on anything long enough to become experts? On today’s show, the best selling author, David Baker, breaks down the process of becoming a true expert.

All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. For all of you who are discovering the podcast for the first time, thank you for subscribing and leaving us an objective review and for moving us now into the top 15 of all podcasts podcast in the world. There’s 530,000 according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s right, and it was a powerful thrive nation. That’s what is. So we owe it to you, the listener, to only invite the best of the best when it comes to our guests. So on today’s show, we’re interviewing the international speaker, author, and helicopter pilot. A helicopter pilot, David Baker, David is the author of the business of expertise and he specializes in teaching business owners like you and entrepreneur and entrepreneurs like you, how to dramatically improve your visibility and leverage your expertise and how to turn a turn it crowded playing field into an asset for you instead of a liability.

David Baker actually grew up with a tribe of Mayan Indians and a remote village in Guatemala, and he has lived and worked all over the world before. Finally settling down in Nashville, Tennessee. A David has been a regular speaker on Tedx. He’s been the speaker of choice for Harvard Chubb. Have you ever heard of Harvard? No, I don’t know. I used to been a speaker for adobe, were head of adobe. We’re using adobe to produce this show, but I’ve never heard of. I don’t know what it is now. He’s a big deal folks. Hey Ladies and gentlemen, please help me. Please help me. Mr. Clay Staires. Please help me in welcoming Mr David onto the show. David, how are you, sir? Very good. Thank you. I thought, you know that, that you almost had me at the introduction. It’s like we go around the world, we invite the best speakers, not.

I thought you’re going to say we couldn’t find one this episode, so we have David here taking their place, but now. Thank you David. That’s a very kind introduction. I had one, a little thing I did skip on the cue card and I want to make sure I get it out there. Okay. We’ll do it. It was vinyl line was supposed to say. David baker is normally a very wise guy, but he made a poor decision. Ended up on today’s show, so. Okay, so never even know. David, we’ve interviewed a lot of authors, a lot of bestselling authors, and I’m always curious about what inspires somebody like yourself to write a specific book because the research that you are putting into the writing of your books is epic. Can you talk to me, were the inspiration to write this book came from,

Oh, this one was so different than the others because I switched midstream. It was such a weird thing I had done. For me, all the work is doing the research and the outlining that’s like putting the drywall up and the paste and getting all that dust in your hair and everything, and the part I enjoy is the actual writing that feels like painting the drywall. So I’d done all what I thought was all the hard work. I sat down at our writing cabin. We have this retreat in Monteagle, Tennessee up in the mountains and I’m boring myself to death as I’m writing this thing. It was going to be 120,000 page textbook, kind of a a book on on expertise and I just could not get into it. So I just got up and I talked with my wife about it and I said, this has gotta change. It’s gotta change now. It’s got to be a lot shorter. It’s got to be a lot more passionate. I want to illustrate it. I wanted to be in color, so this one, unlike the others, really emerged from my own personal passion. Partly there’s a little bit of anger as well too. I’m tired of advisors and consultants who are making can. I

can, I can, I see you can and the thing about our show is what I do is I’m going to go through and edit out every word that I ever say and then I’ll go of optimize the audio quality of what you say. So I’ll do a little bit editing, but you just free form this thing. Okay. So I, I’m tired of it

visors making stuff up and I’m also tired of them trying to be everything to everybody and limiting their impact on the world. I so believe in powerful advisors, but I don’t believe in how they’re going about it. So this just rose from passionate for me and I just got into it and I couldn’t stop. The writing just came much more easily than anything else. I’d written

David as a, as a guy who’s traveled all around the world, I’ve spoken for, for Hewlett Packard and ups, maytag and all these big companies. It makes me crazy when I see somebody get up there who is a master of nothing, who’s an expert on vagaries and in generalities. They haven’t done their research. They truly are not an expert at anything and and I, I totally agree with what you just said there. If I were to go out there and purchase a copy of your newest book, if I ever able to go out there and purchase a copy of the business of expertise, what would I find inside this book?

You would find a courageous call to make a choice because the world has been changed around you and the choice you have to make is to choose where you’re going to be an expert because you can’t possibly be an expert and a lot of things in today’s. That’s one of the things that’s been changed after it’s been google ised, so there’d be this call to courage and then it would walk you through exactly how that’s going to happen. It assumes that you’re disciplined and intelligent. If those two things are there and if you’re courageous, then it’s gonna upset you on the path to expertise as opposed to being unencumbered by data. That would be that how I’d summarize what you just said about the speakers. You’ve heard sometime

now you’ve talked about being disciplined and the word discipline. As soon as you hear the word discipline, I think if we’re not careful as listeners, as soon as you hear the word discipline, you’re like, this guy’s a masochist. Why does he want to have fun? I mean, we’re in a world of constant distraction. We’re in a world where people never can focus on anything long enough to master anything. The idea of apprenticeship is basically gone out the window for everybody who’s not wanting to be truly great at something. When you say discipline, can you break down what you mean by the. By being disciplined?

Yeah, because the opposite of being disciplined is to be so easily distracted, partly because you’re very intelligent and what makes you intelligent as it. You notice a lot of things that other people don’t notice, and so as you see these things, you keep getting tempted to go explore them. It’s like you sit down to look up something on your computer and a browser and all of a sudden 40 minutes have gone by and you can’t even remember what you went to the browser to look up because you found all these rabbit trails. Being disciplined is saying, I am going to focus on something and resist all of the other things that I could be doing. Not because they’re interesting. No, it’s very interesting. That’s exactly why they’re so tempting to do it. It is. It’s tough. I’m not. I don’t want to backpedal on that. It’s very tough to be an expert because it does require discipline.

