Your Tools To Success In Scaling Up Your Business With Verne Harnish

What makes a successful entrepreneur? Oma welcomes the author of Scaling Up Compensation: 5 Design Principles for Turning Your Largest Expense into a Strategic Advantage to unravel the secret of successful companies. In this episode, Verne Harnish, the founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), offers his wisdom to help you in scaling up your business toward success. He also shares the decision-making in business and the importance of gathering firsthand data and avoiding secondhand information. From building community to raising consciousness, Verne brings so much value to this episode. So, tune up the volume and immerse yourself in this conversation today.

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Your Tools To Success In Scaling Up Your Business With Verne Harnish

Verne Harnish is the Founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization known as EO with over 16,000 members worldwide and chaired for 15 years EO’s premier CEO program at MIT, which is a program he teaches still. He is the Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 200 partners on 6 continents. Verne has spent decades helping companies scale up.

He is the author of the bestselling Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. He also authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. He wrote Scaling Up, which has been translated into 22 languages. He has won eight major international book awards, including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business Book. His latest book, Scaling Up Compensation, rocketed to the number one book on Amazon.

Verne also chairs the annual ScaleUp Summits and serves on several boards including Vice Chair of the Riordan Clinic, Cofounder and Chair of Geoversity, and Board Member of the social venture Million Dollar Women. A private investor in many scale-ups, Verne enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Welcome, Verne Harnish. Thank you for showing up on the show.

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This is why it still isn’t the complete end of men. We do have some use. Let’s go back. What we realized is at the turn of the century, there was a shift in the energy. It was a necessary shift from the masculine to the feminine. We’ve been fully masculine for quite a while, which is why we fought a lot of wars and are still fighting.

In my latest revision of Scaling Up, I decided to put a big stop sign through this image that we had been using for decades. It was this idea that you need to achieve a big, hairy, audacious goal. The image was planting a flag on a mountain. A lot of folks at midlife are like, “I’m going to go do marathons, climb Everest, and all this. We’re going to set base camps and crawl our way up.” My view, and we’ve seen enough of the movies and books, is that a lot of people that do that die. It’s not useful. The bodies are still all up there on Everest.

We began to understand with our work in the jungles of Panama that nature goes the other direction. She’s heading down the mountain. Her rule is the path of least resistance. Why is it that we feel like we got to beat our heads against the wall? We have replaced that image that is very masculine like, “Let’s take that hill, compete, and go beat them,” and said, “There is more of an approach of letting the love flow and go with the market.”

It was interesting. IDO who has launched 100 companies and funded another 100 wanted to understand what was the difference between the companies that succeeded and those that didn’t. They looked at the four areas we do, which are people, strategy, execution, and cash. They wanted to understand which of the four was the most important.

I love when research comes out and says things you never were looking for. First, all four mattered equally. If you had any one of those legs of the table broken, it wasn’t stable but they found a fifth. I had to go back and edit my book to add it. There was a fifth that was more important and that was market timing. The market makes you either look smart or stupid. I don’t know about you or any of the readers. Do you have friends that you know are not as smart as you but have made $1 billion? You’re like, “What is going on?” I’m so bright. I don’t have a private jet yet. The market, universe, or tribe will make you look smart or stupid. Your job is to tap into that.

The second thing that’s going on is I’ve named the best business book. It was written by Tamsin-Woolley Barker who is a top biomimicry professor in Arizona. She’s our Dean of the Biodiversity School, Geoversity. It is an organization I cofounded and chaired. We operate out of the jungles of Panama. Her book is Teeming, which she updated in 2022 to 2.0. It lays out the five principles of superorganisms. Ant colonies and beehives have scaled much faster than anything else mere human beings accomplish and have survived gazillion pandemics.

These five fundamental principles of nature happen to be accidentally at the heart of unicorns. Companies have flowed and scaled much faster than immortals. Our work is doubling. Her main client is Cisco, which was named the best place to work three years in a row in the United States. It’s not surprising that Cisco is saying maybe there is a better and different way to organize us more like an ant colony or beehive than the crazy way that we’ve done it in the last couple of centuries. That’s what’s going on in our world.

