The Secret to Quantum Leap Goals in Life and Business | Coach Burt & Dr. Price Pritchett

The research proves big goals work better than small goals. That may sound counterintuitive, but that's what the research says. Goals that are harder create more commitment, more discipline, better execution. They bring out more of what's good in you. Susie Cassum, the poet, said, 'Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.'

Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for being one of our great marketers. That's, uh, keep up the good work there. It's easy to market something you believe in.

Okay. Well, first of all, I got a little deeper into the backstory. I got a bachelor's degree in English and why I was good at it. I mean, I could ace those courses. And so, I was not the most astute, academically inclined person at the time in terms of knowing where I was going. I was just like, 'Okay, I'm good at this.' So, I got the bachelor's degree in English and I thought, 'Well, I don't think people are going to be knocking down my door to hire me. Maybe you need a master's degree.' So, I got a master's degree in English. And I'm like, 'This is kind of nonsense. I'm going to go get a professional degree.' But I had always wanted to write. And I thought the more you know about the human being, that surely would help you in your writing, whether you're crafting fiction or non-fiction, whatever. So, I just wanted to get a professional degree, okay? And so that I felt like I could carve out a professional career. So I got the PhD in psychology and did a year's internship in a clinical setting actually working on a psychiatric board which is one of those great learning experiences. But I knew from the very beginning of the doctorate in psychology that I was going to work with business and industry, that's what I'm better suited for. And so got the degree, but I had to go into the military because I'd gone through an ROTC program. You had to do it for the first two years of my college. And so the second two years kind of made sense because you were getting course credit for it. And at that time you were going into the military and the Vietnam War was on and I was thinking I'm going to go as an officer if I'm going to go. So I got the PhD and then went directly to an assignment in the Pentagon and I worked as a captain in military intelligence in the army and it was a terrific learning experience in a lot of different ways. So I had at this point in time I'd seen the hospital world, the clinical world, and then I got to see the military world, which was interesting because of your bureaucrats and your military, you know, you got those two camps there and it's so you learn a lot about organizational dynamics within the hospital setting, within the military. But then I went to work with a psychological consulting firm in Chicago called Management Psychologists Incorporated. It was a terrific learning experience. We had superb clients, clients like Parker Pen, the city of Chicago, Motorola, Masonite, Upjohn, Clark Equipment, Playboy. It was great. And the main thing we did there, I guess the biggest chunk of our revenue stream was psychological assessments of top execs. And I've done hundreds of executive assessments. And so you get really attuned to how people run their careers, where they're making mistakes, how you size up someone's strengths, weaknesses, and so forth. And we use that learning, we will be using that learning and those skills in this coaching program that we're putting together. It's a real differentiator. And so I was with that firm for some time. We, like I said, great learning, great clients. And then I wanted to put down the deep roots of my career in Texas. That's where I'd grown up. And I'd done internship in Houston and I thought Dallas is a better climate. I like Dallas better. And so, started my business here in 1974. And we've just had the pleasure of working with amazing clients. I mean, top tier blue chip clients. We got to work internationally all over the globe almost. And so we have some real breadth that we get to bring to this program. Now I don't know, that's kind of a quick sketchy run through the years past.

Yeah. Good question. I started out basically doing what I'd learned to do in Chicago with that firm. We did a lot of executive assessments. We did organizational studies, employee attitude and opinion surveys, you know, different things, developed some training programs for major clients. And it was really at the end of the 70s I was getting bored and I thought we've got more potential than this. But there were five things I thought: okay, I want to break some new ground. I want to carve out a niche that is our niche and we are the best in that slice of the world at what we do. I wanted to be working with the very top execs in major companies. I wanted to have a high billing rate. There was a commercial instinct at work here. And I wanted to play in a zone that I thought there's going to be a ton of work there over the years to come. And so all of those factors kind of woven together, I decided we're going to go into merger integration strategy work. which was a field that did not exist at the end of the 70s which is peculiar but it didn't. And there were no books that had been written on the integration process of companies. I mean, I dug around at University of Texas library, the city of Dallas library, the Southern Methodist University library and no books. I scraped up about, I think, 13 journal articles that made some passing reference to integration. And so this was beautiful. I mean, we got virgin territory here. The bad news was you've got to carve out your path. But it was very much an entrepreneurial journey. Why did I take us there? Well, we were getting stale. I could see limits to what our growth rate could be and I wanted to go where the money was. The big money is in mergers and acquisitions. And it's exciting. You can have a huge impact and it's challenging work. So there were a lot of reasons that came into play there. And my goal was to be number one in our niche and that was 1979. By 1985 we were, I had written the first book on merger integration strategy. We have a methodology defined. We had been working with clients for several years. And so it was that was a true quantum leap for us.

