Hi, guys, and welcome back to another episode of your Brain's Coach podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your Brain's Coach and it is my job here to share with you, bring to you, discover for you all the best, cutting-edge, most useful, applicable and hopefully important and life and work transforming brain-body tools so you could take better control of your thoughts, of your emotions and, most importantly, of your actions. So you could deliver more excellence in a more consistent manner. So you could shape your life, work and destiny closer and closer to the vision you have in your head, in your dreams, and you get to live a very fulfilling and meaningful life experience. Today, guys, I'm so excited to introduce to you maybe introduce, but hopefully you already know our guest, but today you get to learn his work and his journey from a different side, a different perspective. So it is my pleasure to introduce to you David Allen.
Speaker 1What does it take to turn a simple idea into a global productivity empire? Find out as we sit down and chat with David Allen, a top-rated expert in personal and organizational productivity and executive coaching, as recognized by Forbes Times and Fast Company Media and many other outlets. David authored bestsellers like Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity, ready for Anything and Making it All Work. He created the GTD methodology, which helps individuals, companies, teams transform their lives and their business, their work, into balanced, integrated and productive experiences. This mythology is praised for its broad applicability, anywhere from boardroom to living room to classroom, and its life-changing impact, from his early days of self-exploration through meditation and martial arts to accidentally falling into a consulting career by helping entrepreneur friends. David highlights the crucial role of maintaining a clear mental space to navigate and shape your career as an expert. Navigate and shape your career as an expert.
Speaker 1Our conversation with David covers the evolution of his career. So here, compared to a lot of other podcasts, guys, we're not going to be talking about David's popular productivity systems. You can get a bunch of resources on David's website and get his books Getting Things done. The original are the books and the new one getting things done, teams. Getting things done with others. We're going to cover the evolution of David's career, the balance between vision and execution, importance of branding and intellectual property protection, the challenges David faced with privacy and measures David took to ensure his methodologies remained authentic. We also touch on the complex art of pricing services, the significance of giving back through pro bono work and battling imposter syndrome. This episode promises invaluable lessons on building a thriving business with your idea, obsession or system. So, without further ado, please enjoy our insightful and very productive conversation with David Allen. David, welcome to your Brain's Coach podcast. I'm so excited and just over the moon, I don't know happy to have you on today's episode of our podcast. So thank you for agreeing to be a guest here.
Speaker 2Yeah, well, thanks Angela for the invitation, sure.
Speaker 1Yes, and for those of you guys who didn't hear the intro or don't know who David is, david is one of the top world's productivity experts personal productivity, organizational productivity, one of the top executive coaches, author of many books on productivity, starting from Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity, to Making it Work Ready for Anything and the latest Team, getting Things Done with Others and I'm a fan of your work, david, and I think everyone who is interested in stress-free productivity should pick up. At least you know Getting Things Done. But today I actually wanted to chat about something else, about your thought leadership journey, about your business journey and how you've created this global empire from what I suspect was an idea in your head. If you don't mind, can you tell our listeners or those future or current thought leaders who feel they have an idea but not sure how to build into a business and into a thriving business? How did it all start for you?
Speaker 2Yeah well, it's actually quite a long story. I'll try to make it as short as I can. I'm not really an entrepreneur. I wasn't that aspirational, business-wise or otherwise. I was really in the academic world. I was studying intellectual history, history of thought, american intellectual history, and graduate school in Berkeley in 1968 in California. And of course Berkeley in 1968 was pretty rich time for personal growth and exploration and so forth. So at some point I dropped out of graduate school. I said, instead of studying people who were enlightened, let me go find my own. So I went on a self exploration tour and you know, meditation, spiritual stuff.
Speaker 2Martial arts got a black belt in karate, but they don't pay people to do that. So I had to maintain my lifestyle, at least a minimal lifestyle. So I wound up. I had friends who were starting businesses. They were small. They had small businesses. They were entrepreneurs. They were starting up. They had small businesses, they were entrepreneurs, they were starting up, and some of them needed some help just in terms of how they were working and their own system. So I became a good number two guy. So I helped a lot of people. That's where all my jobs came from, was I helped a lot of people do that.
