Episode 007 – Beckett Hanan

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Richard Matthews  1:05

 

Okay, welcome to the hero show, I am here with Beckett (formerly Rebecca) Hanan from Type In Mind. You work with business personality types and entrepreneurial personality types. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what Type In Mind is and what it is that you guys do for your customers?

 

Beckett Hanan  1:23

Yeah. We’re basically a coaching/consulting company. Everything we do is centered around the idea of personality type and not necessarily the typical sense you would think of. Here is a couple of different dimensions, you’re either way over here or way over there and we’re going to shove you in that box and then push you along your way. Instead, we’re digging into exactly what makes a person the way that they are and looking at it in detail. People tend to say, “We do it in a very holistic way.” and they actually feel like we’re describing them as a whole person instead of describing a little box to put them in. We have onboarding services to help people integrate new people into their team. We do team dynamics and we also help leaders on their own with personal growth.

 

Richard Matthews  2:09

When you’re working with your customers…I know when I think “Personality Types,” I know how powerful it can be from a psychology standpoint but when your customers are coming to you, what is the problem that they have that you’re going to say, “We’re going to discuss these personality types and here’s the end result.” What is it that you’re going to actually help them do? Is it to make their business more profitable or make their teams work better? What is the end result that you generally are going for?

 

Beckett Hanan  2:34

Yeah. Generally, so we also do a little bit of marketing although we haven’t done as much yet. If it’s marketing specifically it’s usually looking at, “Okay, what is your main customer persona?” I’m very heavy on actual data and analytics, not just guessing. So, I might dig into their data a little bit and look at existing customers and maybe even talk with them, dialogue a little bit. Then, I’m mapping out what their customer looks like. And I say, “Here’s what you’re hitting really well. With your coffee. Your videos or even the style that you’re communicating in.” Maybe they’re really strongly saying, “You have to call us and you have to buy.” Now, that doesn’t work for everybody. And especially if it’s a certain type of industry that maybe you’re missing 90% of the people. So I look for holes and problem-solve where they are missing the point. Then on the team side, it’s often, “How do we make these people work together?” So, sometimes it’s not really like, “Oh, we want the whole team to have it. Rather, just these two people. We really like both of them. They do their job well, but they don’t work together and we need them to.” So, how can we get them to understand each other and find some middle ground where they’re at least not fighting. That kind of thing.

 

Richard Matthews  3:43

So, if I understand correctly, you help them on both the customer side so that they can get their marketing right and they can get their message right; in front of the right customers. So that they can be more profitable. And then you help the team on the other side to work together better so they can build better products and build better service for their customers. It’s a holistic approach to how personality fits into a business. Yeah

 

Beckett Hanan  4:06

Yeah. And often they will come for one thing, and then end up wanting six other things because they just…you know, not everyone does. But when they really get it, and it starts to kind of click in their mind, they’re like, “Wait can we put this in too?” I’m like, “Yeah, totally.” It just depends. Some people are like, “Just give me this thing.” and then they’ll see done. I’m like, “Cool, that’s good with me.” But it’s kind of fun to see what it really clicks for people. And they started kind of have their own revelations from it as well.

 

Richard Matthews  4:32

Yeah. It’s really cool because one of the topics that keep popping up on this show with several the other people we’ve interviewed is, How business is really a part of the human experience. And human experiences built on stories, getting to know each other. It’s all about people, individuals, and understanding how important an individual’s personality is in the sales conversation or in that team environment. it’s really powerful.

 

Beckett Hanan  4:59

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know one guy. He isn’t hugely into this and I wasn’t even the person that got him into it. But we kind of connected. I’ve been working for Perry for three and a half years. Perry Marshall. He was like, “Hey, you guys talk about personalities to me, maybe you should talk to each other.” And so I was talking to him, and he said, “You know, there’s this guy called Dr. Grant, and he’s got Ph.D. in psychology. Fascinating guy talks a lot about personality.” Dave had learned from him. He’s kind of his apprentice. And he said, “You know, I was realizing my entire sales funnel was built around expecting people to be more of these extroverted types.” Just by having that click and realizing, “I’m leaving out all the introverts who want time to think through stuff…” He even got a 30% boost in his sales that did not drop. He saw the list and it stayed there consistently after he changed his marketing messages to incorporate the people that also want to have a little bit of time. Giving them a couple days to decide rather than saying “If you don’t decide now, then that’s it.” That’s huge, from one little thing to have a 30% lift in sales. I mean most people would do a lot more for that. To have that through something so simple is amazing.

 

Richard Matthews  6:09

That’s awesome. So that gives us a pretty good idea of what it is you do now for your clients. I want to go back and talk a little bit about your origin story. I say every hero has one. So, when did you start to realize that maybe you were different? Maybe you had, these superpowers that you can use to help other people and started to discover then develop the value that you could bring to this world?