Well, I'm sure it comes from all of those directions. It can and does. I think pain or frustration is probably the best driver or the most common driver. We kind of have a philosophy or a mindset here at Pritchett that if you're approaching a client, a client comes to us, says they want to talk, can we talk, we want to see about working together. My first instinct is go toward pain. Go toward pain. That's when you get movement. That's when people go see the dentist, not when they need to get their teeth taken care of. Or someone has a heart attack, I think I'll go see the doctor. Maybe I'm not eating right or getting any kind of exercise. My lifestyle is a wreck, whatever. So I think when people sometimes it's because they flatline, sometimes it's because they come up against a major barrier, they're kind of stumped. And I think they know intuitively they've got so much in reserve, so much latent potential, it's just dormant. And it's like surely I can do better than this. And a breakthrough is a different animal. It's different. I think everybody kind of has goals. Sometimes they don't do anything better than a lame New Year's resolution, but everybody wants something. Everybody, we're born with that instinct. And it's good. That's what makes the human race survive and progress and everything. But I think every individual has some of that. Some of us, we just have more of it to begin with. We got more of a need for achievement, but we're just kind of born that way and raised that way. Right. And some people have a much higher level of comfort with where they are and they want a peaceful, low challenge existence. That's perfectly fine. We are made in so many different ways. But I will say everybody has the potential for a quantum leap.

Well, a quantum leap is a different thing like I referenced a minute ago. It's different than ordinary goals, normal kinds of goals. It is. And there's, I sat down a couple of days ago I thought, okay, we're going to be talking now. What's the difference between reasonable goals and quantum leap goals? Well, the first one is just that most people's goals are fairly reasonable. And a quantum leap is pretty unreasonable. Usually a reasonable goal or a regular goal, it's in that general category of where people typically live and set their aspirations. Okay. So one's reasonable, leap's unreasonable. It's you're reaching beyond what seems obvious or the next incremental practical step on the career ladder so to speak. The next thing is you usually kind of know pretty well how to reach a regular goal. With a quantum leap goal, you don't know how to reach it. You don't know how. Secondly, with a regular goal, you can see the resources. You set that goal because you look at your available resources and you think, I've got this. I can do that. I can see that the world would let me do that, so that's what I'm going to go for. With a quantum leap goal, you don't have the available resources. You walk in with blatant obvious constraints. Okay. Next, with a regular goal, you've engineered your ambition so that you expect low number of mistakes or no mistakes. With a quantum leap goal, mistakes are a key part of the process. That's a real twist. Next. I mean, you use them, you exploit them. Next. With a regular goal, trying harder probably works. It usually works. It's a trap when you're shooting for a quantum leap. Trying different, I guess, to say it properly, trying differently is the secret. And usually you end up the game is easier. And then one finally I would say the big difference is with regular goals you can usually stay in your comfort zone. That's the big reason why you picked it in the first place. So you get to stay in your comfort zone. With a quantum leap, it takes you on a ride. You will get pulled by yourself out of your comfort zone and that's good because that's where growth happens.

It's critical. It's kind of like if you want to make a quantum leap, you need to be sharply pointed rather than well-rounded. You know, you show me someone who is number one, number two, number three in their field. They probably didn't get there or remain there by being well-rounded.

Wantly gold. Well, I used to call it selfish. And I had an Australian guy that was going through one of our courses and he said, 'I don't like that word. That just sounds bad. Selfish, you know.' And I said, 'Okay, well, let me put it this way. Quantum leap goals have a big appetite. They want all of you. And it's not like that you're going to have to spend the rest of your life this way, but if you're wanting to win the Super Bowl, I'm sorry, the kids want to go trick-or-treating or they want to do this. I'm sorry kids, I've got game day coming up, you know. Or there's a recital. You make sacrifices to achieve, just leverage up to an entirely different level of performance. But people do that and it changes your game and it requires pretty much all of your cylinders to be focused on that.

