Shawn Livermore - Author of The Amazon Bestselling Book - Average Joe

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Sean Livermore, the author of Average Joe, and we discussed the six claims of a tech genius, the highly valuable Slow Create process that allows the average technologist to create at the same level as tech giants, and the coveted but unreliable flow state. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I actually, this morning, my wife, she said she heard the guest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) She knew the guest that was on the show, and she goes, oh, I'm actually gonna listen to that one. No. I'm like—

(Sean Livermore at 00:00:48) Ouch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) I'm like, okay. Love you too, babe.

(Sean Livermore at 00:00:51) Love you. Yeah. Thank you for believing in me, honey. Yeah. Love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) But as I was prepping for this and researching, I was just—I was loving your content. I'm loving the new book. Is this your first book or your second book?

(Sean Livermore at 00:01:04) Third. Third. Yeah. I've written two with the same publisher, but they were programming books. And so nobody reads that crap anymore. Right? It's just developers out there, but there's respect for that. It takes time and effort to write a software development book. And I went back to the publisher saying, you know, I wanna expand and move into the business category. And they said, okay. Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) And so you had great content. It was—I was hooked by your bullet points on the book cover, and I said, this is the type of stuff I like talking about. But then I find your Twitter handle, and it's Shani Pants. I was like, what is that? That's hilarious.

(Sean Livermore at 00:01:40) You know, life's too short, man. And, you know, everyone takes themselves so seriously. Right? So I just—you know, with—I got two kids, and we have fun. And so I just—I don't know. I thought it'd be funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) Dude, it's hilarious. We loved it. Like, I'm all for it 100%. It was just, like, it was so—it was attention grabbing. It did its job. Right?

(Sean Livermore at 00:02:00) Right. A little bit of marketing there. Why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:04) So is your background software development, and then you got into writing those types of books? Is that how you started?

(Sean Livermore at 00:02:11) Yeah. I began my software development career and got into startups about 10 years later, consulting, and then started my own company a few times, and then launched a few startups and raised venture funding six times, and then jumped back into consulting, and now writing books and doing all sorts of media, and building my software company. So I run Product Perfect, which is all about building the perfect product. And, you know, I've toyed around with starting my own podcast called The Perfect Product, so we'll see if that comes about. But, you know, writing the book was sort of a culmination of all my learnings over 21 years and fitting the paradigm-shifting thought processes into a funnel and then putting propulsion behind it. And it really is interesting how you can organize your thoughts out and I worked with a neuroscientist. We can get into it in the show, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) This is the show, by the way.

(Sean Livermore at 00:03:10) Oh, I thought we had to say when we started. Oh, no. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:14) No. No. No. Yeah. We record from the time we come in. And we edit stuff out—this may or may not. But we make you sound great, and we just kind of hang out and talk. I wanna do life as if we're hanging out having coffee or tea or water or whatever, and we just let the editors make us sound awesome.

(Sean Livermore at 00:03:30) Cool. I'm glad I didn't say anything too ridiculous. Well, you know, since I mentioned it and since we're recording, productperfect.com, that's the consultancy I run. And so we help people out here out of Southern California, but really across the country and even tangential to the United States, build and migrate large enterprise software products. And so right now, we're migrating a mainframe system. We're redeveloping several desktop apps into web apps, and we've got 15 or so people running around working hard for clients and hoping to grow that. And this year, we'll triple in size. So excited about that and excited about the book and building products, helping people realize their dreams, building their products, and moving their software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) Yeah. Well, if you do decide to launch a podcast, let me know. We'll have you back on. We can help you promote it and get the word out there. I'm all about having more great technology podcasts out there.

(Sean Livermore at 00:04:29) Right on. Thanks, Joel. I appreciate it, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:32) So the book is titled Average Joe. What is it about?

(Sean Livermore at 00:04:36) So Average Joe dispels the myth of the tech genius, this idea that there are great men with something more, great women with something more. You know, this binary true or false model that hamstrings everyone. All the CTOs and managers listening, you know, you're looking to build your organization with quality people. You're looking for brilliance. You're looking for intelligence, psychometric scoring, and you're standardizing all your processes so you can get the best people into the funnel. Right? Jim Collins in Good to Great, he says you gotta get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. Right? And you're building this company on the shoulders of great men and women. However, the philosophical underpinnings of that model is suspect. And over time it has endured enormous atrophy. Why? Because we have bought into these philosophies about intelligence and intelligence worship. You know, we have academia running the tech industry. And so Google and others in the Valley, not just them but others, have PhDs hiring more PhDs. Right? And there's quotes in the book from these folks as they hire people thinking through the models of academia-driven tests.

And so psychometric scoring back in the early 1900s, who do we put in the trenches of World War II versus who do we put in the tent? And that bifurcation of society has only exponentially driven us apart. And now it's who gets to live in the nice neighborhoods and who gets the good jobs and who goes to the right colleges and so forth. And so bodies being sent in every direction. Bodies everywhere. Right? And why do we do this? And why is tech the same? Tech sends bodies in every direction, and they're driven off of Elon Musk standing on a stage launching a rocket and saying you too can become amazing like I am, versus the Steve Jobs shot heard around the world when they launched the new iPhone. And all of the culmination of all our hopes and dreams goes into this fulcrum of am I or am I not a tech genius? And am I or am I not capable of building that new thing or launching that new product or running that company or doing that thing? Right? And then we teach our children these things, and it just never ends. Right?

And so the slippery slope, the logical fallacies, the mental models, everything we do, say, think, speak, and hear is driven into this funnel. And this book cuts the pipe. It cuts the pipe in half and says, nope. Wrong. Incorrect. Here's how it works. And it takes you through a smelly tunnel of an uncomfortable process of saying, I'm an average Joe. You know, it's like the first step of admitting, hey, my name is so and so and I'm an alcoholic or whatever. Right? It's like, okay, I'm average. I'm average. Right? Not making light of that topic, but you get the idea. I'm just a human being. I'm just a normal. I've got blood, tissue, organs. I got a brain. I got all this physical tangible world. And I'm gonna enter into the conversation now, and I'm going to nibble around the edges of the tech industry, and then I'm gonna freaking shove myself right into the center of it. And allowing yourself to be okay just where you're at, whatever that is, you know, a measuring rod, whatever measuring stick, metrics, and so forth. And then forcing yourself through a pipeline of how to think, how to speak, and how to create. And thinking, speaking, and creating outside of the litmus test or the psychometric fulcrums of the tech industry and building layer upon layer of all your levels of expertise, the clay that your hands touch, and then moving that through the pipeline into a way of communicating clearly, and we call that sustainable mystique.