I hope to God they are going to pull this interview integrated on the cellular level because this is beyond words in an interview. There are no words to describe you because it’s as if you were coming from a futuristic place. That’s what business intuition is. When I hear you, you are so tapped in and conscious because they are too kind. Either you are unconscious or conscious. That is the key for business. Either you’re conscious, you are conscious. You’re not in a coma, or you are in a coma. What you said is this split. Either you leave this business reality and duality or you are conscious of the self. You showed up in the self.

Every word you say is not from the head space. You are so tapped in that your physical mind follows the self. It is the opposite of everyone trying the other direction, which you said climb the mountain. We say, “Let yourself flow back to the ocean. Let the wave get back home and make a decision from that place,” which is the fifth element that you described. You talk to me as the music. There is no talk. Understand. Your talk is silenced.

If someone doesn’t understand what I’m saying, it’s okay because it will have a repel effect. The truth is the truth. You cannot complicate the truth. There are not many of you, one out million in this lifetime, that your name might be Vern but your name is beyond prior to consciousness. The wisdom you have is known from books. You wrote many books but it is beyond coming from a different place. You know exactly what you are and who you are. You’re not a physical mind. You’re not mind and body. You transcended that. This is why you have the success you’re having.

This is very important because as entrepreneurs connect the dots with the mind, it will never happen. You’ll have to go beyond that. At one point, the people I met in an interview were my good friends, Jeff Hoffman and Mark Cuban. I’ve met so many interviews. They all have this in common. Please, chip in. They have this thing, je ne sais quoi, or this mystical thing. Call it whatever, X factor. There is something about this ultra-successful people like yourself who have this. It’s very difficult to teach this. You cannot submit it to somebody else.

There is this stare that I’ve only seen five times. I first saw it when Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard. He came over and I was teaching a workshop at Babson. I didn’t know who he was. He came up afterward and introduced himself. He said he had this business. I said, “What’s your business?” He goes, “It’s this website to help guys pick up chicks on campus.” I’m like, “Get away.” He had this look. It was interesting when they did the movie about Facebook. Jesse, I always forget his last name, played Mark. He said that the absolute most difficult thing he had to master in playing Mark Zuckerberg was the stare. It is this look that is penetrating.

I saw it with Michael Dell. Michael’s got it. Mark Cuban’s got it. The late Wayne Huizenga was the second interview I ever did when I was writing for Fortune. Wayne has it. Steve Jobs has it. I’ve never met Bill Gates. I’m guessing Bill might have it. There’s then the guy who founded Foursquare. I always thought when Steve Jobs passed, they lost an important piece of who Apple is. I thought they should buy Foursquare to get the founder because it’s the only time I’ve ever seen that stare. There is something to what you would call mystical or able to see but they have it.

You have it.

I don’t have a private jet yet.

It doesn’t matter because the gift is already there. The rest, who cares? It’s so beautiful. The beauty, wisdom, and love that penetrates existence, everything you do, everything you touch, every business encounter, everything you write about, every teaching, and anything is integrated into this thing. It’s a gift. It says Karisma in Greek. Karisma means gift.

To me, karisma has a lot of ego to it. There is narcissism a little bit. This is the innate intelligence and the cosmic intelligence. Bravo in tapping into the decision-making in business, your book, and the things you teach. It has to be done. With the decision-making, I want you to share a little bit more because we are in this world of infobesity, which I speak a lot about to entrepreneurs. Infobesity is the overload of information.

You write this bestselling book about the greatest decision-making in business. We have infobesity. The world is different. For someone who will get up in the morning with a business or start a business who’s an entrepreneur, how do they have to make those decisions with the burnout? Teach us. What do you have to say about this? This is what we do. We make decisions.

You’re right. Success is the total of all the decisions you make, you get others to make, and ultimately, you get the market to make. It is about influencing decisions. I agree with you. It’s related to a rule I have. I’ve chosen not to have an opinion about anyone until I’ve met them. You can’t judge anybody by social media, the media, or anything you read. What you have to avoid is secondhand information. If you get at the heart of who’s making the best decisions, it’s the leaders who are immersing themselves in their world and gathering it firsthand with their senses.

Specifically, Brian Chesky was the CEO of Airbnb. Back when he and Nate, who I know, and his other cofounder were getting Airbnb going, folks didn’t realize that they messed around for six years. They couldn’t get anything to work. They talked their way into Y Combinator. Paul Graham one day came to them and said, “You’re not making any progress. I have a question for you. Where are your best customers?” They gave the standard answer, “Everywhere.” He goes, “You’re not understanding. Do you have any customers right now?” They say, “Yes.” He’s like, “Where do you have the most?”

