The Most Dangerous Question On Earth by Bryan Franklin (Transcript)

And this surprised my parents and they were asking me about it and I was telling them, isn’t it great that there’s always new music in your head all the time and that surprised them even more.

See, I didn’t realize that I was the only one that could hear it. Now I am not sure exactly how that happened. That’s me I’m 0 years old but you actually have the same thing. There’s a vision of the world. There’s a world that only you can see and some of you have that vision really well articulated and some not but everybody’s got one.

Everybody has a future a different world than the one we’re living in that only you can see. It shows up every time you notice that something isn’t good, or isn’t easy, fun, accurate, automated, helpful. Every time you see a problem you’re comparing the world that you’ve got in your head that only you can see with the one that we’ve got here.

Now some of you are dedicated to closing that gap. You’ve built companies. You’re starting movements, or you’re just generally being like a cool person to each other more and more now. So thank you.

The second message is that I’d like you to pay more attention to what it means to lead. But look around, notice something that you really value; something that impresses you; something you rely on. Some remarkable thing you probably take for granted.

The fact that it’s here is a testament to someone else’s leadership. This thing that here now and we were having discussion just the other night and like, you know, things we take for granted, like a pillow, well that pillow had to be invented. That pillow has touched tens of thousands of hands to get to your bed. And if you track it back to the first set of hands, that first set of hands belong to someone who saw a world that we didn’t see. They saw it and then they started to lead.

So listen, I trust you. I want you to be a better leader because I want your version of the world to be the one I’m living in. Everything good about what we’ve got, we owe to leadership. And it’s true that the world is not all perfect. I mean we’ve heard about education and what’s wrong with education. We’ve heard about health. The fact that there’s now more obese people than fat people and more fat people than healthy people in this country. But all of that is due to a failure in leadership. So we collectively, we need to get better at it. We need to understand leadership and get better at it.

I want people’s hearts and minds change when you speak. I want the walls that confine them that prevent them from having what they want and being who they want to be, I want those walls to disappear when you speak because they see you walk through them. But in order for that to happen, you’re going to need to dedicate yourself to being a better leader.

So if I can get your word on that, I’d like you to stand up now.

Stand-up.

Now something interesting just happened. Because some of you stood up out of a commitment to lead and some of you just stood up because the guy on stage said, hey, stand up. That’s okay. You know who you are. I am not going to make a big deal out of it. You can sit down.

But really I want your leadership. In my career, I’ve attended about a hundred years’ worth of staff meetings, and it’s always kind of hard to understand but it’s because it tracks down to roughly nine companies per month for eleven years. So what most executives would have to do in a hundred years, I have done in the last 11. And my job in these meetings has been – to be the trusted advisor to the entrepreneurs who lead companies like this.

So I’ve got kind of a unique perspective on leadership. I’ve got to kind of have a front-row seat and see what works and doesn’t work.

Now in most of these meetings, there was no leadership at all. Most of these meetings, the future escaped the meeting unscathed. But then there were those few — there were those few meetings where something really magical happened where great leadership was present.

I was working with a CEO and this guy’s team stopped following him. And he didn’t know why and initially I didn’t know why either because look, he had all the qualities that we’re told great leaders are supposed to have. Number one, he is honest. You know, he was honest; he was clear thinking. He was actually — I would even describe him as a visionary, really smart, even charismatic which isn’t necessary for a leader but it can be nice.

If he was on stage with me, though, as he spoke, you’d want to like him. You’d want to like his ideas but your heart and mind they just would stay where they were.

And it was in working with him that I realized that there’s something that every truly great leader does, that the ones who aren’t so great don’t do. And it has to do with their relationship to paradox.

See, a paradox is a statement or set of statements that contradicts itself. And they’re very very powerful. They hold a lot of energy if you will.

When you’re presented with a paradox, you really have a choice. You can either ignore it, pretend it’s not there, you can take a side true or false, or you can, what I call, hold the paradox. You can believe both contradictory statements or implications simultaneously. And this is what great leaders do.

So let’s talk about the universal paradox of significance. See, you matter and I know you probably needed me to tell you that. But you can touch a life so deeply and so profoundly that the impact of your loss would never be forgotten. When you consider the people you touch and the people they touch, the ripple effect of your impact is unfathomable. And also the magnitude of your insignificance is equally unfathomable.

Now let’s – just as an experiment, let’s hold these two experiences. Hold in your body the truth, the knowledge of your significance and then without allowing that to dissipate, add to it the unmistakable truth that you aren’t worth a damn, that you’re barely dust. Can you do that at the same time?

Now as you’re doing this, you’re doing what I’m calling holding paradox and leaders who do this can – they are standing in the intersection between these two seemingly contradictory truths. And when they do that, they can be leaders, they can be followed my anyone.

Let’s look at some other leadership paradoxes.

So you know the future is uncertain. Would you follow anyone who would deny that the future is uncertain? No.

But would you follow anyone who had no idea what the future held? No.

All that matters is perspective and there is no truth. But really all that matters is truth and there’s only but one perspective.

So leaders that begin to hold these paradoxes, instead of taking sides, they have a certain energy to them.