And so I worked with a neuroscientist out of UCLA, Dr. Jesse Rissman, PhD. Amazing brilliant man. And so he and I together through the COVID crisis on Zoom sessions for months and months and months put together a system of thinking called the Slow Create framework that anyone, and I mean anyone—I even worked with a couple people who had learning disabilities learn it. And one in particular, and a couple other folks who really brilliant minds learned it and began to apply their thinking through the Slow Create framework of a canvas, a pipeline, and a triad. And the book just basically introduces that in chapter three and then helps you learn it throughout. And then if you go to slowcreate.com, it redirects and there's free materials, free PDFs, there's videos. It's a very simple framework to learn. But once you learn it, you can't unlearn it. It's like, you know, you'll be in the shower and your mind will drift off and you're like, yep. That's the answer. I use the Slow Create framework to get there and it's a really cool process. So I highly recommend that.

But anyway, the culmination of the book allows the average Joe to go from the left side of the spectrum to the right side of the spectrum, which is essentially dispelling the myth of the tech genius. There is no such thing as this tech genius, but in a strange and yet very satisfying twist allows them to become the tech genius himself. And so that's the sustainable mystique that anyone can conjure in that magic dust that they can spew into the air, into the ether, you know, and captivate their audience, whether it's a spouse or an investor or a coworker. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) You're blowing my mind. Cool. I love it. This is what I live for right here. So this framework, slowcreate.com, you said?

(Sean Livermore at 00:10:10) To the book right now, but we're launching the new site. But yeah. And then in there, you can go into the Slow Create framework submenu.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) So if I buy this book, this framework or this concept of thinking is inside of this book described?

(Sean Livermore at 00:10:24) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:25) Oh. Because the way you're talking about it, I feel like some of the things you're touching on are things that I noticed happening in my life. Like, for example, I used to—when I was engineering full time, when I was writing software full time. I used to at first, I would program for hours and hours and hours straight. And then what I realized is that I get exhausted. I go fall asleep and have a snack, relax, and then I would either solve the coding problem in my sleep or the answer would come to me. And then I thought, well, you know what? What if I just program in short spurts and force those breaks? And it was a better way to get things done. I got more done by working less intensely for longer periods of time. And so the little things like that that you kinda touch on, those are grabbing my attention saying, hey. This is something I need to look into deeper.

(Sean Livermore at 00:11:17) Yeah. We already do it. I mean, you see professors at the university walking with their head down. Well, what are they doing? They're just walking across the campus with loads of books, and they're looking at their feet. They're cycling through their thoughts. Right? They're processing. When you're folding laundry, when you're in the shower, when you're driving to work, whatever you're doing that is background thread type work, this is activating a part of the brain called the default mode network, the DMN. And so there's two halves of your thought models there in your brain. There's the executive control network, the ECN, and there's a default mode network, the DMN. And a lot of papers over the last 30 years, 20 years, and academia has gone bonkers. They call it neuroscientists gone wild. Okay? It was like this huge renaissance. It was an amazing time period in neuroscience where Raichle, R-A-I-C-H-L-E, is the professor credited with the origins of it, but they did PET scans and CAT scans and, you know, MRIs and fMRIs and all of this testing driven into this one question. What happens when your brain shuts off? When you're sleeping, resting, daydreaming, what happens? Well, naturally, they first thought nothing. Your brain goes dark. Actually, the inverse took place. Your brain lights up. What is it doing when you're daydreaming? It's fixing, solving, figuring out, stepping through the code. I mean, I've woken up from dreams saying, and I've fixed the bug. You know, I know the reason that that bug is happening that I was staring at for eight hours the previous day. And your brain is figuring it out for you, and that's how we're wired. That's how our physiological bodies are made.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I learned. I feel like I got a master's degree from Jesse Rissman in his work. And so we went through thought fluidity, the nagging pull, as it's called, subconscious creative work, the default mode network, resting state functional connectivity, mindless work. And so all of these neuroscientist terms and the way that people solve problems ties right into how tech products are created and how CTOs run their organizations. And so when Google Maps was created, it was that 10% time that helped to create it, where the guy had four hours a week to work on whatever he wanted. And so he was playing. He was playing around and his brain was thinking and daydreaming. And when the Hubble Space Telescope was solved, it was solved with an idea that came to a guy while he's taking a shower. He was inspired by the shower head and he kinda looked in, oh, I could do it like that. But he was also daydreaming and thinking and drifting. There's so many more examples and we're just scratching the surface of this topic. But mindless work and the way that we structure our thoughts and plot them out into a canvas of the Slow Create framework, that canvas, like a business model canvas, have you ever seen that? Like, competitors and, you know, supply and demand and all the pricing and your advertising, your marketing channels. The same type of canvas is used in the Slow Create framework for plotting out your information that your mind is trying to solve. And then we push it through a pipeline where you stack all the canvases horizontally. And then you push that through the triad, and the triad is this way of communicating.

People like Elizabeth Holmes with Theranos. Right? This dark low voice, you know. Or you have other people on stage, you know, you have the Tony Robbins and the ClickFunnels guy Russell—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:42) Brunson?

(Sean Livermore at 00:14:42) Brunson. You know? And others, not just them. I'm not picking on them specifically. So many others that have hype and hustle, and they have this—calories, and they jump up and down before they go on stage. You know? And let's get our blood sugar up. You know? Let's eat a lot of chocolate. And, you know, then you have entrepreneurs trying to pitch to investors at demo day, you know, which I've done. And I know the feeling and the blood pumping through your veins and you have all this brilliance that you believe that is inside of you. You wanna burst it out into the world like some superhero, you know, removing his shirt and the gold and the dust just flies into the air. And, oh, if only the world knew what I was thinking and how amazing this idea is. Well, that's nonsense. You know, it's—the goal is to not have any hype, not have any hustle, whisper your pitch.

(Sean Livermore at 00:15:31) Okay, if you can whisper your pitch within 30 words, then you've got somewhere, right? You can start there. But if you can't whisper the pitch, it doesn't sound compelling to anybody.

(Sean Livermore at 00:15:44) I would recommend looking at the Slow Create framework, looking at the Sustainable Mystique Triad, learning how to crystallize and distill down to the most concise, meaningful, and specific approach to communication as possible. And look at the stories and the references in the book. I think you'll get somewhere really fast, much faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) All of these flowcharts type things you describe, canvases, I believe is the correct word, they're in the book.

(Sean Livermore at 00:16:15) Yeah, the canvas, the pipeline, and the triad. Those are the three shapes. So it's a square, rectangle, and a triangle. It's very simple.

(Sean Livermore at 00:16:22) It's kind of like the lean methodology in a way. People can really get their teeth into it quite quickly, and you could learn it in one hour. I mean, it's really simple. But it's a paradigm-shifting way of working your thinking and communicating into how you create your products, not just in the tech industry. You know, soccer moms could use this to learn and think about the way they structure their team dynamics differently. I mean, you could use it in any way. But yeah, it's chapter three. It goes pretty deep into that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:52) If I buy this on Audible, is there a PDF I get to see the—

(Sean Livermore at 00:16:56) Oh, yeah. Yeah, you get access to all that. In fact, you don't even need to buy it to get access to everything. Audible just came out, so please check out the audiobook and give me some good ratings. But yeah, the PDF at slowcrate.com, it'll redirect you and then you can click on the menu, Slow Create framework, and all the downloads are there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:14) So what is PDS?