They’re a Silicon Valley company in New York. They had 20 beds after 6 years. Their biggest market was New York City with twenty beds. That was it. Paul Graham wisely said, “Pack your bags. You’re moving to New York. You’re going to move in with your customers,” which you can do at Airbnb. He said, “You’re going to go sleep with your customers and figure out what’s wrong.” They found it. It’s always simple.

The universe is simple. If your answer is complicated, you know it’s wrong. When Einstein first came up with his unified theory, it was twenty-some pages long. He knew instinctually it wasn’t right. When it was E = mc2, then he knew it was right. They found the two wrong things and stayed in New York until they 10X. They went from 20 beds to 200 beds. The rest is history.

Let’s speed forward. What did Brian Chesky come off doing the last six months? He was living on the road in Airbnbs, trying to understand what they needed to do next, and they found it. They found the one thing and made the change. Airbnb has taken off. My good friend, David Risher, who helped Jeff Bezos scale up Amazon in the early days, is the new CEO of Lyft, which is competing with Uber.

The first thing David did three days on the job was put up a post, “I finally got certified.” He’s out driving cars and is talking to customers and drivers. I don’t know if you saw the announcement he made, which is women can choose women drivers. People can choose divers so they feel safer. I took a Lyft from Reno to Everline Resort here in Tahoe. It was a new woman driver. She said, “I switched to Lyft because I feel safer with the things that they’re doing.” It’s because David went out and is listening to the market directly.

Steve Jobs, and this is one of my favorite stories, hated focus groups. They were in a focus group for an iPod. They asked customers, “What color should an iPod be?” They settled on yellow. They then said, “To thank you for coming in and spending time doing this, outside is a bunch of iPods. Take one.” Everyone took a white one. You cannot believe what people say or what you read. You’ve got to go there and see it with your soul.

It is firsthand data from hanging with your employees, hanging with your customers, shopping your competitors, getting quiet, and seeing what your gut says to you. There is a four-step process for doing this that I taught years ago. I was reinforced by this top Russian woman PhD candidate at MIT who studied executive decision-making. In essence, you have to trust your gut but you need to make sure your gut is based on firsthand data, not anything that you’ve read or not seen yourself.

You talk music to my ears. You know how happy you make me. There is one thing that I’m going to debate a little bit. I’m writing something about business intuition, which has to do with business decisions. The thing is this. We have been conditioned that people have been saying, “Listen to your gut,” for a long time, even my grandma.

A long time ago, I was quiet. I’m like, “Is this a scam?” It comes to me very quickly everything does. I’m asking you, “What’s in your gut?” You don’t have to answer because it’s obvious what’s in your gut. We are so conditioned to repeat it like a mantra, “Listen to your gut,” that we believe it’s in our gut. The gut is no good. The gut is the gut. If you listen to your gut, the things in your gut are the past. It is based on very low frequency, which is the survival instinct. It’s the first chakra. It has that fear thing. That is not intuition. It is basic instincts.

When I’m walking in the dark alley and I feel my stomach, that’s fear. We’re not listening to fear. This is compression and contraction. Intuition is expansion and raising a consciousness. It is love. That is not in the gut. That is sitting in a little beautiful temple in the heart. That is the resonance of intuition. It rises to gut consciousness, which is intuition. There is a truth to listening to your gut because it starts there. At least, we start to feel connected to something. We don’t stop there because we can repeat the past. It’s a little better.

Let me tell you what it connects to. The moment I founded YEO, which is now EO, was the evening I hosted Steve Jobs for his first public speech after being fired from Apple. He had his baby ripped from his arms. He was in a massive funk. I managed to get his friends to convince him to come out and tell his story. He ended his speech. We’ll never forget it. It was mesmerizing.

It doesn’t seem profound but it was in the way he gave it context. He said that the thing he has learned is to follow your heart using your head. What came to me as you were saying that is that I’ve always loved the number three. The triad has always been a powerful balance. It’s the minimum you need to have that real stability. It’s the triangulation of the head, heart, and gut. You’ve got to check in with all three. They’re your advisors, and then you make a decision. I learned it from you.