Speaker 2And then I'd walk in and just see what they were doing and say, gee, how much easier can we do this? Because I'm just the laziest guy you ever met, angela. So I just was always interested in how early can we leave the office or the work you know. So I would help them improve their system. Now they call that process improvement. Back then I was just lazy and started trying to figure out okay, how much easier can we do this? And then I'd fix it and then get bored and go find another job. And then I discovered they pay people to do that. They call them something. Hmm, consultant, wow, who'd have thought so? I said I wonder if I could just make a living on a project-by-project basis, working with people that could use my input for whatever they might want to use it for. And so I hung out my shingle. This is 1982, angela before you were born, I'm sure, and Alan Associates. So I started my little consulting practice and it turned out.
Speaker 2And because of my experience in the martial arts particularly, but also meditation and other things at that time I really found the value of clear space. What was it like to have no distraction in your head, to be just clear. You learn that in the martial arts, I think you, I think I've read something for you, you know they say oh well, it takes 20 minutes, 30 minutes to refocus on what you're doing. Look, if four people jump me in a dark alley, I don't take 20 minutes to refocus. I'm sorry it's here here, here, here, that, that, that, that it's like instant refocus. So it's possible to refocus much more quickly if you're clear. And so I like clarity.
Speaker 2And then, as my consulting business got a little more successful and busier and more complex, I went wait a minute, I'm getting distracted in my own head, how do I get back to that clear space? And so, just for my own personal reasons, I started exploring what are the techniques I can use to stay clear amidst busier kind of life. And so I didn't wake up one morning with this whole methodology that I'd come up with. It was like a long string of epiphanets, as I say oh that works, oh that works, oh that works. And I found things that worked for me. I had some mentors that taught me various parts of this and I said let me see if this works also for my consulting clients. And I started to share my techniques with them and it produced the same result More clarity, more focus, more control, more space, mental space to think about the meaningful stuff. So I went, wow. So that actually became a big sort of a core of my little consulting practice.
Speaker 2And then I had I ran across I was doing a little workshop time and I ran across a guy who was a senior HR person in a big corporation. He said, david, we need that result in our whole culture. Can you design some sort of training program around this? And maybe we can reach a lot of people with the model and not instead of just one-on-one. So I said, okay, give it a shot.
Speaker 2And it turned out. We experimented with a pilot program over a year for a thousand executives and managers of a personal productivity seminar that I designed, and it was the most successful seminar they'd ever done. I was like, wow, I suddenly found myself thrust into the corporate training world. And so, you know, this was Lockheed 1983, 84. So I found myself thrust in that world. You could have fooled me, you know that that was where I was going to be, but it turned out that was the ripest audience for what I'd actually come up with and they were willing to pay for it. Yeah, created a job and created a little bit of a career. And so I wound up over the next 10 or 15 years training thousands and thousands of people, mostly in the US companies.
Speaker 1And was it all by yourself? Sorry to interrupt.
Yeah, companies, and was it all by yourself? Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, well, myself. Until the demand got so much that I had to find people that I could actually train and hire to go do this the same kind of seminars or coaching. My consulting turned more into coaching for one-on-one with executives or high level folks who went to my seminar or you know somebody, knew about my stuff and they said David, can you sit desk-side with me and help me implement this for?
Speaker 1myself.
Speaker 2So I spent literally thousands of hours, angela, one-on-one desk-side with some of the busiest and brightest folks you'd ever meet on the planet, actually walking them through the implementation of this methodology that I'd come up with. So that's really how this got developed. At some point somebody said, you know, I had some advisors say, david, you should write the book. I go how do you write a book? Well, they said well, look, you know, it took me, angela. It took me 15 or 20 years to figure out what I'd figured out and that it was unique and that nobody else seemed to have done it and that it was bulletproof because it worked. It went viral in some very challenging organizations and so I said well, if they can't punch a hole in it, I guess I feel confident I could go ahead and write the book about it.
Speaker 2So I wrote the manual. I had no idea how, what the uptake would be, how popular it would be or not. I just had to get it out of my head and get it out there, in case I got run over by a bus. I said, well, here's a manual of what I've learned. I had no traditional formal education in time management, business or psychology. All this was street smarts, just stuff that I'd learned from my own experience and applied and implemented. And then, you know, worked with many, many, many, many, many people and watched the value it created, you know, in implementing it. So then I wrote the book I wrote the first edition anyway of Getting Things Done, published in 2001. I had no idea what the uptake would be. It turned out, you know, it was a bestseller. It started to go around the world and then I thought, oh, I guess maybe I can scale this thing in terms of whatever I came up with. I didn't have to be there personally. You know, somebody can actually get value out of reading the book and actually start to implement it.