(Sean Livermore at 00:17:17) Patterns, details, and secrets are the part of the canvas and a part of the Slow Create framework that I codify into this model of neuroscience. And it's backed by neuroscience. It's real. Everything you do on a regular basis is already PDS. It's your patterns, details, and secrets. You're cycling through it.

(Sean Livermore at 00:17:36) So you're mowing the lawn, you're engaging in mindless work, your brain is then flipped on and 60 to 80% of all the energy your brain uses is being consumed in those moments when your brain is drifting, right? And the amazing part of that is we rise from the ashes of that stupor with new information that we think we actively proposed or conjured or contrived, when in fact the inverse is true—that our brain is doing it for us, right?

(Sean Livermore at 00:18:08) So there's a wall, Hutchinson's wall, back in the forties. Elliot Hutchinson, a great theorist and creative expert, came up with a model of creativity. And it has this big wall right in the middle. It's called Hutchinson's wall. It's that wall of frustration. You keep banging your head against something. Like, how can't I solve that bug? Or why can't I figure out a good logo for my new company? Or what am I gonna do about office space? Or how am I gonna solve this managerial problem? Or whatever it might be. You just keep trying. And instead of going over the wall with brute force, instead of going through the wall, you know, really the Slow Create framework helps you go under the wall, I guess, right? You dig under and you kind of let go and you drift.

(Sean Livermore at 00:18:51) And there's even a ladder acronym: L-A-D-D-E-R is let go, antenna. You become an antenna. You drift. You daydream for DD. You emerge and you recharacterize, ER.

(Sean Livermore at 00:19:03) And so using the ladder while you're engaging in mindless work, the PDS cycles are churning and they're just continuing to process through the information that your hands have already touched. It's like the potter at the clay. Your skin cells are rubbing off into your work. The golfer who is quoted in the book, you know, his toes sunk into the grass and he would wiggle them around and he would kind of get comfy in there. And he would remember when he was 16 and 14 and 13 and 12, just learning how to pick up the clubs.

(Sean Livermore at 00:19:34) All of his life work flattens the layers of all of his efforts. And they come alive in those moments and the brain retraces the steps and it solves the problem for you. And it can be that magical. And people can point to that and say that was the eureka moment. You know, and in chapter two, we talk about how Mozart's letter, this fraudulent letter, became so famous.

(Sean Livermore at 00:20:01) He says, like, you know, after a good meal, I'm taking a walk and the idea comes to me. And then eureka, right? There's so many other moments that people tack onto that. Oh yeah, that's how good ideas come is when you're—well, kind of yes, but kind of no. It's really not about his brilliance, and although he was brilliant, or his perfection, although many would call him near perfect. But the letter was a forged letter by Otto Vaughn many years later that he discovered and proved that it was a forgery. The real creative process is sketching, and Mozart actually had a lot of stuff he threw away. His wife collected it.

(Sean Livermore at 00:20:39) You know, all these sketches where he's like, no, that sucks. And no, I'm not gonna do that. Oh, that's horrible. I redid that in the other one, and, you know, he's scratching things out. In fact, there are so many that they put him in a booklet and, you know, Einstein would listen to Mozart as he was figuring out special relativity. So it's like through the years, one genius kind of in the airwaves was kind of reaching another. It was kind of this beautiful picture of Einstein and Mozart, you know, connecting in the air or something. But anyway, I digress down a rabbit hole. But I think the amazing part of creativity is that it's happening. You just have to be more cognizant of it. It's like the presence of God around us, I would believe, you know. It's like it's there already. We're just not aware of it, you know.

(Sean Livermore at 00:21:22) But our minds, they're workhorses. And it's learning how to leverage that whether you're a CTO or developer, technology professional of any regard, learning how to curate your thinking into that funnel and extract value out of it. That's what this process really helps you do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) I think one day, to your comment of the presence of God being around us, I think one day we'll find it. I really believe that we're on this journey to figure out how we are all connected. I think one day we'll figure out that there is a measurable way that we're connected similar to how we couldn't see infrared light before that technology existed to see it. It was always there, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) But then we gained a technology that allowed us to see it. And I believe that we're all connected, and one day technology will allow us to see it in some way. I don't know how far out we are. But if nothing more than the magnetic thing around the—the magnetic field around the earth, right? I mean, that itself connects us.

(Sean Livermore at 00:22:29) Mhmm. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Sean Livermore at 00:22:32) I think it's also powerful as we think about thinking. We don't think about our thinking very much, do we? We just go do it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) I do.

(Sean Livermore at 00:22:45) Good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) That's most of my thoughts.

(Sean Livermore at 00:22:47) Well, you have a podcast though. So you're like, oh crap, I have to have something good to talk about next week, you know, and you're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) No, this is my outlet because that's how my mind works.

(Sean Livermore at 00:22:56) Nice. For a lot of people though, they don't really spend a lot of time organizing their thinking. They just do it, you know. And they wonder why haven't I come up with anything in the last couple years, or why haven't I moved the ball forward? Or why when I walk into meetings does my brain go blank?

(Sean Livermore at 00:23:12) It's because you're doing too much. You know, you're driving the car too hard, right? You slam on the gas and slam on the brakes and slam on the gas. It's like back-to-back meetings all day long. You know, why not put a little tracer in there like the neuroscientist Jesse Ristman and others have said—you need to allow the car to slow down to a stop. You know, after you're done reading an audiobook or a chapter of anything, just sit there and pause and think about what you just read and let it soak in and let your brain start noodling on that. And noodling is a big deal. You know, I need a noodle on it. Good. Sleep on it. Yes. Do that.

(Sean Livermore at 00:23:51) And allow your ideas to fester and become the nagging pull, as they called it in the book. I quoted them. Because the nagging pull is what drives out the rest of those conversations and the next level thinking, you know. And venture capitalists—Mike Maples talks about inflections. And there are different types of inflections like regulatory inflections or belief inflections.

(Sean Livermore at 00:24:19) Things you believe and you have proof and some sort of evidential basis for that you become a seer, a seer of the future if you will. As if you got into a time machine and went to the future and you saw something there and then you came back to the past to tell us about it, right? And how would you explain that to us today, right? And so they look for entrepreneurs that are seers, right? And then another venture capitalist, Tim Draper, describes his view of entrepreneurs quite curiously, which I think is hard to live up to as a founder of companies and someone who's pitched a 130 times and raised venture funding six times. I can tell you it's very hard to pitch if you've never done it before and to structure your thinking and your life's body of work prior to the pitch and prior to the slides so that it culminates into this massive amount of fascination in one single spark of the—you know, what they call the singularity or something, you know, this concentrated dot that everything blows at, you know, blow your mind type mindset to get them to throw their wallets at you. Here, take my money.

(Sean Livermore at 00:25:21) You know, I wanna invest in you. It's really hard to do that. But going back to what I was saying before that triple rabbit hole is the Tim Draper quote. He says, you know, great entrepreneurs are like magicians. They are able to conjure something out of nothing.