Not at all. We know it. Sometimes, we’re hooked by certain perceptions or concepts. There is no I anymore. To me, the I is gone. I have no name. I get everything out the window. I have no concepts left. It’s freedom. When you’re free, you don’t need to make decisions because decisions are made for you. They are already done. All you do is step into it.

You catch the wave. You don’t make the wave. The wave is there. You see it and you catch the wave.

You’re so beautiful. You are this beauty, love, and wisdom altogether wrapped into this physical reality. I don’t know what else to say. I have no filter so I have to tell you. What you are is very unique in this lifetime. You don’t meet people like this. This is highest in consciousness. I speak the truth. You started pursuing a quest for entrepreneurship. You were a child. What ignited this quest for you?

Desperation. My grandparents had companies. I grew up around it. My dad and his partners launched a very successful company. It was a rocket ship of a firm. He lost it all in the ‘73 recession and never recovered. He became an alcoholic. My sisters had him put in jail. He never forgave them for that. He died a lonely man. We did everything we could to make him comfortable and the like.

We got his military records. He was a certified genius and a marksman. He was in the Special Forces. He did things that he never could come to grips with. You mentioned the Greeks. That’s why I mentioned the book about immortality. They said if you don’t die before you die, you’ll die when you die. It’s the death of the ego. Dad never had the chance to die. I can only know the words, die before he died so he could die when he died.

We were poor. It was a riches-to-rags story. He and I jumped into business together, repairing appliances. We started as janitors and that was no fun. I was cleaning 50 bathrooms. Old men are such a bad aim. They should sit on the toilet. I did that in 100 rooms every night after school. It was $2.22 an hour. I remember that. I’m like, “We’re going to go start a little business.” That got me on the entrepreneurial journey. Why I do what I do is to hope no entrepreneur goes through what my dad did.

I want to go back to Steve Jobs. I’m hosting him for his public speech. He was going to come over from Pixar and go back but he stayed. I had a gathering. Mark Cuban was there, Kevin Harrington, Michael Dell, and all of those hotshot young entrepreneurs. Steve stayed but stood in the corner by himself. I remember my mentor Jo Mancuso’s line, “It’s okay to have freedom and be independent but it’s no reason to be alone.” That’s what EO has done. It has helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs not be alone. We need the tribe and hive, and its wisdom.

The Dalai Lama says one thing very clearly. You cannot do anything without community. One person never would survive. I don’t care how enlightened you freaking think you are. It won’t happen. You need community so build community. Don’t think just business and that’s what you’ve done.

That’s where it comes full circle why I do what I do.

In your community, how many entrepreneurs are there? I wrote a number but I had to double check because there were too many zeros. I said, “Is this possible?”

It’s the present membership. We’ve had a lot of members over the 36 years but the present membership is over 18,000. It should be 1.8 million. We should be 100X what we are. There are too many lonely entrepreneurs out there that we can serve. I’m hoping we can kick into gear.

Hope is the past. I don’t talk about hope. Hope is an element that does not matter in this absolute reality. For you, it’s supreme reality. There’s no hope.

I’m putting the vibration out there for the 1.8 million members.

You touched a very beautiful point in the beginning. You said this is the change of the world. This is the age of enlightenment, feminine, sacred, and divine. This is why all these people who come to you are the entrepreneurs and the new-coming entrepreneurs that you have the EO. You then have the YEO, which are the young entrepreneurs who are coming to you. They’re going to be very excited because when they hear you speak, you transmit the self and truth.

This is the only way someone like you can pierce the veil of ignorance by removing doubt and removing fears. By the time you show up, even if you don’t talk and open your mouth, it’s already happening because of what you are and what you vibrate. The clarity, no doubt you have it. You remove doubt for people and those who are coming.

You said something critical. It is about vibration. We’ve been supposedly around for a couple hundred thousand years as Homo sapiens. To survive and thrive, we developed speech many years ago. We’ve only had the written word and Excel spreadsheets not too long ago. I understand what we’re much better developed to do if we want to figure things out. That is to stare at Excel spreadsheets or have conversations.

That is what EO’s forum does. It provides a safe place for the entrepreneur to speak about what they’re trying to figure out. You can’t think your way through anything. You have to speak it. When you speak it, you put out the vibrations. In my view, we can pick up the faintest of vibrations from the Viking spaceships. They’re out beyond our known universe. Hopefully, Sheryl Crow picks up that I’m interested in dating her. I’ll keep putting that out to the universe. I’ve got folks working on that. You’ve got to speak your truth. You’re right. That is how it manifests. This is important for talking things out as opposed to sitting there and thinking it out.

