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A book with this title has an obligation attached to it. If I am going to ask you to find what is original in your own body of work, then I have to show you what I found when I did it to mine. I did not plan for this to be a chapter. I thought it would be a page at the back, a list in small type that a careful reader might glance at and most readers would skip, the way you skip the credits at the end of a film to get to the parking lot. But when the list came back from the sweep, I sat with it for a long time, longer than I sat with almost any of the seventy questions, and I realized it was not an appendix. It was a portrait. It was the most honest picture of my life's work I had ever been handed, because it showed me exactly where I had been standing on someone else's shoulders, and for how long, and whether I had ever said thank you.
So it gets a chapter, the seventy first, one more than my age, which seems right, because no man arrives at seventy on his own. The sweep that produced these seventy questions read everything. Twenty one books. Two hundred and three self coaching stimulators. Forty years of recorded calls, workbooks, scripts, letters, and the transcripts of rooms I have long since forgotten standing in. I asked the machine to do something I had never asked any editor to do. Find every idea in here that is not mine. Find the source of every phrase I have been saying as if I invented it. And it did. A great deal of what came back was not mine. It belonged to Dan Sullivan, or Stephen Covey, or Viktor Frankl, or my own coach Thomas Leonard, and I had been carrying some of it so long that I had stopped noticing where I picked it up. That is the thing nobody tells you about a long teaching life. You do not steal ideas.
You absorb them. You hear a sentence at a seminar in 1991 and it lands so cleanly that it becomes part of how you think, and ten years later it comes out of your mouth in your own cadence, and twenty years later you would pass a lie detector test saying it was yours. It is not theft. It is digestion. But digestion is not authorship, and a man who is about to ask you to curate what would not exist without you had better know the difference in his own house first. Most of it I credited every time I taught it. Some of it I did not. Both are on this list, because a list containing only the flattering half is not a record. It is a brochure. I am not ashamed of this chapter. A man who has read and studied for forty years should have a long one, and the longer it runs, the more the shorter list is worth. What remains after the subtraction is what I have left to claim.
Subtracting what I borrowed does not prove the rest is original. It only clears the ground enough for someone to see what is standing and judge it. And I want to do more than subtract. I want to say what each of these gave me, because a debt you only list is a debt you have not felt, and I have felt every one of these. So I am going to walk you through them the way I would walk you through a house I lived in for forty years, room by room, and tell you who built each room and what I did in it. I will start with the coaches, because they built the foundation. Dan Sullivan comes first because he comes up most. I have learned more about how to think about my own business from Dan than from almost anyone alive, and I have credited him, I believe, every single time. The referability habits are his. Show up on time. Do what you say. Finish what you start.
Soil of Four Sentences
Say please and thank you. Four sentences so ordinary that most people roll their eyes when they hear them, and so rare in practice that a professional who keeps all four for twenty years will be referred whether or not he ever asks. I built a large part of By Referral Only on the soil those four sentences made, and I have said so in rooms for decades. The four C's are his too. Commitment, then courage, then capability, then confidence, in that order, and the order is the whole teaching. Most people wait for confidence before they commit, and Dan showed me that confidence is the last thing to arrive, the reward for having committed and been courageous long enough to get capable. I lived that formula on a set of gymnastic rings at sixty, doing muscle ups I had never strung together, and I understood it in my body in a way I had only understood it in my head before. The gap and the gain are his.
Measuring yourself backward, against where you started, instead of forward, against an ideal you will never reach. I have watched that one distinction pull more high achievers out of quiet despair than any therapy I know of. And the question, who do you want to be a hero to, is his. I built an entire community around that word hero and I have called my members Heroes for years, and the seed of it is in Dan's question. Who Not How belongs to Dan and to Benjamin Hardy, who wrote the book in 2020. I want to tell the story of that one carefully, because it is the closest I come on this list to a claim of my own, and I want to make the claim at exactly its true size. One evening in 1999 I sat with my friend Dean Jackson at L'Auberge in Del Mar, and Dean pulled out his journal and said, Joe, I cracked the code on getting things done. He showed me a diagram.
