In this profound episode, Les McKeown, Founder and CEO of Predictable Success, shares how to navigate your current stage with clarity across all seven stages of the Founder's Evolution. If you feel uncertain about where you are, sense misalignment in your team, or wonder if you're truly in predictable success, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to use simple tests like "If you have to ask, you're almost certainly in fun" to diagnose your current reality

- What strong leadership and systems look like to successfully transition between stages without skipping

- Why individual perception often clouds your view of the organization's true stage

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stages 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Les McKeown, the Founder and CEO of Predictable Success, is not just an advisor to CEOs and senior leaders but also a sought-after speaker for Fortune 500 companies. His expertise lies in helping organizations achieve scalable, sustainable growth, and his breakthrough strategies have been widely recognized and implemented. Before founding Predictable Success, Les established himself as a serial founder/owner, starting more than 40 companies. He was also the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that advised on the creation and growth of hundreds more organizations worldwide. He’s the bestselling author of Predictable Success, The Synergist, Do Scale, and Do Lead.

Want to learn more about Les McKeown's work at Predictable Success? Check out his website at https://www.predictablesuccess.com/

Connect with Les through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesmckeown/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Retheimer, and today is episode

400 It is unreal. I was, I was shocked if I was going to make

it to episode 40, if I'm honest, and that's only because I had

pre-recorded most of the episodes before then, before we

even launched, but here we are, 400 episodes later, and I've

learned so much. I hope you've learned so much. The podcast has

changed names during that window, it's changed focuses

during that window, and I feel like each 100 episodes, we get

tighter and tighter on how to serve you well, and each episode

- 100 200 304 100 - has been a little bit of a celebration here

for me, and it's become a bit of a ritual. But here with us today

is the one and only Les McKeown, and for today's conversation,

Les and I are going to, we're gonna, we're gonna pick a little

bit of a fight here, where we've both got some questions lined up

for each other about each other's models, which, as most

of you know, are very tightly knit together. So, Les has the

predictable success model. I don't know that I've shared this

story on this podcast in a really long time, but I heard

about less from a podcast, which was actually part.. I don't know

if you know this, Les, but it's part of why I do podcasting is

because the podcast where I heard you.. I don't even know

what podcast it was on, but it was just an episode with you,

and it changed my life. It really genuinely did. We

implemented predictable success at my company that was leading

at the time, tripled our bottom line, and I think you got

probably about $2.30 out of the deal from the book sale, I

bought the audiobook as well, and you know we bought copies

for everybody, so it's probably like $2.45 but but just totally

transformed my life, and so as I was transitioning out of that

company, sold it and was trying to figure out what I wanted to

do next, the answer was pretty obvious. I wanted to help people

out of Whitewater, and the best way to do that was predictable

success. So, for those of you who don't know, I don't know who

that would be, but the one listener out there who doesn't

know, this one's for you. Predictable success is a, it's a

life cycle, it's a model about organizational growth and scale.

Let's set that up a little bit better here in a second, and

radically transformative. My experience of tripling our

bottom line, I've found in the world of predictable success, is

pretty normal for folks that are coming out of white water and

predictable success. And it's, it's, I have the ability to poke

holes in lots of things, I'll just say it that way, it's the

nicest version of that, and there's nothing about Les' model

that I don't deeply resonate with, and so just tremendous

having you here, Les. Love that you've shared your model with

us, and excited to ask you some questions about it. And then the

other model is my founders' evolution model, you'll have

heard about that, you know about that, we talk about it almost

every week, and Les is going to return the favor and throw some

questions to my way. So, Les, welcome to the show. I saw of an

early version of the Predictable Success book just recently, and

and you and I have been going back and forth about about books

in the process, as you know, I'm deep in the process of getting

my book out into the wild, but tell us, how did, before we get

into the questions I have here, but how did Predictable Success,

the book, come to be?