Clay stairs. You are a guy who used to be a schoolteacher, turned millionaire entrepreneur. Did you struggle at first with being disciplined as I’d been an issue for your clients in the past? You have any questions for David about discipline? This is a powerful teaching moment, right? Oh, it is. Yeah. And David is very nice to meet you here on the phone. This is clay stairs talking and a yacht. Clay is. I came out of the teaching world. Uh, they’re just weird to say, but as a school teacher for public schools, government workers, he went for it. I know discipline was not on the radar as a, as a teacher, discipline was not. There was easy to just call in sick, not going to make it. It was easy to wear what you wanted to wear. Oh, hey, you know, I didn’t really get anything done prepared for the day.

So if we’re going to watch a movie, you know, and we’re going to call it you’re your own substitute teacher, you know. And so when, when I started out with clay is my coach wanting to be a coach and wanting to be a speaker, uh, one of the very first things that clay began to do was begin to say, okay, well here are some action steps that you need be taking. And I, if it clay, it probably took me six to eight months to, to get up to speed just in my discipline to stick to the things that needed to be done. And so I guess a question I would have for you, David, is on this discipline because there are several clients that I have as well that, you know, when we start the coaching process, it’s like, Hey, here we go, we’re up to speed. But their discipline is behind the, behind the eight ball. So how, how can somebody give me the silver bullet? What, what is the book I need to read to increase my discipline? What’s the pill that I need to take to where I can wake up tomorrow morning and be more disciplined? What’s your advice?

Oh my goodness. I don’t know if I have. I wish I had a pill for that. For me, where I, where I seem to have been able to reach people about this message is to help them fast forward in their lives and say, all right, go 10, 15, 20 years from now, look back on your present on your current life and tell me. And, and let’s say you’re, you’re in a wistful home and you say, Oh, I wish I was more effective. I wish I had accomplished more in life. Now ask yourself this question, are you, did you not accomplish as much because you didn’t have enough opportunity or because you weren’t disciplined enough? So if you and the answer to that is always, I wasn’t disciplined enough because capable people always have way more opportunities than they can possibly manage and as you get older, what life brings you is this. It stares you in the face and it says, some of your dreams need to die so that the other dreams can really live. They did

the chance to live. Can you say that again? Some of your. Repeat that again, some of your dreams need to what?

That need to die so that the other dreams can really, really live. They deserve your attention and that’s what I think gets people motivated to be more disciplined. I will. If I have a choice between a client who’s discipline or one who’s brilliant, I will always take the discipline one first. Even though I enjoy being around brilliant people. Discipline is what changes the world. Yeah,

that right there, that is hot sauce right there. Jump. I’m going to put that on a shirt. That’d be a bit kind of a large shirt with a lot of words on it, but that’s discipline is what changes the world. That’s very interesting. We here in America, we’re the land of opportunity. Yes. I love that. I love the way you made that connection between opportunity and disciplined. We’re land of opportunity that lacks discipline, man. That’s man. That’s good. I started your, this pod

cast, this one, and you’ve done so many things successfully. If you weren’t disciplined at this, you wouldn’t have an audience. You wouldn’t be the top in the top 15 of all time in itunes if you weren’t disciplined. It just wouldn’t happen. Right? People expect certain things of you.

They expect experts to treat their craft seriously. You know, uh, Dan Pink, the iconic, a multiple time New York Times best selling author. I’m a thrive time show guest. He wants said genuine expertise has become more valuable than ever. I think I’ve heard that phrase. I was thinking about your book and I’m going, you know, you’re writing a book on the business of expertise. Perhaps you could tell us why right now. Does it matter more than ever to be an expert and not a generalist?

I can answer that. So I have to back up for a minute. Don’t tell you that there’s going to be some embarrassing moments here. Okay. So we just. My wife and I just bought a 61 acre piece of property just outside Nashville and there’s a half mile road that goes to it and it is really bad. You got to flip the vehicle and four wheel drive to get up at night. So I thought this is my excuse to buy some tractor equipment that I’ve always wanted. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to rebuild this road. So you know, that’s the promise I’ve made. Now I’ve got to do it because I bought the equipment, right? So I’m lying in bed at night thinking, how in the heck am I going to build a real? I’ve never done that before. Oh, I know.

Tomorrow morning I’ll go to youtube and I’ll bet that I can find within seconds a whole bunch of folks with way too much time on their hands who put videos together about how to build a road with a tractor and I’ll bet I’ll find it, not only instantly, but I’ll bet the information will be free. That’s the world that we live in right now where knowledge is drilled down so deep and we have to put all these little pieces of information together to have the whole picture. In the past, expertise was geographic. It was local. You just hired the best expert that you could walk to and then eventually drive to and then maybe to fly to nowadays because the world’s been googling, we have an expectation that we’re going to find an expert who can solve it exactly the problem that we need and that expert will have published a lot of stuff on it, free or otherwise. That’s why we have to drill down. We have to be disciplined. We have to make choices. We cannot be an expert in everything like we kind of talked about at the beginning.

This is, this is, I just know for somebody out there, this is going to be the kind of thing you’re gonna want to listen to over and over again because I know what it’s like. Um, when I started my first company, David Dj, I started, it says low barrier of entry. I’m in my college dorm thing is David. Most Dj’s are choosing to act as though they have a mild form of mental impairment that keeps them from being able to. I mean, it’s like you’re competing with carnies if you cannot be a carny, become a DJ. So just by being disciplined, I’m not kidding, I would dominate the competition and David baker tell you if you ever want to for a fallback position, if you want to become a disc jockey, the bride will schedule. The mother of the bride will schedule a meeting with three potential disc jockeys

and the one who shows up on time and is respectful.