Asking how do I do this sends you off to figure it out yourself. Asking who already knows how is the real question. We spent two hours on it that night. I put it in print years before the book came out, and I am proud of that. But the idea did not come from me. It came across a table from Dean, and Dean was in Dan's world, and the idea was traveling through all of us long before any of us wrote it down. My use of it in print predates their book. My authorship of it does not exist. Stephen Covey gave me two sentences I have lived inside for thirty years. Private victory precedes public victory. You cannot be trustworthy with other people until you can be trusted by yourself, and every public failure I ever had started as a private one I did not attend to. And seek first to understand, then to be understood. That fifth habit is the root of almost everything I have ever taught about conversation.
When I tell an agent to stop presenting and start asking, I am saying Covey's sentence in my own words, and I have credited him for it, and I want to credit him again here, at the end, at full size. Thomas Leonard was my own coach. I paid him to meet with me one on one, every week, for most of a year and a half, starting in 1996, and he was the man people call the father of coaching. Tolerations are his. The toleration free zone is his. In our very first session he told me that as long as I had things in my life I was tolerating, my goals would be puny and not terribly inspiring, and I would not live up to my potential. Every time I said the word should, he would look at me and say, Joe, you just should on yourself. He is the one who told me I was a seeker and always would be, and that I had to stop needing to find and fall in love with the seeking, and that sentence freed me from a pressure I had carried since I was a boy.
An Unchecked Quotation
He is gone now. I never told him, in so many words, how much of me he built. So I am telling you. Jerry Ballinger was a brilliant, sensitive, somewhat eccentric direct response marketer who became a soulful friend and called me his older brother. The Ultimate Leverage Questions are his, given to me directly in 1995. So is the sentence that the brain is for processing, not for storage, which is the reason I have not been without a journal since, and the reason there are five hundred of them in boxes at my house. And Jerry gave me one more thing that is not on the original list, because it is not an idea, it is a correction. He watched me on stage one day and told me I was struggling, that I wanted to be a big name, and that I was more skilled at being the light than the limelight. I pointed my life in a different direction after that conversation. Mark Divine gave me Kokoro, the civilian version of Navy SEAL Hell Week, which I finished at fifty four as the oldest man to get through it at that time.
Twenty X is his, the idea that you are capable of at least twenty times what you believe you are. The courage dog and the fear dog are his, the picture of two dogs fighting inside you and the one that wins being the one you feed, and that picture is older than Mark, and he passed it to me through his own teacher Tom Brown, and I passed it to thousands of people, and I want everyone in that line named. A whole book of mine, Willing Warrior, rests on what Mark built. I would not have that book, or the year that made it, without him. Now the researchers and the thinkers, the people I never met but read until their sentences became my furniture. The gap between stimulus and response is widely attributed to Viktor Frankl.
In that space, the saying goes, is our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom. I have quoted it as Frankl's for decades, and I learned in the sweep that the sentence does not appear in his published work. It may have come from somewhere near him, it has been passed around for so long that no one is quite sure, but I was handing you a quotation with a name on it that I had never checked. I still believe the idea, and I still believe Frankl lived it in a place I cannot imagine. But I owe you the truth about the sentence, and the truth is I do not know whose it is. Servant leadership belongs to Robert Greenleaf, who wrote in 1970 that the great leader is seen as servant first. My whole model of the professional who leads by serving, the consultant for life, sits on Greenleaf's ground. The eight developmental stages belong to Erik Erikson.
A Committee of Voices
In 2002, after my second marriage ended, I went back through his stages and saw that the identity I had built on stages, the one I was living twenty days a month on the road, had been built out of what was missing in the first five. That was one of the most important things I ever understood about myself, and the map that let me see it was his. The eight resolution strategies I built on top of his stages are mine. The stages are not. First thought, best thought belongs to Allen Ginsberg, by way of Chogyam Trungpa, who taught it as a meditation teacher before Ginsberg made it a poet's creed. I used it to teach people to write without censoring themselves on the first pass, and it works. The only part of it I can claim is the twist I put on the end, never the last thought, which is my reminder that the first thought gets you started and is almost never where the truth finally lands.