(Sean Livermore at 00:25:40) And I just find that—I'm probably missing a few words in there, but that's the gist of the quote. And I found it to be troubling. But what if I can't conjure something out of nothing? What if I'm just a normal person? What if I'm in my tech cubicle right now listening to this podcast, typing in a boring project for a boring company working on a boring software application?

(Sean Livermore at 00:26:02) You know, I've been there, right? Twenty-one years in tech. I worked on a lot of boring software. And a lot of my clients come to me with old mainframe systems, and I'm like, gosh, that looks like a hideous system. Please let us help you with that, right? It's like a mole right on the front of your face. Like, let me remove that. You know, I'm a dermatologist. Get that out real quick. You know? But it's a big deal to be a magician, isn't it? And I think that binary test of the tech genius archetype comes back and haunts us and says, well, because therefore, right, the logic starts again.

(Sean Livermore at 00:26:38) Because I'm not a magician and I know that I'm just a normal person, you know, it's my secret. You know, no one knows that I'm normal. Everyone thinks I'm smart. I'm really not smart, you know, and everyone has imposter syndrome and so forth. Because of that, I will remain silent. I'll go back in the shadows. I'll relent. I'll compromise. I'll settle. I won't launch that company.

(Sean Livermore at 00:27:00) I won't launch that product. I won't do that pitch. I won't add that slide to the slide deck, and I won't speak out, and I won't raise my hand, and I won't lean in, and all the—you know, and I think women in our in tech also have that extra layer of being stifled, right? And so not to be in any way gender specific but just looking at the COO of Facebook, right, Sheryl Sandberg. Right? She's written books about this topic, so I'll quote and point to her as her words. But there's quite a bit of suppression. We have enough of suppression in our society, right?

(Sean Livermore at 00:27:34) We need less suppression. And so this mindset shifting, paradigm shifting, invocation of philosophical models applying to the tech industry—it's been a long time coming. So this kind of starts stabbing that balloon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) Dude, I love it. I like you.

(Sean Livermore at 00:27:55) Cool. Thanks, dude. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'll try to move you up from barely know you to, oh, you're awesome too, and then we'll take it slow. We'll take it slow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) Yeah. I love the way you think. I like being around people like you, and every time I am, I just feel like a child again. And I'm like, oh, there's—look how advanced this person is. I'm so excited to learn from them. And—

(Sean Livermore at 00:28:19) No, I'm just an average Joe, man. And you know what? I spent eighteen months with a research team, and I invested the time, and we poured into the data, right? So what I'm saying is just the kind of that residue that you get excited about when you just watch a movie and you're like, oh my god. Remember that one part? You know? And so, but yeah. Thank you.

(Sean Livermore at 00:28:43) It's been an exciting process when the book became a bestseller. And so I'm honored to be a part of the journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) Yeah. And I would love to argue the title with you because you are definitely not an average Joe. No. But I get it. So I get the sentiment because of myself. I was an average Joe who chose to implement these habits into my life because I would see the Elon Musk and the Jeff Bezos of the world. And when I saw them, it was a positive thing. I bought their life stories and I said, these guys are just human. They're made of the same materials as me. I can reverse engineer how they think, how they make decisions, what they look for in life, and I can slowly structure my life to be—you know, figure out what they did was the first thing, and they're really useful to a lot of people, and then I can structure my life to be valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) And then I started to do that, and I realized how rewarding it was. And then I got a taste for how much work is required to actually move the ball. And then it's from there, it's who I've become. I can't help it now. I'm just on this path, and I just keep pushing that momentum ball forward, forward, and I'm always looking for, you know, what's my next thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:51) But through that whole process and through these whole past three, five years, it's been just this massive journey of pushing myself to the limit and then realizing I have no margin. I'd say that's the biggest takeaway from the past two or three years is understanding margin because opportunity will come along. But if you have zero margin, you can't accept the opportunity or you do so at your own peril or you fail at it. But learning about margin, learning about how much I can do, pushing my health to the limits, you know, I tell a lot of people I train like an athlete. I mean, I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) I'm up 5:30 in the morning. I've run, eat, lifted, woke up kids, got them to school, all before I even hit an email inbox or think about work. Super into nutrition and all of these things. They stemmed from this journey I was on where I ultimately pushed myself far beyond my limit, got sick essentially, and my wife was like, look, you're tired all the time. You're sick all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) You're training like crazy. You're overtraining. This is just too much. And what I realized is now when I see somebody doing that, they haven't figured out what works yet. Because when you do figure out what works and you figure out those little points that you just have, just those few handful of things that you just have to nail, you get this confidence and then the income happens. My business grew 325% last year, and we really kind of figured it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) And so now I'm at a point where I feel like I've gotten immeasurably more. I've gotten more than I could ever imagine, and so I'm just like a kid in the candy shop excited. What's going to happen next? I'm just going to focus on keeping these routines in place. I'm going to focus on these core habits and being a great person and helping other people, and then good things are just going to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) But, man, it's not an overnight thing. It's a decision you have to make hundreds of times over hundreds of days, and it's excruciating, and it's challenging on yourself and your relationships. I mean, I'm talking too much. Sorry. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:50) That's what I've been going through.

(Sean Livermore at 00:31:52) Well, the brute force versus the surgeon, you know, that comes into the room and the nurses are ready, and they hand him or her the instruments. And I think the specificity of focus—I would say for anyone out there that is on a broad spectrum of their journey, the number one thing that I find to be fascinating, very interesting, and move the needle is the idea of chapter nine, "Nerds Telling Stories," you know, the science of showmanship. And, you know, if you've ever walked into a meeting having to present slides, if you've ever put yourself on the hook to deliver a Word document that's 80 pages or 100 pages or 800 pages—you know, I remember working on an 800 or 750-page Word document. I remember putting slides together for a $20 million software project.

(Sean Livermore at 00:32:42) I can think of all these different pitches and interviews and demos and meetings. I remember pitching to the largest venture capital firm in the valley. You know, there's several of them. But the science of showmanship, the ability for you to cross over the chasm of academia to theatrical neural entrainment, vampire economics with this story science—there's a guy who did tests on people when they received oxytocin and what that did, and he did all these deep experiments with it. The emotional intelligence—there's so many topics around that, but learning how to tell stories will transform your life.

(Sean Livermore at 00:33:29) And so the Joel Beasley story and what you're doing and how you did it and where you came from and bringing that into a concise nutshell that all of your employees tell—you know, that is your legend. Right? There's a lot of branding there. Certainly, the brand guys go, "Oh, yeah," and they raise their hands and say, "That's exactly what we've been doing." But it's a little different for programmers, you know. "Hi. My name is Bobby, and I'm a programmer," you know, or graphic designers. "Oh, hey. I'm so-and-so. I'm a graphic designer." That's it. That's your story. That's not a story.

(Sean Livermore at 00:33:59) That's a label. Right? That's what you do or whatnot. "But I'm a CTO." But learning how to create the gremlin, the dragon, and the narrative of storming the castle or whatever the paradigm that you create around your story and learning how to tell that story, even if it's in the most brief form and even if it's for the most inconsequential audience—you're in the bathroom, you're saying hello to somebody. "What do you do here? I think I've seen you at work here," whatever it might be. That nerds-telling-stories moment.