Speaker 2So, that's, you know, by that time I had a small company, you know 20, 30 people, and we said shall we try to scale this internationally? Didn't quite know how to do that, so that was kind of a fumble and mistakes, and trying this, trying that, and then wound up meeting some people and they came to me who had actually had been quite successful in building an international licensee network of an IP, and so they I partnered with them to help me set that up. So that was golly 15 years ago.
Speaker 1And to drop a pin on geographical map. Or you said scaling internationally. Where did you start?
Speaker 2Okay, Well, obviously, you know, my work was primarily in the US, but we had a couple of people that wanted to partner in Brazil and in the UK, so we tried to create some sort of relationship with them and didn't really work that well. We didn't really know how to do that. There's all kinds of legal tangles you come up with and trademarks and things like that, and how do you protect the ip in terms of quality control, and again, we didn't know how to do that. So once we found an international partner, after two or three years we were represented in you know, 80 90 countries we had. We found licensees that you know took to this methodology and wound up setting that up.
Speaker 2So, uh, you know now that's a lot of my work now, you know, once we found a partner in the U? S that could take off, that that could take on the, the uh, the training, the methodology on a basic level anyway um, it's now crucial learning uh out of Utah, and also a partner that could handle the coaching that we were doing, called GTD Focus, based in Vermont. So they took on the North America basically in terms of that, and so we were able to shrink from 50 people down to five of us right now and basically we're probably more of an IP licensing company than anything else. So a lot of what I do and a lot of what we do is just support our licensees now around the world. We have some very successful licensees in the UK, in Germany, in Scandinavia and far off places like Brunei and Japan and places like that. So that's a short version of a very long story, angela.
Speaker 1Yeah, I can imagine you know there are quite a few stories that you didn't share right there and you know, maybe get to share. But I have a couple of questions, well a few, about the whole process. So it sounds like you didn't really sit down and decided, well, I'm going to develop this global franchise or company, but it kind of grew organically from what you were doing. You starting working. That's how it worked, how it still works.
Speaker 2I just go, I just pick up the phone or respond to emails and just, you know, I'm not a marketer and not really an entrepreneur. I mean people say, gee, david, you must be an entrepreneur because you somehow wound up with this career and this business of spreading this IP around the world. But it's not like, okay, I'm going to do that, then I'm going to stop doing that and then do something else, and then do something else which is a typical entrepreneurial kind of a serial, you know, create and sell businesses kind of a thing. I don't do. That that's not my thing. So I was just delighted to have actually found something that people found valuable, willing to pay me for it and I think they are still doing it and you know and supporting my lifestyle. You know, come on, I'm 78. So I don't know how many other careers or professions I would want. If suddenly everybody kind of got this or everybody suddenly lost interest in what I was doing, I'd go back and wait on tables. That was my second favorite profession.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think where the world is heading right now, it's going to be more demand for your work, because there has never been more distraction, more overwhelmed, more stress around handling all of the communication and things we've got to do.
Speaker 2Seems that way. Yeah, a lot's happened since the pandemic in terms of the change of the business world out there. I wrote the second edition of Getting Things Done. It was published in 2015. Not to change the methodology this methodology didn't change. The audience changed. The first book was really targeted towards fast track professionals. They were the people hungriest for this and most interested in it. But by that, even back then, I knew this worked for students, it worked for clergy, it worked for stay-at-home dads, it worked for anybody with a busy life. They could use this methodology to stay clear and get less distraction and less stress. But by then that audience had increased dramatically and that has continued to increase, and that has continued to increase. No-transcript and as soon as everybody works from home and has to figure out their own life and they don't have an office to go to with a structure that they can trust, and so they have to figure that out and manage that themselves, et cetera, et cetera, so the audience has certainly expanded, given the changes that have gone on.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean most of the audience now is knowledge workers, right, who need the systems to create some sort of Well, knowledge worker.
Speaker 2Is anybody who has to think about the emails. Don't show up telling you what to do with that email. That's knowledge work. You got to figure that out. What does this mean? Why did they get this and what am I supposed to do with this? If anything, is this trash? Is it reference material? Is it something I might want to move on later on? Is it something I need to move on and take an action about? Is there some project now that I'm committing to based upon something that's been handed off to me, or something that I think I now want to do based upon this input?