Thinking doesn’t work. It gets you into more problems. It doesn’t end. Sometimes, I do a gathering. It is called Satsang. In Greek, satsang means gathering with the truth. This is satsang. Be quiet. No effort, no practice, nothing. The effort of not making an effort is essential for success. Make the effort of not making any effort. It’s very difficult because we’ve been trained like animals to think. I say, “Don’t think in this second right here, right now.” You’re not thinking right now. There is no thought.

I’m a dude. The other thing we can’t change is our existence. We all have masculine-feminine. We went on the hunt for hundreds of thousands of years. We couldn’t be thinking. We couldn’t talk or we would miss the beast. It’s a joke. I have three sons and a princess. My daughter will often ask my son, Cameron, “What are you thinking?” He’ll say, “Nothing.” She’ll be laughing. When the dudes were out on the hunt, the women were at the back chatting it up. What I do find interesting is if you went back and looked at the research, they talked about the amygdala and how there’s this flight response. That research was only done with men.

I didn’t know that.

We have I either want to attack the beast or run from the beast. It’s that primal. Women have a different F. They Flock. They come together and support each other. It’s not been in the masculine instinct to do that. In the US, when Mother Teresa came over, my Cofounder of Geoversity, Nathan Gray, worked very closely with her. When she came back from that trip, she said, “There is a real affliction in the United States, loneliness.” That’s why it’s okay to be independent but no reason to be alone. I’m speaking probably more to the dudes than I am to the feminine who has an instinct to flock. We don’t. Hopefully, we’re learning that.

You’re teaching it. Your masculine instrument, there is a reason for this. You didn’t show up in this body. Since you’re influencing men in business, you’re raising their consciousness. They open their doorway to this intuitive world or inner voice kind of thing. You are the one who has to do it. A woman cannot teach them. It has to come from someone who has gone through that evolution itself or that experience to transmit it and teach it, which you do. For you to talk to male entrepreneurs is key to where we’re going and transcending.

In a practical sense, which you and I were chatting before we got started, the hot thing in 2023 is AI. What we’ve discovered is that for AI to flourish, it needs a feminine environment. It can’t flourish in a masculine environment. We’ll put too many guardrails around it. It needs to be free to look at the craziest of data sets to be able to make correlations that make no causality sense.

Business leaders, particularly the masculine, need to recognize this. AI, what it does is it helps us gather more firsthand data and process it. We can see those patterns. That’s the fundamental thing we’re looking for. It is these patterns. It’s going to require us to let the love flow if we’re going to realize its potential. This is where theory meets practice as we look to the future. I see it very simply as silicon and carbon. It’s silicon. We’re carbon to the most plentiful elements. It’s this opportunity for silicon and carbon to cooperate and do some amazing things together.

You speak very clearly in the language yet, it is something that is from the scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred and the masculine, yin and yang, or Shiva and Shakti. The Shiva and Shakti are not the trinity coming together. Can you imagine doing business like this coming together? It flows. Everybody wins. Everybody raised itself into consciousness. It’s incredible. You speak about this thing. I don’t remember what I spoke about. I’m so here that I can never remember. You didn’t say meditation. You said AI and how to bridge the human aspects with the higher consciousness or intelligence. Do you know Dr. Patrick Porter?

I don’t.

He is the CEO of a big company. He’s the sponsor of my show. He has a very beautiful company he created. It started for him when he was a little boy, like eight years old or something. He is a doctor of the brain. We do conferences, retreats, and things like that. He created BrainTap. BrainTap is BrainTap technology. When you put it on your head for entrepreneurs, athletes, or whoever wants to raise consciousness or become a super rockstar, they have a light that goes into the brain with meditation. I want to always mention it because it’s important that people know there are tools out there that can help you perform as an entrepreneur. BrainTap by Dr. Porter is amazing. What is next for you in your universe? What comes next? Where do you flow?