(Sean Livermore at 00:34:22) Never underestimate a nerd with a great story is how I open the book. And I find the crossover to be quite rewarding because I'm an actual left-brainer thinker. I'm not the cool sales guy with great teeth. I'm not the six-foot-three, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swiss salesman who can sell you a pencil for a million dollars or whatever. You know, there are people out there that are so smooth. Right? And all the left-brainers are like, "Gosh, I wish I was like that person. I wish I could talk like that person." And don't fool yourself.

(Sean Livermore at 00:35:07) You know you're out there. You're hearing me talk right now, and you've wished that you had the social skills of the marketing department or whatever it might be, the salespeople. But the reality is that you have far more power than they could ever imagine. Right? Because within you is this scientific layer upon layer of complex building blocks of technology, tools, and skills that you have fostered for decades.

(Sean Livermore at 00:35:32) And you're leading an organization, you have a rich history, and you have technical hard skills. I'm not talking soft skills. I'm talking hard skills—you know, software development specifically, and anything in regards to building technology assets. Right? These are amazing technologies.

(Sean Livermore at 00:35:50) And like Blackbeard entering a pirate mindset, you know, he was this famous pirate and he would tie pellets of burning sulfur to his beard before he would come up on a ship. Right? And so when he came up on the ship, the smoke would rise from the sky. You know, he's this presence, and everyone would drop their swords, drop their guns, and throw their hands in the air and give up because they thought that he had something demonic or something spiritual about him. And so we as entrepreneurs tie pellets of sulfur to our beards, and—of course, your beard is actually growing in quite nicely, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) Thank you.

(Sean Livermore at 00:36:27) I don't want you to literally do this. You might light yourself on fire. But we create our own mystique and we stir the waters a little bit in an ethical form. There's an old Chinese proverb that says, "In clear water you catch no fish." So you've got to sometimes muddy it up just a little bit as an entrepreneur. You don't want to be unethical or in any way mislead—it will come back to haunt you. Trust me. But you do want to create some sort of value around what you're doing and why you're the most important person to do it and why you're the most credible authority on the topic. And so telling that story and becoming that expert and digging very deep into your subject matter, regardless of your position, is part of what we call the healthy hustle. It's authentic uncertainty.

(Sean Livermore at 00:37:15) You know, Houdini in handcuffs, he said, "I don't know if I'm going to get out." And everyone's like, "Is he for real?" You know? But he was kind of the first magician to say it like that. Like, "I might die today. My wife's over here—I signed the will, last will and testament." And, you know, they're pouring water into the thing, and, "I've never actually used these handcuffs before." And, you know, there's a little bit of showmanship in there, but authentic uncertainty is a part of your special mystique in your narrative. So, anyway, telling that story—I kind of went down a few rabbit holes, but I'm excited about how that has been transformative, at least for me, but hopefully for others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) I want to know—well, first, when we're talking about raising capital, I've done that. And for them to feel like that is the culmination of your entire existence, to be standing there in front of them, I feel like that's what you were saying earlier. It seems like that's the story. The most logical next step is this person's going to achieve the outcome, and I am going to invest because they're going to get there because they hit their previous milestones. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) That's at least how I felt. I've only raised money by myself once. I've raised money with other people where I wasn't the main character, but I've only done it by myself once. And I was at pitch competitions. I saw everybody go up, and they just started talking about their company or their story creating that product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:36) And I had read this book by Robert McKee about storytelling. And I said, "Okay. I'm just going to go tell a story of who I am because they have all the metrics in front of them. They've got the 10 pages printed out. They can reference all the numbers they want. They probably already flipped all the way through it. I'm going to use all that time I can to just tell them about who I am and where I'm going and see if they want to join me." And it worked.

(Sean Livermore at 00:38:59) Yeah. Congratulations. That's awesome. And I think you're right. They think it's the end of their story. It's just the beginning. Right? And if you think, "Well, what does it feel like to raise money?" This is like buying a house. You know, you sign the stack of paper and it's like, "Do you know what everything means?" Probably not. The term sheet, hopefully. But, you know, they're giving you money. If you fail or if any of these 100 things happen, they get some money back, you know. Hopefully you'll succeed and they'll get a lot of money back, you know.

(Sean Livermore at 00:39:27) And hopefully the board seat is figured out. But other than a key set of checkpoints, depending on what round it is and how many people involved, it's pretty straightforward. But when dreamer meets banker, I mean, that's really the fascinating moment that we're talking about here—this dreamer storyteller. "Hey. Give me money, and you can write my coattails into the sunset," you know, and "I'll make you successful because this is going somewhere."

(Sean Livermore at 00:39:53) And it's the right timing. It's the right product, right market, right team. Everything—all this very complex Rubik's Cube has been solved and we're the team to solve it and we've already made so much progress, you know. But a little bit of financing would really help us out. You know, that's a compelling model.

(Sean Livermore at 00:40:09) But I think there's that hunger in the belly you still need to have, even though it's financial, it's academic, it's black and white. When dreamer meets banker, it's a wonderful moment where they see themselves 30 years prior. You know, these 50- and 60-year-olds are looking back at these 20-year-olds and smiling, and they're like—when scouts would go to ballparks, you know, they said about Ken Griffey Jr., the scouts, they said, "Oh, well, he's a great hitter, but he leans. He's a little too eager for the long ball."

(Sean Livermore at 00:40:40) You know, I think Sandy Koufax, they said—the scouting reports. I like baseball, so it de-stresses, so I just kind of hold on to that. But they said, "Yeah. He's got good hands. He's a lanky guy." You know? And they started describing—I even put it in chapter 10 or chapter nine, I think. But it's like, you've got to understand that these investors are just banking on the dreamer. They want to know, "Does he got good raw material?"

(Sean Livermore at 00:41:05) You know, and when I came to Techstars the first day, the managing director told the whole crowd of entrepreneurs—some of them went on to become unicorns and I know them and they're amazing, very smart and very hardworking people. He told the crowd, "Listen, we don't give a crap about your idea. Your company pretty much sucks. We don't care about your company.

(Sean Livermore at 00:41:27) Yeah. It's you we like. We like you. We think you're smart. We think you're talented. We think you've got something that other people don't have. So feel good about that, and don't be so attached. Don't be so attached." If you need to trash your company—I'm paraphrasing, but if you need to, you know, close it down and start it up and rename it and rebrand it, that's all fine. "We don't care."

(Sean Livermore at 00:41:47) You know? That's cool. Right? And I thought, "That's awesome." And I give them credit for that. But, you know, having that confidence of saying, "You know what? I'm a dreamer. It's okay. I admit I'm a dreamer, and I'm going to meet a banker. And the two of us will come together, and we'll play off each other's resources."

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) I want to talk a little bit about flow. So people are obsessed with it. "How do I get in the flow? I'm going to structure my routines. Flow, flow, flow." And then I read what you said. Right? And I want you to tell me a little bit about flow.