Well, here's how it happened. I told you we did a lot of executive assessments. And these are very in-depth professional evaluations. But anyway, so here's how it would play. I'd be doing several of these a week. And so let's say on Monday, here comes a candidate and he's going to spend five, six hours with us going through some testing, working up an in-depth interview with me and so forth. And so you'd see this guy and he's a successful guy. He's got a lot of assets going for him, a lot of personal strengths and so forth. Okay. Then Tuesday comes along. Here comes another candidate. Okay? And you look at this thing right off the bat and you see that this guy, it's not the same company he's applying for. He's over here somewhere else, but he's the same age. His academic credentials are certainly every bit as good as this guy's. He packages himself just as well as this guy. His personality is just as congenial and seems skilled with people, all of this, but this guy is making two or three times what the first guy was. And you're like, 'Okay, so what's going on?' This guy made some different choices. And when did that happen? Why did that happen? Because it's not because of potential. There's something else there. Okay. So I would see that for a while, but then I came to Dallas and I started my own company in '74 and I took us into merger work after a few years, which was a whole different altitude of the game. But I began to see the same peculiar dynamic. Here's because we had a variety of clients cut across all kinds of industries and everything. And so here's the story, the anecdote I'll give that kind of makes the point. So let's say you got a $500 million company. It's rocking along. It's doing nicely. It's growing about six, seven percent just organic growth per year. That's company A. Okay. And then I'm working with, let's say, company B over here. And company B happens to be in the same industry. And it's knocking down about half a billion a year in revenues also. And its growth rate is pretty much the same, just good, steady, organic growth. Shareholders are fairly happy, you know. But all of a sudden, one day, company A goes out and buys company C, which is another half billion dollar company. And just like that, company A has doubled in size. That's a quantum leap. They didn't get there by working harder. And that's a mistake that they did it by changing the game. They had to step out of their comfort zone. And frankly, I can tell you, trust me, they didn't totally know how they were going to do it because these things are living, changing deals, right? And you're not going to get it perfect. You kind of do some degree of stumbling through an integration process kind of like you do when you make a quantum leap. You try to get it perfect and you'll never get it at all with a quantum leap. So then, I'm sorry that kind of lost my train for a moment there. But so I'd seen this with individual executives. One's making two or three times the other one. You don't see any obvious reason why. Company A, company B, same size. All of a sudden, they're very different. One is just shot so far past the other one. And I'm thinking, all right, now that's fun to think about. And I sat down and I'd read, I did my doctoral dissertation on self-directed change and fast growth, breakthrough performance. And I had read 25 or more books on success, self-improvement, all of that kind of stuff, all the classics, the Napoleon Hills, you know, all of those. And I love those books. I still love those books. And at the time they were totally ignored by professional psychology. I was going through a PhD program. Those books were never mentioned. I thought this is absurd. But anyway, so because these books tell people how to improve themselves. They don't have to have a therapist, a PhD psychologist or counselor with them. So anyway, I sat down and I thought if I'm going to write a book that I think people will actually read and finish and maybe even reread and talk to their friend or coworker about. And so I sat down and I wrote You Squared. And when I finished it was like this tiny little book. But I have a serious bias toward tightness, the tightness of the message so people don't get lost in the message. You give them what they need to execute. And it kind of is manifested also in the coaching program that we'll be doing because our approach is very much minimum effective dose. What's the least effective dose that gets the job done? And so You Squared turned out to be what, 37 pages with a good bit of white space. There was a study done, I think it's 2022, that found the average adult completes only 46% of our country's adult population complete one book a year. And that's 46% that complete at least one book. I wanted a book that people would read. I meant I wanted them to think. The book gives them space to think, time to think, and then it comes down to execute.

The, it's really funny. People are stunned when I tell them this. I wrote the book in 1989. It sells more today than it has ever sold. That little handbook, 37 pages of content, has produced easily well over $3 million. And like you were saying, the typical book sells what, five, six thousand copies. And I think it's got this cult following all over the globe. India, it's a big book in India. Anyway, yeah. And you really, but it really happened. You didn't do a lot of marketing. You didn't do the funnels and paid ads. And that's what I tell people, what is so remarkable about this is that 14 million books out there in the market really because it impacted a person's life and they said I want to send it to somebody else. And that is really amazing to me.