Deep work, and attention as an asset, belong to Cal Newport. I ran my own experiment on his idea in November of 2020, keeping my phone on during election week while I tried to write, refreshing the news like a man pulling a slot machine, and I got half as much done and felt anxious and out of control the whole time. Newport described the mechanism. I only paid the tuition. Growth mindset belongs to Carol Dweck, the simple and enormous idea that ability is built rather than fixed, and that how you think about your ability changes what you do with it. Identity based habits belong to James Clear, who said that every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. I had been teaching versions of identity before behavior for years, and Clear said it better than I ever did, and I have used his words. Future self, and the idea that personality is not permanent, belong to Ben Hardy. I have been recording my own future self in my own voice for years, and Ben gave the practice a science and a language I did not have.
Voice Dialogue and the idea of subpersonalities belong to Hal and Sidra Stone. When I say in the first chapter of this book that every part of me speaks in the first person and every one of them wants the pen, I am standing on what the Stones built, the discovery that a human being is not one voice but a committee, and that most of our suffering comes from one member of the committee claiming to be the chairman. Levels of consciousness belong to David Hawkins, whose map of human states, from shame at the bottom to peace and enlightenment at the top, gave me a vocabulary for something I could feel in rooms but could not name. Love the plateaus belongs to George Leonard, whose book on mastery taught me that most of a long practice is spent on flat ground where nothing seems to be improving, and that the master is the one who learns to love the plateau rather than live for the spikes. The six named containers in this book, money and health and love and attention and reputation and time, are mine, built on top of his ground, but the ground is his.
The Word Because
Reciprocity, social proof, and liking belong to Robert Cialdini, whose work on influence explained to me why the things I was teaching agents to do actually worked. People feel obliged to give back. People follow other people. People say yes to people they like. I had been teaching the behaviors for years before I read the science, and Cialdini handed me the reasons. The satisfaction question belongs to Fred Reichheld, who showed that asking a customer how likely they are to recommend you tells you more than any survey of how satisfied they were. The whole referral industry I helped build rests partly on that one question, and he asked it first. The experience economy belongs to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, who saw that people pay more for what they experience than for what they get, and I named them when I taught it. Embedded commands, negation, rapport, and the meta model come from neuro linguistic programming, from Richard Bandler and his partners, and from the hypnotic language of Milton Erickson that they studied.
A great deal of the precise language I have taught for forty years came out of that school. I took what worked and dropped what did not, and I have always said where it came from. The because compliance effect belongs to Ellen Langer, whose famous study at a copy machine showed that people let you go ahead of them in line far more often when you give a reason, even a meaningless one, as long as it includes the word because. I have taught that word as a small key for decades. Morning pages belong to Julia Cameron, three pages written by hand first thing every morning, whatever comes. Long before I knew her name I was doing something like it, but she gave the practice its name and its discipline, and many of my members learned it from me without knowing it was hers. Regret aversion belongs to Kahneman and Tversky and the people who studied with them, the discovery that we fear the pain of regret so much that we will make worse decisions to avoid it.
I built a whole practice around strengthening what I called the regretter muscle, going public with a goal before I was ready so that backing out would cost me more than following through, and the science underneath that practice is theirs. WOOP belongs to Gabriele Oettingen. Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. Her research showed that positive thinking alone can make people less likely to achieve what they want, and that naming the obstacle is what turns a dream into a plan. The thought worm comes from research at Queen's University in Canada, which found a way to see when one thought ends and the next begins, and counted thousands of them in a day. The inversion I built on it, the insight worm, the practice of catching the rare thought that carries something true and following it, is mine. Possibilist belongs to Hans Rosling, who refused to call himself an optimist or a pessimist and chose a third word for a person who looks at the facts and sees what is possible.
The Film Projector
I adopted his word because I needed it. Feeling follows thought belongs to Sydney Banks and the teachers who carried his work forward, including the Pranskys. My friend Jamie Smart, who gave me the picture of the torch and the lighthouse, also gave me Banks's idea in a single image. Your mind is a film projector, Joe. Thought is the film. Consciousness is the bulb. You live in a movie of your own making. I have been showing people that movie ever since, and the projector was never mine. The tribe of a hundred and fifty is Robin Dunbar's number, the limit on how many stable relationships a human mind can hold, and it came to me by way of Dave Logan's work on tribal leadership.