Well, it's interesting because you find

that buried in a massive email thread that I think I've

forwarded to you for a completely different reason, and

I hadn't realized that the attachments were still all in

there, and you're right, what you saw was probably a 2008

version, 2008 version of the 2010 book, and it was hilarious

to look back at, as you pointed out, without any chagrin, the

weird chapter titles, and the funny little logo that I had,

and all that sort of stuff that was in there as placeholders,

but that was all part of the fun was evolving towards what it

finally became. The book I put down to one very brief

conversation with my then wonderful wife, so wonderful

person, Julie, around about 2007 where she said to me, "You're

going to have to either write this book or. and I'll extract

the expletives. Stop talking about it, because I had been

talking about writing this book for so long, and I took her to

heart. I wanted to write a book. I knew it was a book that was

what it was meant to be, and I. Had to plan it out to stay

financially solvent for long enough to let me do it right.

You're in the middle of all this, so you'll be aware of it,

that you know, actually coming up with the artifact, you know,

the thing feels like it's the hardest part of it when you're

doing it, but it's actually not the hardest part of making it

worthwhile, is all the other stuff, the marketing. It's a

little bit like, as you will discover, you think you've run a

marathon, but some actually, the publication days, that's when

they fire the starting gun. So I did a fire sale of my time in, I

think, was late 2007 I'm terrible with dates, I could be

as much as a year off, and that bought me nine months of time

when I just didn't have to work at all, and I just got up every

morning and sat until I'd done 1200 words, and the book

eventually evolved. So that's the story of how the book came

to be.

Wow, 1200 words is a lot. That's a lot of

words, and yeah, I didn't know that part of the story. That's

very cool. So, for those of you who either of these models are

new. I'm going to put some links in the show notes, where you can

kind of get the least you need to know about these. It'd

probably be helpful for this conversation. So, we're just

going to assume for the rest of the conversation you have at

least a basic understanding of what these different stages are,

so that we don't have to explain everything to explain

everything. We'll be able to get to some of these questions

quicker, but Les, I'm going to open up a first question here,

and then you can fire some back my way. But one of the questions

that I hear a lot, especially from folks that are new to

predictable success, is they feel like things are good, but

they're not really sure if they're unpredictable success or

fun, now one quick thing on this, they don't come across

that way, they all think they're in predictable success, but I

know from some of my experience with them that maybe they're

not, so for someone who either thinks they're in predictable

success or maybe thinks they're in fun or thinks they're in one

of them but doesn't know that how to tell which one it is. How

do you know the difference between predictable success and

fun?

Quick bittens test is, if you have to ask, you're

almost certainly in fun, and I say that because for an

individual to be asking that question, they're

individualizing the sense of where they are, and when you're

doing that, you're leading as the founder, usually type leader

who is in fun. When you're in predictable success, the

question gets abstracted, and the question would be, Are we in

predictable success? And there's almost always assuming you've

got past the first year or so, there almost always comes with

it a sense of certainty at some core part of the business. We

are, or I wouldn't be asking the question. My concern is, are we

throughout the organization in predictable success? If you just

don't know, just assume that you're in fun, and then you

know, maybe you'll prove yourself wrong, but the key

distinction, if I get pressed, I break out into two parts. One is

what happens when you're not there. If things degrade, you're

on the left side of the growth curve, probably in fun, you

might be in some part of Whitewater. If things get

better, you're definitely in predictable success. If nobody

notices or cares, you're probably in treadmill or in the

big rut, but that sense of how individually dependent is all of

this on me is one touchstone and the other part of the two prong

thing is sort of the other side of the coin is how strong is the

immediate team around you if if you feel that you're actually

taking things from them your inventory of important things to

do comes from their priorities and needs. Then you're likely in

predictable success. If they're working like crazy to try and

take stuff off you, you're probably still in fun.

I see this a lot with very charismatic

leaders in businesses, industries, or nonprofits like

churches that are individual specific, and so they'll,

they'll be in a period of ease, they're growing, it's bigger

than it ever was, which means it was bigger than the thing that

barely covered their paycheck three years earlier, and so a

lot of that feels like. Predictable success, but that

litmus test of how does it do when you're not there, I think

is excellent. That's really, really helpful. It's really

helpful. I like that.