There it is. There it is. There it is. How did he know? I remember this one lady. She said that one of my first bookings I have forgot her name is Shana. And shauna said to me, she goes, you are the only dj who doesn’t joke about marriage sarcastically. And I said, what do you mean? And like I, the guy who goes for the clothes, he goes, now we have a two for one special, so when you get remarried to somebody else, we’ll do your next one for free. That was part of his clothes. And they’re like, that’s really not. And so again, I mean, so what happened is I started becoming great at that. That particular thing, I was winning a lot of awards and then people would pitch me ideas all the time like, hey, you should start a party rental company. Hey, you should start a photography company. And I had just stayed really focused for about seven years to really build a monster before I could hop onto the next thing. But if you look at my resume, it looks like a quote Unquote serial entrepreneur, which I hate that description because that indicates you can’t focus. And so I want to ask you about this. You are, are working on this book. You’ve invested a ton of time into researching this book. If you have the guest, how much time did you spend researching the business of expertise and uh, what did that process look like?

I probably spent about 900 hours or so specific research for the book, but then working with clients, I usually work with a new client. Start that relationship every week. That’s really informal research. I find that when I’m back by myself and the office, I’m not all that smart. I when I’m with clients where I have to say things that they’re going to not at every once in awhile I think very differently. And so as I was trying on different ideas, so who knows how many thousands of hours for that, but probably about 900 hours of, with specific research for the book.

Well, in, in, in the book you talk about the importance of articulating more concise points of view. Um, we just interviewed the Mit physicist Joseph Romm, who teamed up with James Cameron and Arnold Schwartzenegger to produce a showtime series educating people about his beliefs on global warming and stars, a lot of Hollywood, a list people. And, and, uh, he discovered our podcast and in wanting to be on and, and he’s a very articulate person and he talked about it, took him about 10 years to learn how to be concise after going to mit and becoming a physicist and discovering I’m many things about his theories on global warming. He said you just only have a little headline that people will read on social media and you can’t get James Cameron’s attention who famously made titanic and Avatar. You can’t get his attention if it takes you a paragraph to say it, you can get someone’s attention if you don’t. Can you talk to us about the importance of learning how to make more concise points of view and maybe maybe walk us through how to do that.

Sure. And I forget who said it, but it’s a pretty famous saying by an author who said maybe it was a Thomas Jefferson, not sure it said this have been a lot shorter, but I ran out of time. You know, that’s just such a great statement, isn’t it? I, I really do believe that too. And I think several different things get in the way of brevity. Conciseness. One of them is the marketing nonsense that we tend to wrap around things where we feel like we have to say everything. Another is that we’re trying to be all things to all people. I think that the process of focusing your work as an expert, think of it this way, it’s the process of irrelevancy. You’re becoming more and more irrelevant to more and more people and in the process you’re becoming more relevant to a smaller group. That process of becoming irrelevant to all those other people allows you to just throw off so much of the language that you would have used otherwise because you’re not.

You don’t really care about reaching them so much and then the next stage of that, they’re really courageous. Fun Stage is when you’re stuck. When you start to be public about that and you worry that you still have these tendencies to be all things to all people and you’ve demonstrated over and over again that you cannot be trusted with opportunity and so you publicly overtly talk about who you’re really destined to help. You put that on your website and then when a prospect comes, they read this and they self select themselves out of the running before you ever get a chance to do that and the more concise you are and specific also, you know another thing that helps here too I found is we shouldn’t be afraid to be direct. Sometimes we’re trying to wrap our thoughts in an indirect way because we don’t want to have a point of view that offends somebody. Experts aren’t worried about that now. They’re not disrespectful, but they’re not afraid of having a point of view at the end of a statement that an expert makes. Most people listening should have a reaction. They should agree or disagree so they shouldn’t be able to just ignore it.

I would. I want to do is I have. When is your, as you’re articulating this, I had two questions that are going to have that kind of occurred to me I want to ask you, but I want to just tee it up by saying let’s offend each other real quick. Okay. We’ll put you go through the offensive game and we need some music. You go first. I’ll hang up again. I don’t know you that well. I did a lot of research, but I just don’t know you. Okay, so this is. This is an example. I’m recently a client reached out to me, this is just six weeks ago and they said, will you help me market my medical marijuana company in Colorado? And I said, no, send samples. You said since that. And I said, I said no. And they said, why? And I said, I’m a conservative Christian of five.

I’m probably on the far right wing. I’m like a libertarian. You know what I mean? Like I’m like way past the Republican Party. I’m like libertarian guns and gold. I live on land behind a wall that some men are just. There you go. Yeah. So I’m like, very, very. That’s, that’s, uh, to me, um, and then they’re like, really? I mean, you understand it’s legal and I said, I know and I said, I’m not judging you for, for being okay with it. I, if you want to smoke pot and it’s legal, go do that, but for me I’m just not going to promote, you know. And what’s crazy is I had a person reach out to us, I can’t mention the person’s name yet, but this person ran for president, uh, for the Republican Party and they almost won and they reached out recently wanting to advertise on my show because of my stance against medical marijuana. So again, you lose some, you win some, right? So is there a point of view that you have about something in the world that maybe some people definitely don’t agree with or an idea you have or most people say you are, that can be offensive. That’s Kinda crazy, you know, nothing maybe religious or whatever, but something that you believe that maybe a lot of people don’t believe because I think even me sharing that with some people just bothers people. They’re like, really? I mean, can you, do you have something like that?