It is not to climb mountains. I hit my midlife, not a crisis, a few years ago. You get a sense that you’ve lived longer than you’re going to live. That was when I was 62 and a half. 125 is my number. For the second half, I’m working on eight things I’m championing in the world. We are working on ending the death penalty in the United States. It’s crazy that we’re the only Western country that still does this barbaric act. I’ll meet with a key senator in Georgia. We got it done in Virginia. We’re the first Southern state to get rid of the death penalty in the United States.

One of the interesting arguments that is catching the attention, mainly of the Republicans who we’ve got to convince to get rid of this barbaric act, is this idea that more is caught than taught. It goes back to firsthand information. Your children learn more from what you do than what you say. Everyone said they wanted a yellow but they went and got a white one. More is caught than taught.

First, what are we teaching our children? Here’s what I find more interesting. What are we teaching AI? AI is learning from us. We’re training AI. Do we want AI to think it is okay to kill people? It violates one of its fundamental rules but it’s there to learn from us. For no other reason, we have to stop the killing. That’s one thing I’m working on.

We’re working on Africa. I’ve always wondered why Africa has not truly realized its full potential. My theory is that it never had a Hong Kong. Manhattan Island did that for us. Switzerland did that for Europe. Panama’s done that for Latin America. We think we finally settled on the Canary Islands. We think that is the place that can be the Hong Kong for Africa. I’ll be there in January 2024. We’re pulling together the key leadership.

I’m working on a musical. There are 4 or 5 other folks. It is our passion project, the number one being to support entrepreneurs. That’s my number one focus. When I got credit again, Ted Leonsis was one of my founding board members. He scaled AOL with Steve Case. He owns the sports teams. Ted’s one of the most developed beings I’ve met and got to spend a little time with. He wrote a book called The Business of Happiness. One of the key things he said in the book is that it’s important to have the most different communities.

You said a keyword, community. To be in the most different communities is truly enriching. I realized I was only in the entrepreneurial community. As Vice Chairman of the Riordan Clinic, we’re there to get rid of big pharma. There, I get to hang out with an interesting group of folks. Geoversity is folks involved in the environment. Our big issue is water. We think that’s the second truth that we’ve not recognized, the plights of our oceans. All of these activities have allowed me to hang out in some very interesting and rich communities. That has brought a lot of joy. That’s the impetus for it.

You speak music to my ears. I picked up a guitar when I was six years old. She’s my baby. She’s always here with me. If it wasn’t for this divine expression and that didn’t find me, because we don’t find this and it seeks you, I would not be here. There’s no way I could have survived the mountains. I would not be here. What you speak about for entrepreneurs is a very important message and wisdom. They work and do business but they also have to have a life of joy. They have to invite joy in their lives.

I have music and I am passionate. I’m a dancer of tango. I’m a tangera. I dance tango every night for five hours. I go and dance. I’m going to prepare a show. I’m going to start doing a show with a partner. The tango is the expression of everything you and I talked about and know. That’s why I was excited to go to Barcelona. Jeff invited me to speak. I won’t be there. It’s your last supper with your disciples. You have the last supper with your disciple. You have your wine. What do you tell these disciples? What are your final words of wisdom about what you experienced in life? What is the fundamental thing?

First of all, that chalice is not just wine but a psychedelic-infused wine. That is what is scientifically coming out. Women were the keepers of the sacrament. Later, you were called witches for brewing up this magic potion. That allowed us to die before we die. It’s a very simple message. It comes down to four letters. It’s love. At the end of the day, it’s letting the love flow. Whatever is in the way of that is what you’ve got to tune into. That’s where you need to do some learning. That’s your growth. It is in understanding the constraints of love.

The truth is the truth. It’s the direct truth. Love is the self itself. Self-love God and guru are the same. It’s one thing. It is love, God, and guru. It is self.

It’s a choice. Let’s come back to our original word. It gets confused as a feeling. What I’ve come to discern is that it’s a choice. That’s what we’ve been given. It is the opportunity to make choices. That’s the heaven and hell, yin and yang, positron-electron, and love and absence of love. We’re here to figure it out.

It will never be figured out because if we try to figure it out, we go back into duality. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s to be that. No name. Gone. If we figure it out, we go back into the drama. What is to figure out? When I see you, what is to figure out? There is nothing to figure out. When somebody sees someone, they call it enlightenment. That’s another concept but call it for what it is. You inspired me. You got my juice back because I live for this. If you tell me, “You’ll be dying in five minutes,” I’ll say, “That’s good. Let me go,” but I live for those moments. What happened with this thing with you, I live for this. It’s the juice. I’m going to pick up my guitar and up we go

I love entrepreneurs.