You know, if somebody's immediate reaction

is, I haven't been not there for five years, can't remember the

last time I took a holiday. You've answered the question, so

let me, let me turn that around a little bit, and look at it

from the point of view of the individual leader who's asking

the question, as you track the founder's evolution, as we've

called it. Do you think it's possible for a leader to

overshoot in their evolution, so to speak? You know, in my model

world, to find yourself in predictable success and realize

this isn't where, actually, where I want to be. I want to be

back in fun. Can you get to stage five and think I should,

I'm actually going to go backwards. Is that, is that

possible? And is it healthy?

Yeah, there's, there's a few different ways

that that happens. One is, I think, like predictable success,

there's this idea that whatever is the highest one is the best

one, especially in the US, and I think the West in general,

there's this idea that bigger is better, and bigger does

different things, and can be better, but it's not inherently

better, and I think one of the reasons why the founders'

evolution is so helpful is because we don't define level

seven as the destination for everybody, that you know we're

just all on our journey to level seven. It's the, it's actually

the least likely by several orders of magnitude, because for

most of us, we don't actually ever have to get that far, and

so what ends up happening, I think, a lot of times is, is

similar to predictable success. What puts you in level three

instead of level two is success in level two. We don't really

choose to get to the next level as much as we do the things that

thrust us into that level, and so a lot of folks will, you

know, they'll, they'll start in level two, they'll start

bringing some folks around them in level three. They'll kind of

crack the code in level four, and they'll wake up one day,

usually in level four. It's not level five, is a pretty

conscious effort to get to, but I see it happen sometimes, and

they're like, why am I doing this? Is this it? Like, is this

in? So, for some folks, the answer is no. This isn't it.

Level five is amazing. Let's go there. For some folks, it's

yeah, this is way past it. And if you just had your own private

practice where you were doing the thing that you love to do,

if you love coffee, don't get to level five and be a coffee CEO,

right? that's just that's not like if you love being behind an

espresso machine, then level two, maybe level three, is all

you need to do, and so in a similar way to predictable

success, if you have any choice other than to go to the next

level, it's oftentimes the right answers to stay, or maybe even

go backwards,

And I'm guessing too that you can get to the

point where you've, as you say, been promoted, isn't the right

word, that's got a very specific connotation, but in essence,

you've developed into a leadership level where it

actually would feel like a failure, or certainly there'd be

a lot of peer pride involved in just saying, no, I don't really

want to do that, that you know, I just want to go back to my two

coffee shops rather than trying to be another Starbucks, you

know, but yeah, it can make you the happiest person in the

world.

It takes way more bravery to go backwards. I

don't even like to use the phrase backwards, but to go

backwards, to return to a previous level, I call it going

home instead of going backwards, but it takes way more bravery

and courage to do that than to just accept the organizational

inertia and try borrowing someone else's vision for your

life. Now I will offer, and this is a part of what makes us so

hard, and part of how it happens is that I believe organizations

of a certain size demand a founder or leader at a certain

level. You can't lead a 500 person firm from level two

startup entrepreneur doing your own thing however you want,

whenever you want. So, so some of what makes that is the kind

of golden handcuffs is like you get to level five and folks who

are in level five that shouldn't be in level five are some of the

most miserable people I know because they've got everything

that everyone thinks that they should want and they're they're

dead inside they hate all of it and. And it's like, how do you

say no to that? It's like you've got the most privileged position

in the world. How do you choose to give that up and then go

start something new from scratch? Is it's a really,

really difficult place to be. It's a difficult place to be.

I want to just throw in a follow-up here. I,

when I was thinking about things I wanted to ask you about the

model, I thought this was a distinct question, but I realize

now, having just spoken to you about this, it's actually part

of what we just said. Talk to me about skipping stages in the

founders' evolution. Is that possible? Is that desirable?