Speaker 2And the inputs have just been increasing exponentially, what I call channel creep. How many people now have to deal with slack and teams and and you know and email and sms and whatsapp, and you know how many channels are you getting angela right now that you actually need to look at, consider whether there's anything you need to do about it or what you need to do about the content that's in it, and so that has increased dramatically, and so you know. If you know what you're doing, it's a great time to be alive, given the fact that we can you and I can connect. You're in South Africa and I'm in Amsterdam, right, so that's wonderful that we can connect that way, you know, in a semi-intimate way. But if you don't know what you're doing, you're toast. There's just too much. There's too much that I have to learn how to do.
Speaker 1Yes, that's need for top-down structure. It's ghosted like a red thread through all of your work. And, yes, I believe it's never been more needed than now because, you know, in the world of plenty, just like with nutrition, if you have no framework of how to make great choices, you're just going to be overwhelmed and making, most times, the worst kind of choices. And that's, yeah, what I love about your work. You know why I feel like it's so essential and a lot of actually people who are familiar with your work they somehow get the idea you know about folders etc. And I'm like, but I don't believe that's the most important part. I believe the horizons and actually how to think, starting from the vision and principles and purpose, that's where you know it's the essential part and the rest you can kind of Well, you need them both.
Speaker 2Yeah, you need vision and you need execution. You know they're two sides of the same coin, right, you need to kind of know where you're going, but then you need to make sure that you get there, and you actually have to do stuff to get there. So you know our new book that you know that we've got. We talk about healthy high performance, and healthy high performance means you know, yeah, you need to. Your team or you and whoever you're doing work with, need to produce a result, but you don't need to. What you don't want to do is burn out, and you need to have is this are your structures in terms of how you're engaging with each other appropriate, just like personally? It's the same principles, really, for personal productivity as for team productivity, which was a lot.
Speaker 2I spent the last four years with my co-author really sort of piecing that together. What are the real essential elements of a healthy, high-performance team? Not just high performance and not just healthy. If you're just healthy, then it's kumbaya. You know ayaspa rituals and you know, never produce much. So you actually need both.
Speaker 1Well, exactly, and it's kind of this life-work integration system that you've created over the course of your career and your business journey, which I'd like to also return for a little bit more. These days, you know, I also hear not here, but just what I'm personally exposed to throughout my journey Not here, but just what I'm personally exposed to throughout my journey it's like you got to have a I don't know a business plan and you got to write the book first before really knowing how it's going to work in the real world. But what I see from people like yourself who actually built great businesses from your ideas, you go through experience first, like you know, adding value and seeing what people find value, and then seeing the, the need, the, the request from companies, from people, and then you kind of design all of your services and products and books when needed and content right.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's how it worked. That worked for me. I don't know that that's the success formula permanently, but that's certainly how that worked for me. I'm not a ta-da kind of person. I'm not a let me go write the book and then hope it works. I could only write the book after many, many years and thousands of hours of experience with the material to trust that nobody could poke a hole in it. That gave me the confidence to write the book.
Speaker 1Exactly, and I think that's why it got popular and it got onto bestseller list, because it works in real world and you didn't have to doubt it yeah, and it took you I had a good friend of mine who you know was a best-selling author.
Speaker 2You know lots of books and and he I met him in the airport. He said, david, I see your book is still on kind of the best-selling list. How did you, how do you do that? Because he had a lot of marketing people or whatever. I said it's a really good book.
Speaker 1Exactly and it works. Yes, yes, yeah, and it took you, like I don't know, 10, 15 years or 20 years to get the work done before the the book Right, sure, and yeah, it takes, you know, patience and a lot of, especially younger generation. Even in myself, I find like this impatience. Well, I gotta get the book out, you know, I gotta have all this content and social media, etc.
Speaker 1But instead what I'm hearing is like do the work, figure out how to serve people better, how to add value yeah and and also what I'm hearing, probably through joining, correct me if I'm wrong of a lot of things in your thinking changed before you developed the system, like you kind of figured out the system as you went right well, yeah, I mean, the system itself was pretty much figured out in the first four or five, six years that I was involved in with this.
Speaker 2So it wasn't. It wasn't much that changed after that, other than seeing how people implemented it, you know, dumping everything out, writing it on paper and then making next action decisions about all that. I learned that immediately. As soon as he had me implement that, I went, wow, so that has never changed. It's still the essence, a lot of the essence of of you know, how do you, how do you manage distraction? Stop using your head as an office. But I couldn't have put the words on it that I can put it on now. Back then I was just like, wow, see, I wasn't broken.