As you begin to hold paradox more and more, what you’ll find is the area that you’re standing in can expand and then the paradox itself disappears. It turns out there’s really only one here and there’s one now. So paradox in a way is just lazy thinking.

As you’re standing here and now and holding the truth of everything, you’re inviting your followers to have a higher level of consciousness and this is translated non verbally even in a business meeting when we’re talking about whether or not we’re going to expand into the Japanese market or not. The team knows whether you’ve taken sides or not, and have decided either, hey you guys aren’t doing enough, or you’ve done way more than enough in your contribution as extraordinary. See, both are true.

And if you deny one of the two, then you lose the other part.

So here’s a couple of guys that picked the paradox, kind of in a really messy and bad way.

As you lead or become a better entrepreneur you realize that you have to lead people where they want to go, right? If you can’t just lead people arbitrarily into your vision of the future, if it has no content or context that matches their reality, and we’ve got some of the greatest marketing minds actually in the country in this room and what they’ll tell you is you need to understand inside the customer’s mind, understand what they want, understand their emotional and then present them to them a solution to the problem they’re trying to solve.

The more and more you do that, however, the less relevant your picture of the future is, and the more you become leading by poll. So Warren Harding campaigned on making no enemies; that was his campaign slogan. And then he tried to govern entirely by poll basically making all of the decisions based on majority, and he is well regarded as one of the worst U.S. presidents in history. He always makes the worst 10 list. In fact, I saw a list where he was ranked lower than the two guys that died after they were in office for a week.

And then on the left we’ve got Plan 9 From Outer Space which is written and directed by Ed Wood. I used to be in the movie business. Ed Wood is famously the worst movie director of all time, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone but himself. He only paid attention to his own vision. He did no market research, no contact with his customer at all. And I actually worked on about 300 feature films most of which make Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Casablanca.

So I worked a lot with people who aren’t polling enough, who decided they’re just following their vision for the future and everyone else can go to hell. So these guys were not holding paradox.

Now let’s talk about a couple of guys that do it well.

So these are two of my dad’s business mentors but I don’t think my dad met either one. And I kind of thought it’d be fun if we do have a mini celebrity deathmatch here between Chopra and PT Barnum. See, Chopra’s message is follow your Dharma. Be not concerned with money, or I can’t imagine Chopra doing split-testing.

But the PT Barnum says give the people what they want. It doesn’t matter if it follows what he thought was going to be good. He presents a show which is the show that people will buy.

Don’t maintain things

So third message is don’t maintain things. If you’re going to draw together the paradox of the vision for the world that you have inside you, you being a thought leader regardless of what people think they want and also an understanding of where they are and how to speak to them in such a way that they’re going to take action, you’re going to draw those together that puts you right smack up against the question what do you want? And that is a desire question – what do you desire? And desire is the intersection between who you are and who you are ashamed of; who you are and who you are afraid you are.

You can’t have desire really without shame. Anything that doesn’t have a little bit of shame is just not interesting to you. So we believe we’re not enough, that creates the desire to fix that problem or prove that it’s wrong, and then we really work hard at it and then we achieve it. And now we’ve achieved the thing that’s proving that we’re not enough. It’s disproved that lie.

So now we have the marriage, and the house and the car and the job and the career and the business and now we have to maintain those things but the purpose of creating them was to prove something that can’t be proven because it wasn’t true in the first place.

So anytime you’re maintaining anything you’re not free. Now I’m not saying to – not to paint your house or not to pay any attention to your wife. I’m saying approach your each house payment like you’re buying that house for the first time. Every time you go to write the mortgage check, you’re buying the house again. Do you want it?

Every time you interact with your relationship, be in rapture in the moment for that relationship and created in a moment. If you are maintaining, then you disconnected from the desire that had you here in the first place and you’re just kind of doing a shame maintenance program.

So with those three messages, I hope you’re somewhat prepared for the question — when I asked this question to my brother, he nearly vomited. And then he said, I can’t – I can’t talk.

When I asked this question to myself, it cost me my marriage, all my money, the future I thought I was living into and possibly more importantly this false identity that I thought I had. The person I thought of as me.

And I’m very grateful for doing that. Because what emerged is someone who actually has a chance of living a life that I was here to live.

So what’s the most dangerous question?

I want you to imagine a virgin of yourself that has no shame. It doesn’t have anything to prove that’s already proved everything. That’s gotten the validation you always wanted from all the people you’ve ever wanted it from. Like declare yourself the winner of any game you could think of playing. No one any more doubts you, least of all you.

Imagine that you’ve got nothing to prove. Imagine there’s nothing to hide, that you’ve already revealed every secret you possibly can, everything you can think of that you’re subtly and not so subtly hiding every day that’s already all been revealed. And imagine there’s nothing to lose either because you already lost it anyway or anything you could possibly lose isn’t real. And then ask the question: what do you want?

So in that state, what do you want?

Now if that question doesn’t freak you out, you’re not really asking honestly.

Every minute – every minute you spend doing anything that isn’t going towards the answer to that question is a waste of your life.

Thank you very much.

 

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