Uh, yeah, I do. And now you’re starting to regret asking me. I know that you’re in favor of medical marijuana. You’re don’t want a king man. Don’t do podcasts that are handling podcast. If it wasn’t for medical marijuana, I would have died. That’s what I would say to you. Okay. Now it’s a, I don’t believe in debt except for in very rare circumstances. That’s one puts me at odds with a lot of people. Yeah, it is. I, uh, I think growth is neutral. I think we do all kinds of crazy things to chase growth in our businesses. I think that the primary benefit in a business in terms of how you’re going to change the world is how you manage the people there. I don’t think your clients will hardly ever remember you years down the road, but I think the people who work for you will remember everything about your management style and how much you cared about them and how honest you were. I could go on. You’re not offending me yet, but you’re two for two. I just testing the waters. I’ll get to them in a minute to mega points for you. Okay.

And another thing. Okay. So now again, if you’re out there and you’re saying, well, who is David David? Who are you? Who is your core audience, you know, who are your ideal and likely buyers? What kind of give, give, give the listeners a little bit of a glimpse into your background.

Okay. So I was born in the u s but I immediately went overseas. My parents were actually medical missionaries in Guatemala, so I lived there until I was 18, came to the US and um, you know, went through school, like normal, um, worked all through Grad school and managing the publishing firm, ran an ad agency that I started for six years and then for the last 25 years to bring you up to the present, I am advising entrepreneurial experts on how to make better business decisions. I’ve worked with 900 firms all over the world and that’s essentially what I do through speaking, writing and advising. I have chosen this field partly out of accident, but then it just fell into my lap and I’ve just loved doing it. So what I do is I don’t help people with their craft. There’s so much good help for that and I can’t possibly be good enough at all of those different things. What I do is I help them think through how should they be positioned, how should they structure roles, how should they understand the performance of their firm? And that’s a very, very small niche. And that’s what I, that’s what I do. I’m married, been married for 38 years, have two kids. They’re married, they have kids.

Hey, but that’s a very, that’s a very small niche by the way, to being married for 38 years. My wife. You would agree with that? Yeah. No, I, I was looking into your background and I was thinking, Jeff, I was telling you, I said David baker and I have the almost exact same background. I mean, it’s eerie because he grew up in a remote Mayan village and I grew up in a remote Minnesota and village and it sound cold. Coke Cato. Uh, there was 2038 natives there. Mostly they were finished, which if you’re not familiar with, I moved there when I was 12. Okay. So when you, if you’re blonde and blue eyes, right, exactly. And they all have, I’m not kidding. They all made a real. And, and this is not an exaggeration, this is not hyperbole. This is true stories. I played sports in Dessel, Cokato high schools.

Two towns emerged. Dassel and Coke Keto. If you look it up, there’s two towns that merged and between the two towns there’s like 40,000 people. I’m not kidding. On my team, there was a guy named last name Ahow a, it’s a h ago. And I thought to myself, okay, that’s not right. So I pass the ball in one of my first practices to another auto. So I turned. I said, hey, you’re an who are you guys? Like cousins or something? They go, no, we’re brothers. Like, I’m like, you know, eighth grader, he’s a ninth grader. So, and then I pass the ball to another guy, he’s in Ohio and I said, what are you? Who are you? He says, I’m a brother. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not kidding. The hose have north of 20 kids and their family, and in my school there was more than a dozen families that I knew of that had more than a dozen kids. That’s crazy. Well, didn’t you say you had five of them? Did I finally figured out how that was happening in that time? You don’t have six. I kept falling on her. I don’t know what today. Hey, cat keeps turns out. I’m finished. Apple systolic turns out. So I want to ask you, what was it like growing up in the Mayan remote village where a lot of Finnish people, their the average height

below five feet. I’ll tell you, my dad on his knees was still taller than these wonderful folks, so we had no electricity. We had no running water, no roads, no stores now. So looking back it seemed like a very, very primitive existence, but at the time it didn’t seem that way at all. It was just kind of normal. We were also there during the civil war, so it was a. There was a lot of violence around, a lot of my friends were died one way or another. My Dad did a dentistry work, mom did nursing work, and then they both did a lot of literacy, so just just teaching those folks to read and so on. So I consider I’m a US citizen, but I consider myself more of a world citizen and I am so grateful for that upbringing because now when I hear people say things, I tend to test what they’re saying against a slightly different worldview.

Here’s an example. Oh, getting back to the trying to offend you. Think this might work. I don’t want to leave this without offending you in some stereotypical perfect. Okay, so people are saying, follow your heart and success will come or you know, different versions of that, right? I do not think that’s true, nor do I think because I know a lot of people following their heart that are not successful, but I also know a lot of people, in fact, most people in the world who simply do not have that option. One of when somebody at this in this tribe of Mayan Indians got up in the morning, they didn’t say, oh, what do I want to do today? I know I want to go out and I want to. I’m going to work in the cornfields and basically for no money at all, this is I’m following my heart and soul.

It’s like I just don’t believe. I think we should work hard and if we love our work, we should be grateful for it but not demanded. Sometimes we’re changing jobs too often because we have to enjoy what we’re doing instead of just buckling down and doing the right thing. So I do have all that to say. I do have a slightly different perspective on the world and I’m also very grateful for it. I’m a totally spoiled American at this point, but I still remember that I go back there multiple times a year as well. You know, we didn’t have a civil war in Cokato, but I do want to one up. You can build friendships. So we had a. We had this thing called the marketplace, which was our only grocery store in our town, and we had one stoplight total in the town and the marketplace put up a sign one time.