Speaker 2But I started to experiment with him. I brought him a good mentor of mine, I brought him a good consulting client and then he said well, david, look, I think you're probably going to take what I've learned much further than I'm interested in doing that. So he said you want to hang out with me? So for a couple of years I worked with him to to actually implement a lot of this in terms of organizational change, which was his consulting model. That included a lot of what then became the GTD, or getting things done methodology and so, but that was so that was pretty rapid that I that I found some of the core elements of this. It wasn't like it took me 20 years to figure all that out, but it did take a long time to start to test it out and see how it worked in multiple different kinds of environments and to find out what was core about it, what didn't change, no matter who I was talking to or how they implemented it. So a lot of getting things done was written to be kind of a universal, evergreen manual.
Speaker 2If we fly to Jupiter in 2090, you're still going to need an in-basket. You're still going to need to decide next actions or things that have your attention. You're still going to have to organize that in some way so that the team sees it. These are just basic fundamentals. This is not like some new foreign language or some new technology. These are basic rules and principles of how you get stuff done.
Speaker 1These are basic rules and principles of how you get stuff done. Yeah, and that's universality. That's why the book keeps being on bestseller's list.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's so great, angela, I don't have to change anything. I say, no matter who I talk to, I'm the laziest guy you ever met. It's like oh God, I found something. I don't have to figure out some new thing to say. You know, no matter what it is, I've discovered a lot of new ways to say it. Yeah, based upon who I'm talking to.
Speaker 1And culture, yeah and time and you already mentioned, but I just maybe wanted to talk a little bit more about that Marketing strategy. You mentioned that you didn't really have any and you kind of said yes to things that made sense. How did you first start finding your first clients? Was it like the word of mouth, something from your mentor like maybe context, Like how did that start in your career when you were?
Speaker 2still doing consulting, coaching, referral. I'll word of mouth Once.
I did this program at Lockheed. I had a lot of people there, wow, that's really cool. And then the guy who had brought me in there suddenly moved. He transferred to McDonnell Douglas and so he brought me over to McDonnell Douglas. So suddenly I was training all kinds of people there and all kinds of people would go through my training and they'd be married to somebody who worked in another company and he'd be telling them about it and say, oh God, we need that in our company. So it was all really word of mouth and you could have fooled me. Again, I didn't have any. Yeah, later on we decided, okay, at some point we needed to kind of create some sort of an image and a brand. Gtd was just our shorthand for getting things done, but that became a brand. Itself could have fooled us. We said, what gtd is now a brand out there and so. So now it's trademarked because people started to learn it that way, because it went viral in the tech world, and when it goes viral in the tech world you go global pretty fast.
Speaker 1What do you want to say? There, A couple of things popped up simultaneously. Gtd as a brand. When did you think of creating a brand out of that? It sounds like much later, but how much later Was it quite recent, way later.
Speaker 2Oh gosh, well, the book was, so it's got to be the mid-2000s, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1You know so this is.
Speaker 2I've been doing this, angela, for 40 years, so I have to have to kind of recalibrate. Let's see, okay, when did we start to do that or when was it necessary? It was mostly because the world was needing it. You know, the world kept coming at us and saying okay, you know, how do we brand this, how do we protect this? How do we, you know, how do we make sure that the quality out there? Because there were just tons of pirates that would just grab, they'd read my book and say, oh, I can do that, and then they'd go. They would go pretend they were getting things done consultants, you know, all around the world. So we didn't want to be police, but we did need to make sure we had some sort of a, some sort of something that we could protect and something that we could then make sure that the brand didn't get sullied because of people doing suboptimal work.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah In the name of whatever getting things done.
Speaker 1So Would you, if you were to start now? Would you still do it that way, or would you put more work upfront? On the brand side of things, what do you think? I?
Speaker 2don't know. You don't know, thank goodness, I don't know. You don't know, thank goodness, I don't need to think about that, I don't need to figure that out. It's working fine as it is. I mean, we still have to tweak it, hone it, pay attention to it and support our partners out there, because all of our partners are licensees. They have their own businesses and they need to protect their work. And we are licensees. They have their own businesses and they need to protect their work. And you know we can't do anything or let anybody do anything that's competitive to them, because we need to support them.