Where does that fit in? You know, you know, my view on the

lifecycle side of things. How does skipping stages, where does

that fit in the founder's evolution.

Structurally? No, you can't skip stages.

However, the founder's evolution, like predictable

success, is a fractal of, I think, a much more universal

principle. You can find the same seven levels in the story of

Gandhi, the story of Steve Jobs, and the story of Jesus. So, in

that, in that, it's just the founders' version of this same

pattern that exists for every person in their story. You can,

you can, you do whatever stage you want at whatever time, but

in terms of the founder's evolution, here's the most

folks want to skip to level six, which is the

owner stage, and it's obvious why. It's like, if you could own

something and not run it, and it just gave you a bunch of money,

and you had infinite time freedom, who doesn't want that?

It's like, okay, that's fine. I actually don't want that,

because I'd be bored out of my mind, and I'm a terrible person

when I'm bored, but I understand the allure, and so you'll get a

bunch of folks that are, you know, level two very successful

solopreneurs, and they want to, you know, hand off their

business for someone else to run it for them while they, you

know, collect a paycheck once a month. Why would anyone do that?

Why would anyone run your solo practice for you and not just

run their own solo practice? And so, can you do that technically?

Yes, but that's not level six, that's just stepping out and

collecting a check, and and so you can borrow some of the

strategies and privileges of other levels, for example, a

startup entrepreneur can retire, they can just close shop, and if

they've set aside enough money, then they can do investor type

things similar to what a level six owner would do, but they're

doing it not as a level six own founder, they're doing it as

someone who had a great career and has spare money to do stuff

with. It's, it's, it's different. It's not level six,

so no, you can't skip them. They are linear, even if you move

through them too fast, you don't build the requisite skill for

success in a level, the next level will collapse in on

itself, and so even if you could skip a level,

As you're sharing that with me, as you know, one

of the things that I enjoy doing more than anything is working

with family businesses, because I think the family dynamic

brings such a juicy degree of complexity into everything that

you know, I can't help myself. I just love working with that

stuff, and I think that is one of the reasons why so many

success family successors fall on their face, because there's a

presumption that they've somehow got it, whatever they would have

got from working through the stages, by osmosis, you know,

just being at the dinner table every Sunday night, and you

know, sharing the war stories and all that sort of stuff. It

sort of has seeped in to them. Now, there's some sense, I

think, in which, sure, you know, sure, you're getting a

mentorship that's free, almost nothing in families is free, but

you know what I mean, that if you use it, you know wisely can

help accelerate moving through, but there's almost at times a

sort of a bit of an arrogance bordering on entitlement sort of

thing that goes on, like I don't need to do that, you know,

that's that's what the parentals did, they did all that stuff.

Now I can just step in and make this work, and you know the

statistics are very clear. The majority of family success and

plans don't go the way everybody thinks they're going to go, and

not in a positive manner. So I think that plays into that a

lot, don't you think?

Yeah, I do, and, and, and it's one of the

reasons why I was very specific in that this is the founder's

evolution. There are an enormous number of benefits from someone

who's not a founder to come in and learn from it, but with a

founder, if I'm talking to a founder in level five. I know

that they have been through levels 123, and four. If I talk

to a business owner in level five, I can't make that

assumption.

Sure, sure,

right? Because they may have bought in at level

five, they might have bought in at level three, and, and you can

buy organizational competence in, in later stages, but you

can't buy the individual experience, and so, unless

you've had that in other environments, then it's gonna

be, it's gonna be a real challenge. Speaking of

challenges, I want to turn this around for you. We opened up

with fun and predictable success, which are not the most

challenging of stages, but one of the things that I've found in

helping companies, businesses, and nonprofits, organizations to

use the predictable success model to navigate their strategy

and how to achieve predictable success. Many, many times I've

been in the room, and, and you could split the room down the

middle, you usually have to reorganize the seats a little

bit, but half of them think they're in whitewater, half of

them think they're in treadmill. Can you be in whitewater and

treadmill at the same time?