(Sean Livermore at 00:42:23) There's a balance of this idea of flow. I won't try to pronounce his name, but in 1975, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—nailed it. It's like 20 letters in his name. I'm so sorry. Amazing psychologist and really created a model that had set the next 50 years on fire with musicians and sports and athletes and business and so forth. But he described it with 10 characteristics. I won't read all 10, but I'll distill them into four. It's you have a challenge and skill balance. You have clear proximal goals, a feeling of control, and you have immediate feedback.

(Sean Livermore at 00:43:04) So this flow state goes into this kind of paradigm that people have tried to draw and they've tried to recreate and, "Oh, let's..." You know, Gatorade commercials around it. And everyone's like, "Hey. Let's all get in the flow." And so you wake up at 5 a.m., and you do a certain rhythm, and you write love letters to your spouse. And then you go and you work to 100 push-ups, and you run, get your certain fluids running through your body in a certain way. And then you've got to do a warm-up routine. And then you, you know—people are doing these weird contorting kind of mechanisms on a regular basis moving from boredom to anxiety to skill and this increase of challenge and decrease of challenge. All that's cool if you're into it. I don't do that. I lean on rhythms and schedule and the circadian rhythm of sleep and, you know, I have my coffee in the morning personally. And, you know, they try to say that you become in sync and that you become a superconductor.

(Sean Livermore at 00:44:03) They use words like opiates, the natural eurekas, this enlightenment that is organic and it's created by the body. Cool. Sounds great. What if you can't conjure that on a regular basis? What if you're a non-flow kind of person? Right? Does that mean that you're not a tech genius and therefore you shouldn't work on your startup or you shouldn't build your company or you shouldn't, you know, lead your organization? "Might as well give up, retire and go live in the woods because you suck and you're horrible." Right? No.

(Sean Livermore at 00:44:31) The flow state is unreliable. You can't always manufacture it. If you can manufacture it one out of five times, great. You know, there are programmers that say, "I put on my headphones. I get into my Spotify playlist where it's this flow state playlist," you know. It's like beats and stuff—trance music and whatnot. That's cool. If it helps you, do it. But not everybody's mind works that way. Not everybody feels comfortable with that.

(Sean Livermore at 00:44:59) And some people just need quiet, you know. Some people have children running around screaming and they're like, "I just can't think," you know. And so I don't rely on—in fact, the whole chapter is "The Coveted but Unreliable Flow State." Comedians talk about it. Some comedians—Seinfeld, he said you just want to keep a chain going every day where you don't break the chain. You write a joke every day, a really good joke every day, and you cross out a date on the calendar. Edison would experiment, you know, perpetually, and it was more determination and perspiration rather than inspiration. Right? So I just—I think it's cool, but the SO GREAT framework is the anti-flow. It is exactly the opposite of flow.

(Sean Livermore at 00:45:40) It is saying, "You don't need any of that. You need to systematically look at it as data. You're a scientist. Put on your white lab coat. Go in the lab. Start grabbing the fluids and the vials and start shaking things up, cross out your chart, get up your Excel spreadsheet, and get to work. Freaking get to work." And every day that goes by, you can point back to the mechanisms and methods and systematic processes, and you're exponentially more efficient than someone who's randomly running through the forest with their shoes off trying to figure out how to get in the flow state. It's reliable. Now having said that, euphoria is great for work.

(Sean Livermore at 00:46:20) You need that mental health reprieve. And I think we all should, especially in the days of COVID. We all have learned how important mental health is. So I think that resetting that unmet expectation and unreasonable expectation and starting from a method and a schedule and a calendar and, you know, feeling good, feeling better, experiencing, enjoying, achieving, etcetera on a regular basis. That's great. But I think the Stephen King quote, amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, but the rest of us just get up and go to work.

(Sean Livermore at 00:46:54) You know? I think that's a great one. And a lot of good writers like Stephen King, Stephen Pressfield, you know, grinding it out. I mean, I just don't necessarily agree with people forcing themselves into this exhaustion, like you mentioned. Right?

(Sean Livermore at 00:47:10) Like, you can't drive the car into the ground. You need to put it through a normal rhythm and allow your body to rest and make sure that it's balanced. But sometimes it becomes effortless, doesn't it? Like, you're working through the Excel spreadsheet of the work, and then eventually it starts getting faster and your brain creates these shortcuts. Forgot the word for that, but heuristics.

(Sean Livermore at 00:47:34) And so based on heuristics, you leverage, like, a fulcrum and you move quicker. And then flow is just like that afterburner that can push you a little further.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) Yeah. Man, this is awesome. I've got, like, a couple more. Are you good on time, by the way?

(Sean Livermore at 00:47:50) Let's hang out. I'm good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:51) Okay. Cool. I want to talk about, I'm gonna try to say the word, contrarian. Contrarianism.

(Sean Livermore at 00:47:59) Yeah. Contrarianism. Yeah. What do you want to know? What should we go with that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:03) Let's talk about that.

(Sean Livermore at 00:48:05) So a contrarian is someone who believes the inverse of something, and Bitcoin is a great one. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever you are, wherever you are...

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:15) Come out some, some call.

(Sean Livermore at 00:48:16) Yes. Send some coin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) Don't come out. Stay in the shadows. Send me some coin.

(Sean Livermore at 00:48:21) Oh, man. So, you know, he believed 10/31/2008, the wolf was howling on a Halloween night. And on that night, he rolled out Bitcoin, and the world changed. It didn't change quickly, but it changed. And he was slow creating Bitcoin, by the way, for two and a half years prior to that.

(Sean Livermore at 00:48:40) So just another of many examples of people who were just nibbling around the edges of their mind of their idea models. But he rolled it out, and he based it on this idea, this fulcrum of science versus trust. So the old banking world, he showed the finger to the old banking world and he said, you know, your model of trust is archaic. It doesn't work because we don't trust you. Who, what person trusts their lender?

(Sean Livermore at 00:49:07) Do you have a lender? Do you own a home? Yeah. Do you trust them implicitly with your children? I mean, I don't.

(Sean Livermore at 00:49:15) There are bankers out there that would sell their kids to an alligator or whatever. You know? They're better. They just, I do not trust the banking industry because of the printing of money, the Federal Reserve connectivity of all that. Yeah.

(Sean Livermore at 00:49:30) It's all pretty solid, I guess. But fiat currencies, non gold backed currencies, you know, Bitcoin and a cryptocurrency world. I think that we're headed for some interesting inflection points over the next 50 years. I think anyone would probably shrug and say, yeah, that's probably true. But, you know, eventually, we'll get there where people will really question printing money.

(Sean Livermore at 00:49:51) And anyway, going back to the science versus trust, he said, you know, this fulcrum is unsustainable. And so I'm gonna base on science. So I'm gonna create a math-based accounting model. Right? And Bitcoin goes into this, you know, really long numbers, you know, if you're not familiar with it.

(Sean Livermore at 00:50:05) Like, every coin is this incredibly long number. Right? And so there's only so many of them that fit the bill of a couple criterion. And once you find one, you've mined a Bitcoin. Okay.