Speaker 2Yeah, so you know, we just need to pay attention to that and pay attention to the feedback that we get out there. You know, we hear from all kinds of people gee, david, these people are out there pretending they're GTD and pretending their stuff is work. What do we do? So I have my, as we call her, our legal beagle, where she knows how to write to these people and say excuse me, you are using stuff that's trademarked. You can't trademark an idea, but you can trademark the expression of that idea yeah, can you elaborate a little bit more on that?
Speaker 1um, how do you protect the brand for all the creators out there? Like, what do you actually protect? Like you, you mentioned expression of that idea. So what is this like? The name, name, the practices, the method.
Speaker 2Anything that's copyrighted. The book is copyrighted, so you know you can't quote the book past. I don't know, I don't know how many words, 100 words or something like that. You know whatever that is, and they can't use GTD. Gtd is trademarked internationally. We pay a lot of money, you know, to make sure that that's managed. You know internationally in that way Also getting things done, Also mind like water, Also your heads for having ideas, not for holding them.
Speaker 1So some of these basic phrases that became kind of somewhat of our brand, you know we trademarked, so you can't be using those without either our permission or you know yeah, you're, you're, you're in violation yeah, and I think, for creators like yourself, what's important is that, uh, people know how it was created and who it was created by, and and, yes, if they like, want to work with someone who maybe learned it from you, at least you know preserve that sort of like uh, order of things who originated the idea, how it came to be and what it is, and who is the author? Right, instead of saying that I don't know, it's, it's your thing or, um, yes, somehow taking ownership of what, what was created by you?
Speaker 2the fact that I wrote the book makes it open source in terms of the ideas yeah. Right. So yeah, I don't know if you've been using any of the ideas from the book, but that's all fine.
Speaker 1That's why I wrote the book so that people could use, could could use that information you know appropriately, and so yeah, but but but yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say, as long as people are like when I use any of your quotes, or when I use parts or a whole system, like okay, this is who created this, this is where I learned, this is why I practice it this way.
Speaker 2That keeps the karma clear.
Speaker 1Yeah, also, on the side, you know, of branding, like I often hear that is addressed to me like you need to create a brand to get successful, and I always feel like that is kind of backward way. First you do the work, you have something solid which I don't have I have exactly because I haven't worked with enough people. And then once you're like sure this is the thing, it's speaking up, you know, and people using certain aspects of your work as almost like I don't know rules or principles, that's when it's time to make it solid and protect it and create copyrights. What do you think?
Speaker 2Yeah, I just I'm not a marketer, that's not my area. So I'm sorry you're asking me about stuff I know very little about, frankly. And you know, angela, you have your own personal brand already. I looked at your website. I mean, you're already. You know you're a brand in and of itself, like I am too, and you know it's kind of unfortunate. The good news about having licensees that we've now trained and certified to do coaching and training. You know, in these different arenas and regions, a lot of them have sort of become the David Allen of Germany or the David Allen of Switzerland or the David Allen. They've become their own gurus within their own regions, within their own languages, and that's great. You know, it's like wow. As soon as somebody doesn't need me to show up to expand this work and to use their own brand personally, I go fabulous, you know.
Speaker 1So yeah, it's amazing I think it's everyone's thought leader kind of person dream that you accumulate all this knowledge and experience and you put it into the world in the form of some idea that brings other people's value, and then it picks up and grows and changes the world in so many ways world in so many ways, like because of your work you know so many people live more balanced, integrated relaxed work life like space yeah, and and so yeah that's.
Speaker 1that's amazing. And again, uh, the reason why I wanted to interview is that, uh, we see, uh some creators like yourself who had an idea, who developed it into business, and now we see the global effects of it, and it's sometimes very hard to trace the beginnings. How did it all start and perhaps how can I start to be developing something similar?
Speaker 2I don't know, keep a job. I was born with a silver spoon so I always had to work. So I was like, okay, what do I do next? What can I do next? I've always priced myself how much do they need to pay me for me to give them my full attention for a day, but for two days or for a week or for whatever the work that was going to do, and I've never really changed that. How much do you need to give me that? I give you my full attention, right? So that's, that's increased dramatically since 1982.
Speaker 1But how did you? Yeah, well, an interesting question. How did you first come up with the number, like for your consulting services, etc.
Speaker 2I just you know what do I need. To not worry about rent.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Or food, that's all. I was like what do I what? What do I need so that my attention is not on? Wow, I need more money than they're going to give me, or I need whatever. And I said what do I need? How much money do I need to have the freedom to give them my full attention? That's all, and you know who knows how you figured that out, other than what is my rent? What?