That’s why you’re so powerful. I am grateful. Thank you. Much love.

You’re welcome. Much love.

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This was mind-transcending. Verne Harnish transmitted wisdom that is through words and also beyond words. When you read his message or this conversation that he and I had, if you can be very present, here and now, you can feel the power of the words and the vibration that came through him directly to you. This is why this show is so important for those who are seeking wisdom, truth, success, and liberation, whether it is spiritual, physical, mental, or financial liberation.

It’s so important for those who are on this path of liberation. If you’re an entrepreneur, creator, or mystical maverick, you have this je ne sais quoi. You’re looking for a tribe to understand your uniqueness. We are here for this. The wisdom of this episode is profound and powerful. It hits you right in the wisdom eye and heart. This was not the feeling of love but love as you being natural love. It is who you are and what you are. It is love, wisdom, beauty, freedom, and the self.

He said, “This is it. It’s about love, which has no name.” One thing that was so unique in his transmission is he says, “Don’t form an opinion about someone or anything in business or life.” Let’s talk about this in business. A lot of times, we’re quick to make opinions by the five senses. We make a judgment opinion about somebody right away. It is the wrong way to go because that won’t help you to succeed. Don’t form an opinion right away.

Have a flow, which he talks about, about life in general. When you form an opinion, you are very rigid and you most likely will fail. It’s a condition and a habit. We are judgmental. A lot of times, we form opinions about this person. We are like, “She looks this way,” or whatever it is. Don’t do that. Try your best to speak about no opinion. We can learn from every experience and everyone. Don’t get so quick in forming opinions. That’s one key of his wisdom. Also, keep it simple.

He speaks about when we make decisions in business and life. Let’s say you’re making a business plan and you have a business partner. Somehow, it gets so busy in your head and complicated. This should be a signal that you’re getting away from where you should go. It’s not intuitive. Make it where it feels simple. That’s what he is trying to explain. Try to make things where it flows and where it flows usually with simplicity.

When things are getting too complicated, this should give you a good idea that is the wrong direction. This is a part of your intuitive awareness or business intuition as we call it. That’s getting away from this expansion and the goal of success. That’s number two. He says, “No opinion. Keep it simple.” It’s something that is music to my ears. Someone like Verne Harish confirming this makes me so happy.

He said, “Be quiet.” What does that mean? Does it mean to be quiet in your room with no noise? No. You can be quiet even when you are doing things. Being quiet means that you are at peace with yourself. It is this certainty of having the confidence in yourself to be able to be very clear about, “What’s going on? How do I feel now? I am here now.” This is what it means to be quiet.

It also means to listen and then you’re able to take action. The power we are giving is to take action and willpower. We are making decisions with that quietness in the background. You can raise consciousness and not be depleted by this thinking mind but go beyond this. Be yourself. I’m very happy. This beautiful exchange is what it is.

He speaks about love. He says, “At the end of the day, it’s love. You come from love and you go to love. It’s love.” This beauty and wisdom is your nature. There’s nothing you need to seek it. It already is there. This show is about how someone can tap into this thing that is already there. Sometimes, it takes effort to no effort. Have this moment where you are quiet and not thinking.

Let things flow and seek you more than what you want to seek. The truth at the core of it is that what you’re seeking is already there. Trust that pattern in your life and watch it. You have experience. If you don’t like those experiences, it means that you have to change something. You have to be more self-aware. Practice self-awareness.

Self-awareness means to be here and now. It’s not in the past, present, or future. It’s the same thing. That is mind and time. You are here now. You are always here. That doesn’t change. Everything around you can change but permanent is what you are. It is beauty, love, and wisdom. You are free. Thank you for being here with us. Love, wisdom, and beauty. You take care of yourself. Try it. Practice no effort, which is no practice. It might be the most difficult thing to do. Love. À bientôt and namaste.

Important Links

• Entrepreneurs’ Organization
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
• The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time
• Scaling Up
• Scaling Up Compensation
• Riordan Clinic
• Geoversity
• Million Dollar Women
• Teeming
• The Business of Happiness
• BrainTap

About Verne Harnish

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 16,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today. Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 200 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scaleup.