It said, pizza hut coming soon because a local business guy wanting to bring a pizza hut to our town and our town had a place called the pizza factory chain, are very offended. Worked there at age 14. I worked there for about four days. I’m dating the guy’s daughter. And I got fired. And the relationship to things didn’t go well. I was dating her for a while though. So I got fired. And uh, but while I worked in those four days, I realized that the town had got together to stop the pizza hut for coming to tell you that the commercialization, we can’t bring in a large chain and it became almost a civil war minus the guns and the weapons war of ideas and words can really hurt people. And, uh, and then back to David’s point, I want to make sure I comments because David baker talked about how essential there’s so many people out there teach. If you can believe it, you can achieve it, except if you can’t jump and you want to play in the NBA, you can believe that you can treat accepted. I mean, one of my clients, Colton Dixon can sing. Oh yeah, he’s a top 40 music artists and I would love to be a top 40 music artist, but I can’t sing like that. So that’s

all man. You just need to follow your dreams again. And if Tony Robbins is listening, there’s a strong chance now because I’ve noticed some of our, some of the content on his website is starting to change to look like ours, but if he’s listening, I would just say overall, I disagree with everything that man ever says and everything he ever and every speaking event, every time he’s on, he’ll, you’ll get somebody in the crowd who will stand up and they’ll go, oh, David, in this case, Tony, uh, I have a question. And he’ll go up to him and he’ll say, what’s your question? What’s your, it is a big, big hands and a large just deep voice. So what is your question? And the person will say, I just, I struggle with finding a job and I, and it will say, well, do you believe it? And they’ll go, yeah, I do. Well then you can achieve with the crowd. Cheers. And the beach ball’s move around and all of a sudden glow sticks or jumping on it. They just say we just changed another life. And then Hugh Jackman shows up or someone famous and it’s like, I changed my life too. And the thing is though, the dude has no discernible skills.

Are you talking about the guy that was looking for a job or Tony?

Yeah. Well careful. Well and now that right there is a divisive question. Talked to you about the guy who’s asking for the help. Tony never says, do you have a skill that will allow you to pay the bills? It’s all about feelings. Could you talk to the listener out there? Is someone listening right now? Somebody’s out there listening who’s hovering around the top 10 on itunes right now. Okay. And they have, they’ve listened to podcast number one, very focused on feelings. Nothing more than podcast number two focused on you want to be and it sells well by the way. Then they somehow screw up and find podcast. Three or 15, they find us. Could you speak into the life of somebody out there who has no discernible skills yet and they want to achieve financial success? What would you say?

Don’t start your own firm. Go work for somebody else. There it is. It is, yeah. Yeah. It’s not a god given, right to start your own firm and to be successful. I, I think it’s a nasty, rotten, lonely life to be an entrepreneur and if you’ve got the guts for it, go for it. But it’s not some glorious thing that everybody’s cut out for. I, um, you know, sometimes people, people running entrepreneurial firms would die to go work for somebody else. At some point it meant that the things that people do to prevent, to, to not have a boss at any cost, it’s crazy the money they’ll give up so that they don’t have a boss. And then you have entrepreneurs who are really, really good sole entrepreneurs or small from entrepreneurs. That would be me, and then you have entrepreneurs who were amazing at starting and building companies have thousands and tens of thousands of people. That is not me. Those take different skills

and I admire all. I admire the person who’s who can go work for somebody else every day and be engaged and do good things. I admire the entrepreneur can start affirming building at the 10,000 people. We all bring different skills to life. It’s like it’s okay. It’s fine. I wouldn’t say that they’re, for the listeners out there, I personally struggle with startups. They always work because I won’t quit. You know, so like our, our haircut chain people marvel and say, that is so cool, man. Your haircut chain, elephant the room. You guys are rocking and they don’t understand like how much I just want to be done with the startup. I hate new ideas. I’m really comfortable managing as a team of about 100 people. That’s my zone. I love that. That’s why franchising is where I’ve made a lot of money. I love franchising because you know, I can sell you the business concept and I just make a small percentage of what you make and so I don’t make anything if you don’t make anything and it’s kind of a wind wind, but you have your own staff and your own problems in your own.

You’re on your own employment. I like that, but I think it’s a great question for the listeners to ask yourself, what are you comfortable? Are you comfortable working for a big company? Are you comfortable with a small, are you comfortable working for somebody else? That’s a, that’s a powerful question and I want to, I want to ask you this. You’re at, you’re a pilot. If I understand this right, you’re a helicopter pilot and an airplane pilot. Is this correct? That’s true, yeah. Not just like a, uh, you know, one of those little lego things. I mean, a real thing. I can climb in it and actually take off. Oh Wow. Yeah, yeah. My grandfather once built a gyrocopter, which is a combination of the motorcycle and they help the man right there and he crashed it into a barn and rural Minnesota and almost died and then when he recovered, his wife almost killed him.

And how many [inaudible] did he take out in cash? Anywhere you’re going to take out an auto crash anywhere at all. You know, I have. The question I have for you though is how did you learn to master being a pilot? How many hours did it take you? What was the process like to learn to become a pilot? That takes us right back to the discipline. Crushed question, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. That’s probably where you were leading me by the nose. It’s a great question. It took many, many years. The first rating was the hardest and then after that I kind of knew what I was in for. But you know, the most amazing thing about learning to fly to me is watching how instructors do it because they have to let you go almost to the edge. They have to let you almost die and take them with you and they have to keep resisting the urge to take the controls back because if they take the controls back every time, then the pilot to be the pilot and training, there’s never going to learn. Right. That’s the story of what management is. You know, I used to teach people in my car, I don’t do this anymore, David, by the way, this is in the past. Okay. That’s, it’s sort of in the past where we can move on, but you know, people are afraid to cold call, you know, people are just so afraid. I’ve heard that. Yeah, I’ve heard that. I don’t know. I’ve never experienced that, but I have heard that.