Speaker 1money do I need this month, who knows? That was the beginning, but then how did you change your prices? What was based on, I guess, what I'm trying to ask, when, obviously, the price tag for your services increased, like, how did you make this increase and what did you base your decision-making as it progressed?
Speaker 2You know, it's just the market.
Speaker 1What were they willing to?
Speaker 2pay and how much time was I willing to give them. And, you know, it just sort of incrementally grew. It was like, okay, right now what I charge for a keynote is probably less than what maybe a lot of other people charge to do keynotes, you know, who have some sort of reputation. But it's like that's enough for me to be able to, you know, go give them my time and spend the travel time to get there and the travel time to get back and so forth. Here's just what I need. So I'm not concerned about it. I'm not concerned about how I'm using my time. A lot of it just sounds like what's my time worth? Yeah, Kind of a simple question, but that's not necessarily an easy thing to answer.
Speaker 1You know what I'm hearing. With a lot of your work you just play by ear. You know feeling like what's right based on the situation I'm in in the environment.
Speaker 2Well, I have two prices now retail and free. So I do a lot of pro bono work. I do a lot of pro bono work. I do a lot of stuff. You know, I've given keynotes for, I think, seven universities around the Netherlands, just because it's kind of my adopted country, and so I'm happy to support, you know, people doing good work. Yeah, so you know, but I let them know. This is what this is worth, but you're going to get it for free.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So I don't discount.
Speaker 1Yes, yes, yeah, it for free, yeah, so I don't discount, yes, yes, yeah, I also, you know, feel like that is such a good strategy. That's um I think I heard it several times like I have two prices here either very high price or free. Um, because you know either of the institution or the cause, etc. So, and it feels so right, like to not discount yourself but instead like, okay, I want to give to this cause or organization and these are the people who can afford this.
Speaker 1Yeah, um, thank you for sharing this. I know you know it's some always like a little bit of a sensitive subject in terms of pricing what you do, how you do it it's a little bit of, a little bit of the robin hood syndrome, you know, let me take.
Speaker 2let me take from the people who can afford it and give it away to the people who can't I think it's right.
Speaker 1It's kind of like universal law when you create abundance, you kind of want to share it with people who don't have it yet or don't have necessarily the same opportunity. I think most of the people actually have it. The two last questions that I have. One is about confidence. I also often hear and experience it from time to time myself that like, am I good enough? Maybe not even is what I have to share good enough? Like, did you ever struggle with that? And if you did, like how did you work with that? Like self-doubt, if you ever had it, you know, because sometimes not really.
Speaker 2I mean, what's? What's the? The imposter syndrome that a lot of people experience? It's like, oh, how did I get where I am and they're paying me to do this, but is it really that good? Yeah, so to me, it's just always been based upon feedback. You know, if the people still consider this valuable hey, this was the coolest thing, this is whatever Then I go, uh, great, so I just pay attention to what works, to feedback and what's working out there.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, it's what I'm hearing it's. You know, it's like value when people decide it's valuable, then it's good enough. You know it's not you saying that it's what you get from people in the world. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what you get from people in the world. Yeah, yeah, I think that's you know the really good, healthy way to to think about that instead of focusing on you. What do you think about that? Like, let other people see the value in, in the work.
Speaker 1And the second question that I had love is people who try to do work like you in today's world. Would you recommend doing something different than how you did it back then? Way of saying this is uh, do you? Well, maybe not. As I said, it's another sub question like do people, you who try to do similar work, do you see that they might be doing something wrong? Like, from your experience again, it's not um, not necessarily um data, but like your feeling about that um, do people do it in the in the wrong way in our generation? And would you do something different if you were to start right now from comparing to judy?
it'd be hard to say. You know, I just was always putting one foot in front of the other and just, you know, fall on my nose and look. You know, whatever I did got me where I am, which is fine, and so you can't denigrate the rungs of the ladder that got you where you are. So I'm very happy with that. I don't know what advice I would give anybody about that, other than pay attention to the feedback, keep going, mostly, just don't stop. You just need to keep going and stay engaged with what you feel like doing. Trust your intuition. The intuitive quality is there's a still small voice inside of you that could tell you that's a good thing to do or that's not, or go ahead and try that out and then learn from the experience, cause, oh, you know, we're here on the planet just to experience things and learn from it and see what you learn. So you're not going to stop learning. I don't think till you stop, yeah, and okay, till you stop.