Yes, you can. That's not always the reason why

the dynamic that you're talking about happens, and I'll talk

about that in a second or two, but the reality may be that

that's the case, that we've got two departments, divisions,

projects, groups, teams, whatever, that are just in

different stages of the life cycle, and I had a sort of

clearest exemplar of that, that I had over the years was a PR a

a real old time PR company, Chicago-based, and this was back

in the very early days of the interwebs, when you know AOL

were sending out CDs, so they set up an account, that type of

thing, Who were absolutely they owned, you know, old media, so

you know that gets you newspaper column inches, that gets you on

radio and on TV, and all that sort of stuff, but they were

plunging into treadmill headlong, if not at times in the

big rut, and their newly set up Los Angeles-based internet

division was zooming up, and you know, plunging into wild water

faster than the half life of, you know, a neutron, if that's a

thing. I'm going to disown that sentence. I don't think it makes

any sense, and so you know, I literally did physically sit in

a room with people who were half of them were in treadmill and

half of them were in my work. What's as likely happened to us

frequently is you've got people who are just seeing things

differently, and you know, if you've got a hard charging

operator, and if you've got a business that's succeeded, and

it's been in fun for quite some time, you will have developed a

cadre of hard charging operators, typically people who

have become big dogs in the organization, because they've

got a lot of delegated authority, whether they would

call it that or not, lot of sweat equity, they've got their

own, might be small, but teams around them who look to them,

and any hard charging operator worth their salt, you know, if

you, if you just, if you just put a spreadsheet up on your

screen, and they're over there, they'll smell it. What are you,

what is that? You know, don't you actually have a job? Why are

you being extreme, but not much. And so, what often is the case

is here. We've got, you know, a single source of truth here in

the middle, which is we're just going to have, we're in white

water, we're going to have to codify stuff, gonna have to

start writing things down, gonna have to be able to replicate

what we do and not make it up. It's too complicated to do that

anymore, and for certainly for the processors, synergists

usually on a good day, the visionaries, they accept that

and see that, and the operators, and on a bad day, the

visionaries are looking at it and saying, horrible, you know,

why do I have to fill in this thing at the end of every day,

or whatever, and so, yes, you can be in both, and that's

actually easier to deal with, because giving shared

vocabulary, it's like that old cheesy story of the, is it five

blind men, you know, blindfold. The men who are backed up to an

elephant, and they each pull a different part, you know, one's

got the tail, one's got the ears, so forth. They all

describe a completely different thing. If that's what's going

on, and you can take the blindfolds off, and everybody

can go, "Oh, right. So you are in treadmill, that's fair

enough. How can we help? You are in white water. So there are

mechanical things that you can do with the other situation, you

know, you're dealing with hard coded DNA, just how I think

about things, and sometimes just intellectual purity isn't going

to fix it, just showing somebody it's like I don't mean that the

people involved here are bad people, but if you've ever tried

to reason with an internet troll, eventually you work out

that reason isn't on the table here, it's just not gonna make

any difference whatsoever, a waste of time. Like, I want to

say that sentence again. I'm not saying hard charging operators

and big dogs are all like internet trolls. It's just that

the thing that's being triggered isn't something that's fixed by

logic. It's, it's such a deeply felt thing that, that, that,

that's the work that's really, really hard in Whitewater. So,

you're genuinely in whitewater, you've just got people for whom

it really feels like treadmill, that's tough, tough work.