Yes.

Well, I would hire people in our call center for DJ connection. I mean there’s like, you know, dozens of people in the call center and everyone’s afraid to make a goal, so men, women, whoever worked for me, I’d say, here’s the deal. Do you drink alcohol? And they would say, oh no sir, I don’t. Or Yes, I do it. About 80 percent of you’ll go, yeah, I occasionally have a beer and I’m like, here’s the deal. Step one, I’m going to have a beer and you’re going to have a beer, and they were gonna make a call. All right. Now every 25 calls we get another beer and they’re like, are you kidding me? I’m like, no, no. This is how we start. Every one of our guys, Aaron, we’re like four beers in each at like 10:30 in the morning and he’s like, oh, they just so much courage that the best man, because I learned this move because I was the dj for weddings and I saw the best man always grabbed a beverage before giving a toast, take the edge off the old liquid courage May. We’d be pretty much blasted by noon on their first day, but they would book something and they’re like, dude, this job’s awesome.

Well, the next day they can drive, you know, have some of them, are the office, drive them home, they come back the next day we do it again, like here’s the deal. We’re tapering off. Now. We don’t create it by day three. We’re kind of beer for him. I said, here’s the deal. Every time you close a deal, you get a beer. So we always kept just tons of beer around on. Now I’ve changed my religious views and I don’t know that I promote alcoholism but it wasn’t effective move and I think one of those instructors have got to be probably. I mean going. If that guy. Does that move again, I’m going to slam something from this. I mean, seriously. That’s crazy man. That’s crazy.

I just, when you think about discipline, do you think about process and learning all the flight, the hundreds of thousands of flights that take place across the world every week and so few accidents, so few people hurt. That’s a testament to how we can really pull something off if we care a lot about it. Right, and I just wish we had that same sort of attention in our businesses as well, like process thinking. I’m writing things down, training certification. It’s just a great story. That’s what I mean. I know flying is fun and I love it and I was good at both, but to me that’s the lesson and behind flying that’s so interesting. Especially the instructor side.

Now this is the rapid fire round that I did not prepare you for and if you want to opt out you just hang up and that’ll be my subtle cue that you’re not interested in this part of the show. Okay. I’m going to introduce a distraction to you. Okay. So I might say something like a kangaroo and you can tell me how to deal with that distraction. Okay. Because the world that we were all being distracted, a lot of entrepreneurs and I made a list of things that most entrepreneurs say they’re being distracted by on a daily basis and I just like for you to share how you do with this distraction. Is that okay? Okay. Okay. Here we go. I’m getting pretty nervous, but facebook, I don’t know how real wood, the kangaroo ideal. Theoretical face facebook updates. Oh God. Turn all your notifications off. Nice. Oh, you know what that is? We take a moment. We all just get 4 million mega points and a big bomb explosion sound.

Thank you, Harry. Thank you.

Okay. All right. So here we go. Next, next one. Chronic email interruptions.

Uh, well, other than obviously the notifications, um, figure out how to end email conversations because otherwise it’s like. Thank you. Oh No, thank you. It’s really good to speak with you. No problem. Let’s talk again. It’s like figure out just to stop them somehow and that will eliminate at least a third of the emails.

Okay. Well, okay. Here’s what that, that right there is a chef. We get 17 mega points. I like that. Adjusted for inflation. That’s $3,000,000,000,000 checks in the mail. Here’s the next interruption. A imagine there’s somebody who is a phone book salesman. Okay. He shows up or a salesman of some kind. Somebody who’s trying to sell you something today. I got called by multiple people and I have my own deal at waves of dealing with these things, but can you. How do you deal with interruptions from wanted solicitors?

If it’s by phone. I use Robo killer. Really? It’s a fantastic app and you can automatically play back. These are so funny. You can. You can play back messages that makes it sound like you’re speaking, but you really aren’t and it records both sides of the conversations and if you’re ever bored you can go listen to live recordings. This robo killer, it’s called, yes,

I know about this. This is really good. By the way, just for the listeners out there, don’t know. It’ll say like, thank you this or hey, this is David. And they’ll go, Hey David, I was calling you about whatever and it knows how to do it right. And you finished talking to go, oh, really? Tell me more. Yeah, and then they’ll keep you that long to pause and what to ask, but it keeps doing it and so you’re on the phone with someone who sounds like they’re. They’re interested. I did it the other day. There was a guy who called me, I won’t mention the name of the company, but it’s in the world of the Tony Robbins kind of thing. Yeah, and he called me, not Tony Robbins, but somebody in that world. He called and offered me $100,000 to buy our video vault of training videos and I said, a hundred million thousand dollars.

He goes, no, no, $100,000. They owe 100,000 million dollars. That’s too much. And he goes, no, no, I’m just trying to make you an offer here. I would appreciate if you take this seriously. I got to tell you I could not in any way take 100,000 million dollars. And he goes, sir, it’s a $100,000, $100,000. Big Ones. That’s crazy. And I kept this going and eventually just hung up on me because this guy would call me all the time and Vanessa just my wife just loves when I do those kinds of things. She was just saying that’s a good move. Okay, next distraction.