When I taught people to build a Top 150 list of the people who matter most, I was building on Dunbar. The ACE questionnaire belongs to the study run by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control, the research that showed how adverse experiences in childhood follow people into their adult health and lives. I used it to help people see that their patterns had a source, and that the source was not their fault. Interests versus positions belongs to Roger Fisher and William Ury, who taught that people in a negotiation say what they want, and underneath it is why they want it, and agreement lives at the level of the why. It is a cousin of the five, six and seven I have taught for decades, and I want to say plainly that the family resemblance is real. The trust equation belongs to David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, who wrote that trust is credibility, reliability and intimacy, divided by how much the advisor is focused on himself.
That denominator alone has kept me honest in a thousand conversations. Work on the business, not in it, belongs to Michael Gerber, whose book changed how a whole generation of small business owners understood their own jobs, mine included. Peak end, and the finding that people remember an experience mostly by its most intense moment and its ending, belong to Daniel Kahneman, and Daniel Pink carried the idea into the study of endings and timing. When I taught agents that the last week of a transaction is the most referable moment of the whole relationship, I was teaching their research with real estate examples. Metaphor as cognition belongs to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who showed that we do not just use metaphors to decorate thought, we think in them, and the metaphor you choose for your life quietly decides what you can do inside it. I have spent years helping people trade a bad metaphor for a better one, the torch for the lighthouse, the climb for the descent, and I learned that metaphors were that powerful from Lakoff.
A Late Correction
Solomon's Paradox belongs to Igor Grossmann, whose research showed that people reason far more wisely about other people's problems than about their own. It is the best explanation I know of why a coach needs a coach, and why I could see in a member in five minutes what I could not see in myself in fifty years. Sentence completion belongs to Nathaniel Branden, the practice of writing the beginning of a sentence and finishing it quickly, again and again, until the truth surprises you. I used it in PrivateWork for years. Neutral thinking belongs to Trevor Moawad, who taught elite athletes that the alternative to negative thinking is not positive thinking, which the mind does not believe, but neutral thinking, which simply states what is true and what comes next. Two hundred and twelve degrees belongs to Sam Parker, the picture that water at two hundred and eleven degrees is just hot, and at two hundred and twelve it boils, and the one degree changes everything. The hero's journey belongs to Joseph Campbell, and if you have noticed that the shape of this whole book is a departure, an ordeal, and a return carrying something home, you have noticed that I was walking a path he mapped seventy years ago.
Wake up, grow up, clean up, show up belongs to Ken Wilber, four words for the four kinds of work a whole human being has to do, the spiritual awakening, the psychological maturing, the healing of the shadow, and the bringing of all of it into the world. The unique self, and the idea of the public and private face, belong to Marc Gafni. Now the business books, and three I owe a different kind of debt to. The trust leap, and the phrase reputation capital, belong to Rachel Botsman, who explained that every time we try something new, a new kind of service, a new kind of person, we take a leap of trust across a gap, and that our reputation is a form of capital that either lets people make that leap toward us or does not. Start With Why belongs to Simon Sinek. The speed of trust belongs to Stephen M. R. Covey, the son of the man whose habits I have lived inside for thirty years.
Boundaries as property lines belongs to Henry Cloud and John Townsend, who taught that a boundary is like a property line, showing where you end and someone else begins, and what you are responsible for and what you are not. Those three I taught without ever saying whose they were. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to dress this up as a technicality. It is not one. I taught Sinek's why in my Conversational Coaching Academy as if I had found it. I taught Stephen M. R. Covey's speed of trust in Creating Trust as if I had coined the phrase. I taught Cloud and Townsend's property lines in more rooms than I can count. I did not set out to take anything from them. I absorbed them, the way I said at the start, and I let the absorption stand in for authorship because it was convenient and nobody stopped me. Saying so here is the correction, and it is late, and I am making it anyway, in print, in a book with my name on the cover, which is the only place a correction like that is worth anything.