(Sean Livermore at 00:50:14) Great. So now you have this unit of measurement that was worth, like, point 0.0001 dollars or something back in '08. It was, like, worthless. And he found a whole bunch of these. And then, as time goes on, of course, it became this thing, and now it's worth $46,000 of Bitcoin, I think, after Elon and Tesla bought $1.5 billion Bitcoin the other day and just drove up the price.

(Sean Livermore at 00:50:38) Everyone's like, whoa. What's gonna happen next? But, anyway, contrarianism, believe in this inverse model. Jeff Bezos is a contrarian. Love you, Jeff, by the way.

(Sean Livermore at 00:50:49) Please don't demote my book. Appreciate you. Wink. But he believed against the model of bookstores, the smelling the ink. You know, everyone walks into a bookstore and they just want to feel a book, the tactile nature of books.

(Sean Livermore at 00:51:01) Well, he's like, yeah, maybe maybe not. And so he left his finance career to have a new finance career, but in the form of an e-commerce company. But he believed in the inverse. And there's so many more examples with that, but they have an appetite for uncertainty. They have a bulldozer mindset, and they have this contrarian lens they look through.

(Sean Livermore at 00:51:21) They use the beginner's mind where you start with first principles and you build block upon block until you have something very different, holistically different than what the existing models are. You know, they go into CBM, I call it Contrarian Belief Mode, where you can't talk them out of it. They're so sold on flying cars that they start buying products that align with their beliefs around it. You know, they're so sold on Bitcoin that they just pour all their money into it. They're just completely indifferent to the norm and they sell out to that beautiful future.

(Sean Livermore at 00:51:55) And then somehow they create a self-fulfilling prophecy around it. Right? So according to them, it's a certain way, and we all just haven't learned that yet. You know? And some people invested in the Segway.

(Sean Livermore at 00:52:08) Remember that, like, thing you ride on, the Segway? Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:11) He was a fascinating guy. Yeah.

(Sean Livermore at 00:52:13) Yeah. Paul Blart, Mall Cop. You know, he's riding a Segway. Like, that's how most kids understand what a Segway is. It's Paul Blart, the Mall Cop.

(Sean Livermore at 00:52:21) Because nobody has a Segway at their house right now, do they? But all these people invested hundreds of millions of dollars, some of the best investors and future seers in the world, threw their wallets at the guy talking about Segways because he just, you know, he had it all figured out. He had this Contrarian Belief Mode and everything was just period. This is the future. We know it. Absolute certainty.

(Sean Livermore at 00:52:44) Well, he was wrong. So some contrarians hit the nail on the head and investors buy in too, and some contrarians are very wrong. But in order to go from Average Joe to tech genius, part of that paradigm shift is becoming contrarian. And I believe that anyone can learn how to become contrarian. Anyone can adopt the curse of knowledge and own it and say, I have the curse of knowledge, but I'm gonna shift my thinking to get out of the weeds and up into the ether where people can understand what I'm talking about.

(Sean Livermore at 00:53:13) Right? So it's Malcolm Gladwell, my favorite author. Love that guy. You know that guy with the big hair? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:20) Oh, god. How can you not know Malcolm Gladwell? I've listened to all of his books. Yeah.

(Sean Livermore at 00:53:23) You know, Outliers, Tipping Point, etcetera. He talks about the curse of knowledge is this, you know, printer codes, these copy machine repair guys, you know, huddling over the printer, and they're like, oh, I got an E04. You got an E04? Yeah. E04216.

(Sean Livermore at 00:53:36) Oh my gosh. Did you do the override to the flash panel and do the EF297? Oh, no. I did that last week. You know, they're going into this crazy detail, almost like programmers talk about their code, you know, but they're so deep in the weeds.

(Sean Livermore at 00:53:50) They have the curse of knowledge. Nobody understands what the freak they're talking about. Learning how to come out of that and talk like a normal human being. You're at a dinner party and your spouse says or the person you're meeting says, what do you do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:04) You want to know what I do?

(Sean Livermore at 00:54:05) No. And I was just me? Isn't that sometimes a difficult answer to make? Like, some people stutter over their words. They're like, well, I'm a programmer, but I'm an entrepreneur.

(Sean Livermore at 00:54:17) And I have a startup thing going and but yet I'm kind of a designer. I do a little bit of everything. And they're like, what? Hello? Right?

(Sean Livermore at 00:54:24) And you, so you learn, or maybe this is just me talking, but I've met people like me and they say the same thing. And so you learn how to get out of the curse of knowledge and speak like a normal human by becoming a little bit more on the edge of contrarianism and say, look, I believe in this. I believe it will happen within this number of years, and I'm preparing my whole company around that with a special product that does XYZ.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:50) That sounds good. I'm gonna steal that. Write that one down, Jake. Make a note of that. That's a great way to answer that question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:57) My answer varies depending on my mood. Like, if I want to talk to people or if I don't want to talk to people, sometimes it's as short as, oh, I own a media company. And, like, if they want to go deeper, great. If not, oh, yeah. Well, with that media company, like, what do you guys actually do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:12) Now I'll go in, but I used to be so excited about the podcast thing. I'm like, oh, yeah. I host number one podcast for technology leaders and all this stuff. And then I realized that, like, nope. That's not, people don't, in casual conversation or with friends or outside, that's not. I own a media company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:32) I've got two kids, a wife. I own a media company. Really love a lot.

(Sean Livermore at 00:55:36) Story is so much richer, isn't it though? Like, you know, I'm Joel Beasley, and I'm the founder and author of the number one most successful Chief Technology Officer media platform in the world. Right? Mhmm.

(Sean Livermore at 00:55:51) A little bit of showmanship sprinkled in there. And we're trying to solve a very specific problem. Let me tell you about that problem. Right? And then you drill into that.

(Sean Livermore at 00:55:59) And here's the team I've assembled around that problem. Oh, and also we raise venture funding around it, and we are first in line for XYZ certification, insert here, that would allow us to exponentially grow our company. And I can't wait for next month when we have that one meeting and we're gonna show them what we've been working on. Right? I mean, you start taking what you're doing and formalizing it into this arc, and then that arc is transferable to any sort of event.

(Sean Livermore at 00:56:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:28) That's good. That's good. That's way better than anything I'd ever done before. I had that first part nailed, but the way that you can simplify that intro with a story or where I'm going in my introduction. So when the situation comes up where I do want to talk to these people, I can still use media company when I'm just like, whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:47) But when I do want to talk or when I'm talking to my target audience, having that intro story natural progression, this is how life's going. I like that a lot. I'm actually going to, I'm really excited because tonight, I'm leaving after this podcast, packing, we're finishing packing, and I'm headed up into the mountains, which is, like, seven hours away. So taking the camper up there and the truck up there and everything, and I'm just gonna download and listen to the whole book versus just reading, like, the notes I did before the podcast because I'm really excited to learn that system and that model. And then I'm going to put on my calendar immediately following this podcast, Jake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:29) I'm gonna sit down. I'm gonna script that out for myself. That's what I do typically when I want to say something that's polished, like, our frontline of where the number one, you know, podcast, all of that. If you ask any of my salespeople, you get the same consistent thing because that's part of our training. We all fire like that, so people know who we are if you ask them, like, what the podcast is.