It's an interesting process and it is a process. I think that people get excited. It really charges you up. The research proves big goals work better than medium goals or small goals. That may sound counterintuitive, but that's what the research says. Big goals work better than small goals. Goals that are harder create more commitment, more discipline, better execution. They bring out more of what's good in you. So, the process I think there's some initial really being cranked up, but there's always day two, right? There's always day two and then people get scared of themselves. What have I done? Susie Cassam, the poet, said, 'Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.' And I think one of the things that our coaching will be doing is helping people through those dark times. I think people have to, and another thing we help them do is reconceive failure, rethink what failure is. Like I said, if you're shooting for a regular goal, you've pretty much engineered big mistakes, failures, setbacks. You've tried to engineer those out. Yes, that's not the case when you're going for a quantum leap. You're going through a discovery process, a learning process, and forward motion is the fastest education you can have. And so the mistakes are there to guide you toward what's next? What's next? What's next? So I think there, I just wrote a blog just a few days ago about the four levels of a quantum leap. And it's like, I got to thinking about this, what do people go through? Where do they end up? And it's like level one. Level one is doubting. This is where people, they really love the idea of a big breakthrough, but they focus on what could go wrong, how hard this could be, and will I make a fool out of myself? They don't focus on all the constraints that they can see. That's where their focus goes. They focus on potential losses as opposed to potential gains. And they say, 'Well, I need to do some more planning. I need to get ready.' And you may have heard me say in some of our conversations, coach, that getting ready is the graveyard where big dreams go to die. And there are tombstones everywhere. There's not a lot of getting ready for a quantum leap. You very quickly start getting going. And that is a key secret, that's one of the insider secrets of how you do this. So there's level one, that's doubting. Level two is dabbling. And this is where people are putting their toe in the water, but they're not trying differently. There's no real hardcore commitment and so they're just kind of messing around with it. It may be that they don't really have that clear and well-defined of an aiming point. It may be that they're playing with six goals at the same time, you know, whatever. But the main thing is they don't really move off of their old game into a new game. So level one, level two, level three, things are much better here because this is driving. Level three is driving. This is where a person is actually trying differently. They're experimenting. And all is good and they're beginning to focus more on, their thinking is better. They're staying more in the optimistic zone. They're listening to their hero voice as opposed to their villain voice that's talking them down in the first two stages. And they're making progress, okay? They are still vulnerable to setbacks and failures, but are lowering their ambitions maybe, but these guys, got to give them credit. They're in the game. But level four is where you want to get to. Level four is determined. Level four is I am all in on this new game I'm playing. I have exed out of my life a lot of things that keep me stuck in the old game. I've created white space to do things differently. I am sharply focused and yeah, God, I'm going to get there. Okay, now here's the most interesting thing about level four. You have to really, you need to be really keep your spider senses alive because strange good things come out of nowhere. This is where coincidences happen. There's a lucky break. Here's someone you never dreamed of this thing happening, but life offers you something better than you had even originally planned. You began your field of vision is better. Your sense of hope is much fuller and you have a far better grasp of what you're capable of doing. Yes. But it's like, serendipities come along. And there was a novel written by Anne Patchett some years ago. It's a good novel, but there was this line in it that stopped me cold. I wrote it down and I've used it before. But the line is, 'Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you fail to see what you actually found.' Wow. And when you're in level four, it's a much more expansive life you're living. Yes. And the way you're behaving and the way you're thinking and the way you're managing yourself and your interactions with other people. They see you differently and things come to you that wouldn't have when you're in other spheres of life.

Well, thank you first of all. And what you did and what we will teach people in this course is you take action. You know the old Nike slogan, just do it. Do the work and the world will show you how. It's really fascinating. But we will teach people about the importance of going where you have to go. I mean physically you got to quit just dreaming and planning and thinking about it. It does take action and it takes relentless pursuit. But one of the books we'll give some time to in the program is this dumb little book I ran across at a train station in London. I was over there doing some work for General Electric, some merger work as I recall and I was waiting for the train and here's this little news stand thing there and I'm always looking at books. We're looking at books, see some new idea or something and there's this ugly little paperback book. It's called Bunkhouse Logic. And I don't even know why I picked it up, but I did. But I love this little book. It's been renamed now. It's still out there. I can't remember what the new name is on it, but anyway, the one key message in this book is you can't win if you're not at the table. You've got to go to the table. And so the table in this case was well, the table was here. It was us getting together and you showed that initiative. You showed that drive and that putting energy and action behind an idea, an ambition, a plan.

Okay, two or three things I guess, and this is ad lib. I had thought about this beforehand, but first of all, they need to trust their instincts more on the upside. The research shows that we weigh losses greater than gains. Even what we think are potential losses versus potential gains. And psychologists, major psychologists won the Nobel Prize in economics because of this research that found this. But it turns out that we weigh losses or potential losses twice as heavily as potential gain. So what this says is you're sitting here trying to make a decision. Oh, gee, I might waste my money. Oh, I might bomb out. I might, my friends, relatives may make fun of me for doing this and calling me stupid. And again, it gets back to listening to your hero voice and weighing the potential upside more dutifully. People see, it's kind of funny, another psychological research shows that when we talk about risk, and that's what you're talking about here coach, should I risk spending this money on this course or whatever, decisions about risk-taking are mainly not made by this rational analytical part of your brain; they are made by the emotional part of your brain. And that takes us right straight to this weighing losses much more heavily than the potential upside. So I think if a person will step back and say, okay, I'm going to be fair about this, what do I stand to gain? What could this bring about in a positive direction as opposed to overweighing a really seriously lopsided weighing of the pros and cons.