Yeah, yeah, I think that it's important to

address both of those issues. If I could put a bow on it, of

saying, hey, we need to know what stage we are in, enterprise

wide, and that the reason we're there is in large part because

this group is there, this group is there, it really is both, and

you almost can't address one without the other, but you do

have to wrestle through the dual reality there, and I think a lot

of teams come up short in that respect,

And in doing that, one of the self-deprecating,

say, one of the few things, but it's not true, one of the many

things that age has helped me with is that it's really

difficult to be of help to anyone dealing with that

different set of perceptions, if you, as an individual, have an

emotive buy-in to one of those specific perceptions yourself,

and when I was younger, you know, it was a lot harder for me

to be a real sounding board, being able to be objective and

stepping back from the emotional concerns of all of that, you

know, one of the things that I've always believed is that the

ability to be not necessarily clinical, because that sounds,

you know, less than human clinicians are not less than

humans, so again, got to be careful, but the ability to be

objective is such an important part of being a good skill

architect, critical success practitioner, and you know,

although I have my own preferences when it comes to the

work I do, I can completely abstract from that, so let me

ask you this. When you look at the founder's evolution, where's

your natural, where's your heart? Which stage is the one

that you most enjoy being in, and does that affect the way in

which you interact and help other people,

Yeah, yeah, 100% So this is an interesting

one, because if I were to just say which stage, because I've

been through most of them, not all of them, but most of them,

which one did I enjoy the most? It was five hands down, not even

close. I love the CEO stage when I finally figured out what that

meant, and I'm pretty good at it. It works well for my makeup,

and as soon as I got there and it got good, I sold the company.

I don't know why I did that, but I left that, and one of the

things that I realized I didn't have the model at the time that

I did this, but when you are a level five CEO, crushing it in

one domain, and you go start another business, you don't

start it in level five. It's like same with predictable

success. If you're in predictable success and you go

launch another business unit, it doesn't launch in predictable

success, it launches an early struggle, and in the same way I

went all the way back to level one, had to figure out, like,

what is this, what does it mean to actually be a coach. However,

when I'm helping folks go through this process, I don't

think that which stage you want to be in is the highest and best

way of figuring out where you're trying to go, for me and how I

coach. Folks, and now they choose whatever stage they want.

I actually, I think all seven are equal. I didn't think that

when I started the project, and several of my clients proved me

wrong. All seven stages have a valid expression that can be

wonderful and life-giving and fulfilling, and every bit of

what you need it to be. Some of those is a little harder to

believe than others, but it is true, and, and the book has

seven of those examples, so you can actually see it from the

real world, but I found that to accomplish what I wanted to

accomplish, helping other founders ultimately build an

organization that they love to lead, that's really what it

boils down to, I can be most effective at that, achieving

that vision for this organization in level two, and

so I have even once my, my book of business was completely full,

and the next obvious step is to bring in other coaches and

start, you know, having them work for you and all that in a

bag of chips, I realized that for the vision that I have for

this organization, and what I want to do with it, level five

is undoubted. I'm sorry, level two is undoubtedly the most

effective tool to use for that vision, and so I have to make a

really concerted effort to not accidentally get to level three,

and kind of watch hiring people, and

For your listeners, very quickly, just explain the

difference between,

yeah, level twos on its, on its best day,

level two is a successful solopreneur, it's you with, you

know, a couple of people that help out, you have less than a

handful, because somewhere around hiring a handful, the

game changes, and it's not about you doing what you love to do,

it's about you managing a group of people who does something

that hopefully moves us in the right direction, but so level

two successful solopreneur, level three on its worst day is

being a reluctant manager, but on its best days being a

skillful manager, where you have arguably the most control to do

during your day job, the thing that you enjoy the most. So, if

you're like the, if you really like to sell, then you can hire

other people to do the actual doing, and you can go have

wonderful sales conversations until you're blue in the face.

So, level three, being a skillful manager isn't about

being a manager, it's about what being a manager allows you to do

personally, but it happens when there's enough people that you

actually have to manage them, and so that's the break point,

and I have to be really conscientious of that breakpoint

and make sure that I'm not committing to more work than I

can do from level two,

And here's an interesting thing you and I

share that you know me well enough to know that I'm firmly a

level two guy, and this is going to sound like, oh, well, of

course, you know it was going to come up at some point. I'm

surprised that too. I mean, this is a podcast, so AI has got to

be talked about at some point, or we're clearly just two old

fuddy duddies, not anyway. My personal discovery, and it's the

one real revelation to me over the last year, is the degree to

which AI genuinely helps me build a moat between this level

two and level three transition, because the amount of stuff that

I previously would have had to conduct a group of people to do

that I can just invest like a morning setting up some really

good way for AI to do it, and then put it on rinse and repeat,

has been, you know, I.. I'm not going to use game changer, it's

just an awful phrase, but it really has at least helped me

use some game tactics that I would never have otherwise got.