Okay. TV

only. Don’t watch any live TV except definitely not the vikings for. That’s for you. Only your NFL team. Don’t watch any live TV. I only watch shows that you have preplanned, so you’re not just sitting down watching something you don’t want to watch.

That right there gets 16 mega points and a free subscription to the jelly of the month club like started out at 40 and then 17 and 16. This is not encouraged. Well, let me tell you what the first things I gave you were Iraqi dinar next distracts because you’re. You’re so good at being disciplined and focused and becoming an expert. Charlatans,

charlatans, like people trying to rip you off.

You. You see it all the time. Get rich quick. Hey David, I could. I could get you to the top of itunes in 10 minutes readavid bakl quick. Hey, it’s only $10,000 a month. I’ll get you there real fast. Hey, $27,000. I could. It sounds too good to be true because it probably is.

Yeah. I just completely ignore every single one of them and if I’m ever mildly tempted, I will send it to one of my boys who are even more skeptical than I am and if it passes the smell test that I’ll pursue it. But usually I just completely ignore all of those things. That’s, it’s just such a nasty marketing world we live in where people are trying to sell us stuff all the time. And I also wonder like, why are you, why are you doing this? If this is so effective, wouldn’t you just be retired somewhere?

Okay. All right. Now that right there was a 4 trillion, 716 and point two, three, four slash seven care. The five high. A lot of mega points. Okay. Very good. Just got a lot better. Okay. Final, final, final question for a distraction. People, people discussing, wanting to discuss during the workday, very divisive political or religious discussions. You know, how it is. So it enters into the office, it’s a potential client or an employee or somebody and they want to just talk about, hey, what are your thoughts about legalizing abortion? Or Hey, what are your thoughts about legalizing marijuana? Or Hey, what are your thoughts about predestination? How do you see a lot of owners spinning massive cope, copious amounts of time discussing things like this? How do you deal with it?

Oh goodness. I try to distract them because I, I don’t see any upside whatsoever in discussing that stuff. I just get away from it entirely. I don’t even discuss gossip kinds of things with them about some of their employees because I find I’m charging them so much money that they want to use every minute of my time, so I would say the best answer is charge them so much money that they don’t dare waste time talking about that stuff.

Okay. Chuck, can you tell about my rash move? Yeah. Anytime there is something that a clay doesn’t want to talk about or deal with or at the time he’ll just ask him if he could show him his rash on his thigh. It’s just not. It’s not getting better. Would you mind coming and taking a look at this with me right quick. Have that point. Let me show you my rack. Thankfully no one’s taken me up on that. I’d be in jail now. Your habits and routines on a daily basis, you’re obviously having success as a result of sticking to some kind of routine, some kind of habit, some sort of discipline. Can you talk to us about your daily habits and routines?

Yes. So in the morning I always get up very early, like around five, 5:30. I scan five newspapers. Uh, I have breakfast then and I’ve the night before and that you can’t have a good morning unless you clear your plate from the night before. Right? So I already know what I’m going to get done today and I’ve decided that yesterday and I’ve finally gotten to the point after this many decades on earth where I won’t put anything down that I know I can’t get done. So I used to be very aspirational, like these 30 things I need to get done knowing that was only going to get six of them dumb right now. It’s a very real plan. And then I picked the hardest things to do first. And then I try to relax and do some of my hobbies. Uh, about mid afternoon we have an early dinner, we binge watch shows that we’re excited about and then we’d go to bed around 9:00.

That’s now. Here’s other than just how a day unfolds this. I learned this from Dan Sullivan of strategic coach. He would be great for your show. One day he talks about how there are three different kinds of days and every week one day is the day where you’re doing no work at all. That’s two or three of those seven. Another kind of day is a day where you’re preparing to really do work, so you’re getting all this stuff off your table, off your desk, you’re getting stuff prepared, the research ready and so on, and then there’s one or two days during every week where you are doing nothing but one or two huge projects. You’re not doing any of the little things. You’re not relaxing. That has revolutionized how much I get done. Very helpful.

Dan Sullivan is a great author. I don’t know that he’s rejected me for an interview. Most great people have and I just reached back out of it every six months. That’s been my key to my success. I just continue, uh, reaching out, so I don’t really. He’s rejected me yet, but I will make sure he rejects me in the near future because usually people get rejected me about two or three times and then they’ll say yes. Then they kind of just given our hire an itunes, people will, will, will say us more often. But uh, one thing he didn’t, you didn’t mention here data. Don’t make sure we’re getting it out there. If you’re a member of the Finnish apostolic community, you want to block out an entire day to make it the love. You got to create the debate. 20 babies to show it back to you. Hey Man, I was going to ask them

you, David, you talked earlier about having a writing retreat. I got a two part question for you. First of all, I would like to know what the inside of that writing retreat looks like. Is it like a sterile, cold environment where you go to work or is it swagged out with Patina and you’re finished? Is all over? What does that thing look like? So there’s a. If you go to the website of the book, expertise.is, you’ll see pictures of it. But essentially there are, you see how they wove that, right? So there’s 700 foot drop off of a rock bluff on the back and we’re riding on the mountains and there’s a fireplace. I like to write there during the three seasons when a fire makes sense and it’s just, it’s like a really nice kind of a cabin. But it’s a modern cab.

I’m on your website right now. What do I need to click? I cannot. I could not contain myself. I have no data. I have to see this. I need. So if you go to

teeth.is. Yep. And you pull up. I think there’s something in there about like about the book or something like that

right there. If you’re a listener out there and you at all extras, extras, extras. You’re listening to her and you’d all care about your family or your soul or your personal development. You will also go to expertise studies. I’ll put a link on the show.