(Sean Livermore at 00:57:47) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:47) But to do that as my intro and my story, I really love that idea.

(Sean Livermore at 00:57:52) Well, yeah. I know. For sure. And I think any CTO on your audience list, you know, as you enter the Zoom call and you meet new people or you're recruiting, you're talking, you're working with people on your teams and your managers and your directors, I think the model of communication that you can absorb, it all ties into the intrinsic value you bring to the organization, the journey that took you here, and the amazing ground shifting models that you can't wait to dig into with the team, you know. And if you don't have any amazing ground shifting models, that's okay.

(Sean Livermore at 00:58:26) Start still creating those, you know, and start envisioning that contrarian future and then backing your whole world into that future. And I think that that thinking is your most valuable calorie burning exercise. It's not speaking. That should be the tip of the iceberg, the 10% of revealing what has happened in your mind. But learning how to, I would contrive that, learning how to think 10 times more than you speak and carving out 10 times more time to think about the unit of measurement of spoken and interaction.

(Sean Livermore at 00:59:03) Now is that practical? Probably not. You know, they fill me up with back-to-backs all day long. How am I gonna get any time to think? You know, I could barely get time on way to and from work, you know.

(Sean Livermore at 00:59:13) Well, something's gotta change. Right? So if you're on back-to-backs, you need to start carving out less time in your calendar, or you need to reorient your world, your life. Because if you don't start thinking and learning how to systematically think and restructure your mind around that and back into that contrarian future, then you'll fall into the to the alphabet soup of everyday everything. I won't say Average Joe because that's kind of, we all are there.

(Sean Livermore at 00:59:45) But, like, I hate to say it, but it is a trap. It's a real paradox, you know, is that you can't add value unless you really grind it out. And you can't grind it out effectively and have paradigm shifting value you add to the organization unless you have ample thought time. And so it's a sick twisted cycle. A really devious cycle.

(Sean Livermore at 01:00:08) It's hard to get out of it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:11) I mean, we're average, but we can choose.

(Sean Livermore at 01:00:15) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:15) Like, I don't want people to think that because you see someone farther ahead of you, for me, it's foreign. It's a foreign, like, I know it exists because I see these people sometimes, but it's very alien to me to see somebody doing really well and think and use that as a reason why you can't do well. If anything, that's proof that it is possible. Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:38) And so I agree with you. And and I use these thoughts of, like, Average Joe thoughts, like, I'm just a person to ground myself because there are times when I need to ground myself. I naturally go up, and then I say, okay, it's time to pull it down, and I'll ground myself. And and, yeah, this way of thinking, but I love that you came out with a book that is showing people how to do this creation, the slow create process, that's saying there's nothing necessarily magical about these people. Here's exactly what's happening, and here's how you can do this too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:12) I love it.

(Sean Livermore at 01:01:13) Yeah. Thanks. I think two things. One is there's nothing magical about them, but they somehow found a way to create magic. So there is a preposition in there, isn't there?

(Sean Livermore at 01:01:23) The but. And that's the hinge, because we all say to ourselves, Elon Musk, he's just like me. He poops on a toilet. He, you know, he has the same, he's got like five kids. He's got a lot going on in life, but, you know, but he found a way. And I think proximity to venture funding.

(Sean Livermore at 01:01:43) I think there's a lot of reasons for certain things. His upbringing—you can look at all the trace back, you know, a lot of success stories. And Carnegie, you know, his dad had some money, and, you know, Trump's dad had money. And, well, it's a bad example, I guess. But please, I don't want to speak the truth.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:02) Wasn't that a book? That was Outliers, right? Where they talked a lot about—yeah, I think that was Outliers.

(Sean Livermore at 01:02:07) Oh, totally. Malcolm Gladwell goes into that, you know, Olympic athletes that were born in January had sometimes many months of advantage because their bodies are just older than the other kids born in December. They're almost a year ahead, right? So, of course, they're going to hit the ball harder and do well in sports and hockey and so forth.

(Sean Livermore at 01:02:24) But the other thing I was going to say is imagine yourself in a boardroom. There are 30 people in the room. They're all at the table, seated around the big boardroom table. Someone comes in to speak. They're the expert. One person in the back, very inconspicuously, has a small question to ask. They raise their hand quietly and whisper out a very subtle, very short question. The question is so good and so specific that the entire room shifts their head back to that other person. You can feel the energy in the room moving. You can feel the attention moving from the expert to the inquiry. And the inquiry, a humble question, a humble, insightful question, a question that's based on fact, research, invention, decades of information, and just this subtle twist in the question leads everyone to ask the inquirer a follow-up question. All the information and all the attention is now completely lost from the person entering the room with the good teeth and the perfect hair and all of the supposed expertise to that obscure person in the shadows. You are that person. You are that person. And now you need to fill in the blanks of that whole scenario I just painted.

(Sean Livermore at 01:03:38) What is the question that you asked? What is the research that you've done? What is the lifelong investment, your hands into the clay? What are the skin cells that you've rubbed off into the clay over 20 years? Like the famous potter in the book—it talks about in chapter five when it talks about the flow state, just shut up and work kind of stuff. He says, "How did you get to be so good with pottery?" He says, "Well, the first 10,000 pots are the hardest. After that, it gets a little easier." Right? So how many years does it take to create 10,000 pots? Well, I did the math. It's about 8 to 10, 12 years, I think. So you invest your life into something and then you raise your hand and ask the very poignant, very specific questions in as few words as possible, and you just own the room. That's what you do. And so that's the challenge that all of us have, I think, and that's my daily goal.

(Sean Livermore at 01:04:28) My daily goal is to have that one inquiring moment that is energy-shifting, paradigm-shifting, inverting everyone's assumptions that were already made, and shifting all the weight and the power. And not power, not manipulating, not contriving, but truly stepping forward into the light, right? It's not about manipulation. It's about stepping into the light.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:55) Man, that's a mic drop moment. I'm so excited. You've got me hungry for this book. Cool. This is great, man. We're going to put links to the book and all of that good information, maybe your LinkedIn profile. We'll put all of that in the show notes so people can find it really easily. And then the book is just—if I go on Audible, I just type in Average Joe, it's going to come up?

(Sean Livermore at 01:05:18) It'll come up on Audible. And hook me up with a good review if you don't mind. And averagejoetechgenius.com is the website, averagejoetechgenius.com. And then slowcrate.com links over to the Slow Crate framework future website. And follow me on Twitter at shawnypants. And Product Perfect is the name of the company. If you need software out there, if you're a CTO looking for a competent set of hands to guide your teams through software migrations or software implementations, productperfect.com. And I'm Sean Livermore. Love to talk to you and book a consult. We'll jump on with you. But yeah, thank you for having me, Joel. This is a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:58) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.