Speaker 1Yeah, and one small question, talking about intuition how did you develop yours? I hear and you mentioned that at the beginning Of your story how did it all start? Like you had, and probably still have, some mindfulness, some self-awareness practices which allow you to hear your intuition. So what did you do throughout this journey of creating, of putting your idea out in the world, and what do you still practice daily or somewhat consistently?
Speaker 2Well, obviously relaxing is a key element.
Speaker 2How do you do that? Good glass of wine, meditation, walk with the dogs, get out in nature, you know, ride the bikes, you know. There's all kinds of things to do, that kind of get you out of yourself that allow you to relax and then just pay attention to what then shows up while you do that. One of my favorite things to do is at night, after the dogs are asleep and my wife is asleep and I've got a good glass of wine and my living room turn the lights down or off, no digital tools at all, and then I basically practice doing nothing, thinking about nothing. And then when you think about nothing, you'd be surprised how many things start to show up when you give it space, you know to do that.
Speaker 2And then you know a lot of those are gee too much wine, david, or that was a dumb idea. Or you know, come on, but you know I always keep a. Are gee too much wine, david, or that was a dumb idea. Or you know, come on, but you know I always keep a pad and pen by me, no matter what, so I'm always capturing wow, that could be a cool thing to do. And then the next morning I go gee dumb idea, or that's a cool thing to do, but it may go on my someday maybe list. It may be something I actually take an action about, you know. So I never know it could be any and all of that. I'm just open to you know wherever and I have a working hypothesis that there are all kinds of you know angels and people on other realms that are friends of mine, that are quite supportive of what I'm doing, that love me dearly, and so if I relax and say, okay, guys, any advice, and then be open to listen.
Speaker 1Yeah, be open to listen, creating space so things can pour into or fill the space.
Speaker 2Yeah's, that's what I hear well, you know, meditation, everybody thinks well that just turned the world off, it's like. No, the world is always on, it's always on. All meditation does are contemplative or reflective kinds of exercises. Or you should, you're, you're, you're slowing down or silencing a lot of the noisy part of the world so that you can then are available to hear the more subtle aspects. But they're always there.
Speaker 1Yeah, I feel like a lot of anxiety problems not being able to figure things out in life come from this constant noise that our world is being filled more and more with from social media or messages or email etc. And the more noise we get. Yeah, it's like you know, being in a very noisy room, it's very hard to hear one single voice that might be like your soul or spirit, whatever, but if you tune down that noise then you can hear it a lot clearer. Thank you, david, for sharing all this, your story, so openly and all the details about how GTD and the rest of your life came to be and got to improve our world in so many ways.
Speaker 1I really appreciate it and I hope that our listeners will take a lot of practical advice and also pick up your books, from the first one to the last one, whatever speaks to them most. We'll take a lot of practical advice and also pick up your books, the first one to the last one, whatever speaks to them most clearly. And, yeah, ultimately, you know, after listening to this podcast, I hope they'll take some pen and paper and create some list of things to get done. Why not, why not, why not, why not? Any parting thoughts. If not, that's okay, but if anything, you'd love our listeners to live with yeah, Stop using your head as your office.
Speaker 2Your head's a crappy office. It did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize or manage relationships between more than four things. And that's now cognitive science data.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So you know, objectify it, write it down, get it out of your head. Take a look.
Speaker 1Yeah, Such an easy practice to start and such a powerful practice to start Indeed. Yeah, so thank you so much. Thank you so much, and one last piece, one last question when do you want our listeners to go to discover more of your work? Is it your website? Is it just?
Speaker 2you know Well yeah, gettingthingsdonecom is our website and you can tap to a lot of stuff there. If you do gettingthingsdonecom slash YouTube, you'll see a lot of my short little videos and things that I've done. Dot com slash YouTube, you'll see a lot of my short little videos and things that I've done. If you like little snippets and a snack on this information how I packaged it that's an easy place to go.
Speaker 1Yes, and also Instagram. Right, you post those snippets on Instagram?
Speaker 2Yeah, and Twitter.
Speaker 1For folks. I'm going to link those channels as well in the show notes so they can find you on the media where they mostly spend their time. Thank you so much, david, again Looking forward to more of your work and to see how you keep transforming the world. Thank you so much for your time Appreciate it.
Speaker 2Thanks, angela. Yeah, thanks for the invitation. This was fun, Good work.