Named by Number
Then there are the people in my own rooms, and this part of the list moves me more than any of the famous names, because these are people I know. The testimonial drip came from Terry Honnefeldt's Gold Rush campaign in the nineties, built for agents who had more time than money, and I credited him. The practice of asking for the five star review at the consultation, before the work is done, came from Jesse, the young disc jockey I trained in 2006 who became one of the most referred agents in San Diego, and who one day told me the truth when I needed it most. I credited him, and I am glad to credit him again. Name your chat came from Cecil Volsch, one of my members, a small practical idea about giving every conversation with the machine its own name so you can find your way back to it, and I use it every single day. Walkie talkie versus turn based communication came from Dan Paris, one of our coaches, the same man who helped me stuff my bloody shoes and mud packed boots into a green garbage bag after Kokoro and asked me how I did it.
Obtainable, relatable, aspirational came from my daughter Traci, who is a better communicator than I will ever be, and who taught her father a three word test for whether a message will land. Oak log gene sequencing, and the link between isolation and intelligence, came from Zach Bush. And then three of my own stimulators that are not mine in any honest sense. Stimulator 0172 was written in full by Charlotte Volsch, and it went out under my name. Stimulator 0057 was written in Brigita Lajkovic's voice. Stimulators 0195 and 0203 contain no original material of mine, and 0203 is largely Joe Dispenza, and I did not say so. I am naming those by number because they deserve that level of precision. When you have written two hundred of something, it is very easy to let three or four slip by, and the slipping is exactly the habit this chapter is trying to break. And one more, which is not a borrowing so much as a gift. The word PrivateWork came from my therapist.
She said it once, about the work I needed to do on myself between our sessions, and it landed so completely that I built a whole methodology and a whole community and a whole season of my life under it. The method underneath the word is mine. The word never was. Every time I say it, I am saying something she gave me, and I want her to have her name in the history of it, even if she never reads this. Here is what I learned from sitting with this list, and it is why the list became a chapter. When I first saw it, I felt smaller. Seventy years, twenty one books, thousands of rooms, and this many of the load bearing beams were cut by someone else. That was the first feeling, and I let myself have it.
I Felt Held
Then something else came in under it, and it has stayed. I felt held. Every name on this list is a person who stood somewhere before me and left something on the ground where I could find it. Some of them I knew and loved. Most of them I never met. A few are dead. All of them were in the room with me every time I taught, whether I said their names or not. That is not a diminishment of the work. It is the truth about the work. Nobody makes anything alone. What would not exist without you is never everything you have said. It is the particular way the things that came to you passed through your particular life and came out changed. The four referability habits were Dan's. What happened when I taught them to an agent in Spokane who had just lost his biggest client was mine. The stages were Erikson's. What I saw in them about my own father's workroom was mine. The projector was Banks's, by way of Jamie.
The movie playing on it was my life. That is the real subtraction, and it is the real addition too. Take away everything you were handed, and what is left is not a pile of original ideas. It is a person. A specific person, with a specific history, through whom a great many borrowed things passed, and who changed them on the way through. That is what would not exist without you. Not the ideas. The passing through.
Your Seventy
So make this list before you make the other one. Sit down with your own body of work and write down everything you have been teaching that somebody handed you. Name them. The famous ones and the ones who sat across from you at a kitchen table. The ones you credited and the ones you did not. If there are some you never credited, credit them now, out loud, to someone, even if it is late, because late is still better than never, and I am the proof. The list of what you made is only worth something because this list exists first. And when you have finished it, you will be ready for the real challenge, which I told you at the beginning of this book was coming, and is now yours. Everyone who has lived and paid attention has a body of work, whether or not anyone ever called it that. It is in your mornings, your losses, your kept promises, your unresolved questions, and in everything that passed through you from the people who came before.
Most of it has never been curated, because nobody ever asked you to. I am asking. Go find what would not exist without you. Condense it into questions and hand them forward, with the names of everyone who handed them to you written right beside them. Begin with one. One question your life has earned. Write it at the top of a page tomorrow morning, before the world wakes up. Then carry it for a week, and let it fish for you. And when it brings up more than you expected, do what Milton asked of me on the first day. Stay.