We aren’t going to go to expertise done is we’re all going to expertise. There’s the writing cabinet. You see? Oh, okay.

So we got that. I’m going to put a photo of this, a beautiful place, and then my real question, I think that was a champagne room, but that’s a my question as it relates back to, we’ve been talking about, you know, it takes discipline to become an expert. How important is it for you to have that place that you know you can go to a to get work done? The thing is set up how you want. There’s the distractions you don’t want aren’t coming in. How important is that for you to stay disciplined?

I don’t think it’s important to have a place, but I think it’s important to have a particular mentality. So it might be that you go to a starbucks and you have your special pad of paper and the pen that means a lot to you that costs $100 and really should have cost seven. You know, it’s important to have teens. You don’t necessarily have to have a separate writing retreat again, right? I don’t want to, I don’t want to come up with something maxim that some, uh, somebody who doesn’t have means in a little tribe and Guatemala can’t do right, but everybody could do that.

A chuck, I think what David baker just said, I’ll try to paraphrase it. I think what he just said,

well, you must go to school mountain alone and stay in a Dojo of Mojo with a lot of cans of bud light, completely new cold calls at night. And only the most extravagant of accoutrements we’ll do top of the mountain is in your heart.

No, he’s got to have a mindset which you can bring anywhere. That’s powerful. Beautiful. Uh, final questions I have for you. One to two books out there. Someone says, okay, I will. I’m definitely going to purchase a copy of the business of expertise because I’m a great American. What’s another book you might recommend for the listeners out there? Is there a book that you thought, man, that really changed my mindset? Maybe a Dan Sullivan book or particular look out there?

Um, you know, I love Dan pink’s books, just honestly. Um, I also love Ryan short books, especially the ones on that that looked back through the marcus aurelius kind of stuff that, that talk about how to live simply and deeply and in a real way a, those are two, I think anything by Anne Lamott, l a, m o, t, t is really fantastic. She’s written a lot of books about writing that, about thinking about faith as well. Those are the three authors that I tend to go to where, you know, there’s certain authors where it doesn’t, you don’t even really care what the book is about. It’s just you’re following the author. Those are three authors that I follow a lot.

I’m marcus are really a pile on there. If you had the money to podcast well is we’re trying to book a lot of deceased Roman emperor. He can’t get his email. The issue is the ones that lived during that particular window of time have been harder to book budget. We’re not getting a lot of email responses, but he talks about this simple way of living, which I 100 percent endorse. Uh, you know, my wife and I, people always ask us, well, why do you guys live on 17 acres behind a wall? You know, why don’t you have more, why don’t you, why don’t you live in a gated community and I can be real with you. I’ve done it and I’ve had the HOA and I’ve had, you know, the little button you hit and it opens the gate and there’s the little gate guard guy and there’s the Hoa and then there’s the big couch that goes into the dining room and the big table in the dining room that you never go in.

You had rooms in your house, you’ve never been to. There’s a in somewhere. And then you go, what am I doing? You know, when you realize I just, I got sold, you know what? I should probably sell this thing to someone else because I got sold. I got to, you know. And so again, I just mark is a really, this is such a, there’s so much powerful truth that he put out an observations. Um, can I get, my final question for you is for anybody out there who’s an aspiring expert or an aspiring, they want to take their career to the next level. If they want to reach out to you, what’s the best way you’d recommend for them to do that? Do, do you want just a ton of emails? Are you looking for people to just, you know, Robo call you, what are you looking for?

And they get for every call I answer, they get a free beer or something like that where you’ve already gone through that.

No, they’re, they’re welcome to email the best addresses me, men, David c Dot Baker Dot com. But probably before that they should just go to that website, David C, Baker.com because I put every week I write something that’s like 800 to 1600 words and it’s free and it’s, it’s, it’s actually, it’s not as frequent as seth Godin’s blog, but it’s a whole lot better. But the idea is I want to give people a lot of insight for free that will just help them in their careers and so that’d be a good place to start. And then if they have other specific questions, just email me. Sure.

What do you charge? I mean if someone’s going, I, I might be interested in hiring this David Baker guy. I’ve got the book. I’m interested, you know, I’ve kind of, I’ve read his blogs. I mean how much does it cost him and be just entry level

level to work with you. It’s $17 a minute and you think I’m kidding. But it’s if you, if you go to clarity dot FM slash DCB, my initials that that’s what I charged to talk people talk with people on the phone. You’ll be getting a bill for this obviously, but then most of the job definitely that. Your last question after you heard that? No, but most of the packet, the services or packaged and and it does not make sense for me to work with hardly anybody in the world. I need to work with just very, very few people who are very serious about a particular thing and those are the folks that I love working with. The rest of the people. There’s 37,000, that’s not a lot, but 37,000 people to get the free weekly email and that’s where I pour a lot of my soul and I’m very, very happy to do it. That’s what most people’s do is just get the free email.

If you’re out there and you say, I want to hire this guy for a, a one meeting a week for an hour per meeting, it’s $4,386 if you wanted to do that. But David, I all of a sudden I have no more questions. I don’t know what it is. I just wrap it up. Okay. No, but seriously, I appreciate you being on the show today. It means the world to me that you would take time out of your very intentional schedule to, uh, impart your words of wisdom to, to our listeners. And we’d like to end every show with a boom because boom stands for us. It stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum, and so chuck, we typically say three, two, one, and then. Oh, okay. So clay stairs. Are you ready to bring a boat? I’m in Mr David Baker. You ready to bring a boom? I’m ready. Yes. Eric. Jeff, are you ready? Boom. Town. Here we go. Three, two, one. Boom.