I think it's a wonderful tool if you want to stay in level two

and you're going to try to minimize the gravitational pull

into three

Mechanically, what's happening is when you're

maxed out in level two, you have three options, which, because

you can't do it yourself anymore, so you either have to

eliminate it. Hey, I'm just not going to do that anymore. You,

that's really hard, and that was kind of the only choice. Level

two, the only way to stay in level two is to over eliminate,

just keep cutting, keep cutting, keep cutting, keep cutting, so

you could stay in size. Then you can automate it, right? Which,

again, this is where AI and natural language processing, and

all of that, have have radically shifted what's available. The

automate functionality 20 years ago was nothing compared to what

it is today, which is nothing compared to what it will be two

years from now, and and so the only the third tool, the only

thing that we could really rely on if we were maxed out and

didn't. To eliminate was to delegate, which is why you had

to keep hiring and hire and hiring, and so, yeah, I couldn't

agree more. I think what it allows folks to do is to thrive

in level two at a much larger scale than was previously

possible, and for us level two junkies, that's a pretty cool

thing. It's a pretty cool thing. Well, Les, I'll give you the

last word, and then we'll wrap up here.

All right, my last word is a remaining question for

you, which is, to what extent do you think you will be a changed

person as a result, in say two or three years from now, as a

result of what you've learned writing your own book, because I

know that's something that years ago somebody said to me, you

only ever really see true change in the rearview mirror, and

that's true, and as I was being pulled through a hedge backwards

in stage you're at now with my books, I didn't see anything

like the impact. I couldn't see what the impact it was happening

on me. What do you, how do you think you'll be changed by

producing this great is it up to 400 pages now?

I don't know what the final print version

will be, but I think it's actually gonna be longer. I'm

the guy in the Briar Bush being pulled backwards, so I just.. I

can tell you, I'll have a few more scars along the way. But

what the one of the things is to pull this back to founders of

evolution for a second. One of the things I tell folks in level

six to do is to write a book and don't publish it, because of how

this process has always already changed me. Right, there's

something that's I've written a lot of content, you know, I've

published a bunch of videos, I've done a lot of different

media types. Nothing comes close to the structural integrity that

comes from from writing it out in a book to actually get that

big of a cohesive thought all together in one place. I think

is a profoundly beneficial exercise. So I can tell you, so

far I know that all seven stages are desirable for some folks. I

didn't know that coming in. I know that, like, how much you

can boil down the world of what you have to focus on. That's so

much clearer than it was before. So I use that moan practice and

reminding myself what I need to be focused on, and the process

of getting that out into the world is so much more stretching

than I thought, like you and I have been talking recently about

endorsements, and like the vulnerability of endorsements is

uncharted territory for me, because it's like with this

video, we'll post it in the world, it'll be live, we put an

hour into it, and it's it's out there, and but when you've been

writing in a dark basement room for months and months and months

and months and months, and then you put it out in the world,

that's a different feeling. So I expect there to be change there

that I don't quite understand yet, but it's been quite the

process. It's been quite the process. Well, last as always,

it's a privilege and honor having you here, both as a

friend, as a colleague, and a fellow thought partner. Yeah, so

thankful for you and appreciative of our

relationship. Thanks for being here. And for those of you

watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as

I enjoyed it. At least I talked a lot, so I can't use my normal

outro here, but I can't wait to see you next time. We'll see you

there. Hey everyone, Scotty Timer here. Thank you so much

for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this

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