 

Beckett Hanan  6:34

I grew up with my parents who were entrepreneurs. So to me, it’s like, “If you need money, you just go figure out something and do it.” Not like, “Oh, you go get a job.” I’ve always felt a little weird in jobs. I’ve always had quirky jobs. I worked for Perry and I don’t really have this one role. I did 15 different things and it’s very customized. I just don’t do well with a typical job and I never have. When I was a kid, I was maybe 13. I was in a youth camp for the church for the summer and I was making friendship bracelets. These people were like, “Oh, I like those.” I made 40 bucks selling them for $1 each over a couple of days. I made stuff on duct tape. I made wallets and purses and I’ve always been doing that. I never really realized it was weird until I ended up working for Perry. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, like, there’s this whole world of entrepreneurs. They’re all crazy like my family.” and it’s great! I just…I don’t, understand the people that can just go to a normal job. It’s great because someone needs to do that. But it’s never been a thing that I could do. I love the freedom of it. I am the kind of person that…if I want to work at two in the morning on this thing that I suddenly thought about, I want to be able to just do that. I don’t have to be like, “Oh, I have to get up at 7 am and go to my job and do the same thing I do every day.” Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  7:54

It reminds me a lot of myself because I remember when I was 13 and I just started high school. I discovered that people were buying candy at school at the time. So I talked my dad into taking me to the local big box store and I bought all the candy…even fancier candies that you couldn’t get at school. I could buy them for cheap. I started coming to school with a backpack with pounds and pounds of candy in there and I was selling it for a buck or two bucks a pop. I made a couple thousand dollars at school selling high-end candy to all my friends. I became the candy guy. It lasted all of about six weeks before the administration caught on and told me I wasn’t allowed to do that at school.

 

Beckett Hanan  8:34

Hey, that’s pretty good.

 

Richard Matthews  8:37

That’s where I got my start. I remember even further down the road at school. They did a…what did they call it…a Renaissance Fair? It was the English department in high school and everyone had to dress up and you could put up booths and everything. I was like, “Oh, I know what I’m going to do.” Everyone had these booths where they were demonstrating things for the Renaissance Fair…bringing their birds or their dogs and stuff like that. I built a water table and I sold water bottles for 50 cents a pop because in Southern California at the summertime, it was like 100 degrees! So everyone else was doing cool stuff. I walked away from the Renaissance Fair in 10th grade with several hundred dollars in profits.

 

Beckett Hanan  9:26

I feel like we’re doing “Show and Tell” for people who make money!

 

Richard Matthews  9:27

So, yeah! I totally understand where you’re coming from.

 

Beckett Hanan  9:31

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  9:31

So when did you get into Personality Type and the typing for people?

 

Beckett Hanan  9:38

So at this point, I think it’s been almost 10 years since I first got into it. It was with a group of friends. The classic MBTI thing. It’s interesting because when I first learned about it I was with a group that is actually all the same personality as me but they were all guys. My type is more heavily logical and they’re like, “Well, you’re more feeling than we are. So you’re probably like the feeling version of it.” And so for a long time, I was like, “Oh, I guess this is it.” I did a little research into it because I just found it really interesting and how do the friends take the test but it didn’t really click until 2012. I dove back into it because I was not like most people. Over the course of about five years, I was still in school in Northern California. So I lived with, I think, almost 40 different girls as roommates at different times over the course of that. At one point I was living with 14 of them.

 

Richard Matthews  10:40

At one time?

 

Beckett Hanan  10:41

Yeah, it was two houses. It was a guest house in the back, but we’re all sharing one kitchen. I’m noticing that I’m not really the same as those other girls that I know. And so I dug back into this. I think with that in mind, like, “Why am I different?” I realized after all this time, I was the same as these other guys. But it looks a little different when you have different genders and there’s all sorts of stuff and all your experience plays into it, right? So I’m looking at it and I find this website, and it’s called intpexperience.com and this website basically dug into, probably completely different from most of the stuff I had seen before, something called Cognitive Functions. And this is actually what breaks down what the core of what Jung discovered, which is what MBTI is based on. The more I got into it I actually found myself crying, which is very unusual for me, as I was reading through this because it described in exquisite detail the way that I understood my feelings. Just different things about the way my brain works. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.” So after that, I just dove all the way back in again and it hasn’t stopped since then. I started having friends who go through stuff and I moved in with four other girls. We all thought we were one type that I had thought I was before. By the time we moved out a couple of years later, none of us were actually that. We realize how easy it is for people to think like, “Oh, I want to be this kind of person.” and it’s not actually who you are. Once you get on this path of understanding who you are at the core of what you really want, you get this whole growth pattern that you’re able to see. And like, “Oh, I’m at this stage, and here’s what the next stage looks like.” And it just made me feel like I actually make sense and I don’t have to try and be like other females to be healthy and awesome. But I have my own unique kind of passion I can go on. I started kind of just…anytime someone came to me with any relational thing, or whatever. I was always like, “Oh, well, you know, you’re like this. And it sounds like the person you’re describing is more like that. And have you tried this?” And then comes back to me and be like, “Oh my gosh, like, you just changed everything. Like we had this long conversation and, you know, this problem we’ve had for 10 years I was able to forgive them.” The more and more that happened, the more people were like, “You should really do business with this.”

 

Richard Matthews  12:55

And help people. So I think that tells really beautifully into what your superpowers are, right? We’ve talked about it a little bit here. What do you help people do that helps them solve their problems and helps them slay their own villains.

 

Beckett Hanan  13:15

So one of the things that I mentioned is…you look at self-help books and they really work for a couple types of people. They don’t really work for everyone else. Either they’re just like, “No, I don’t want that.” or “The advice just doesn’t fit.” And it’s because I think they’re written by a certain couple of types and they appeal to those couple of types because they’re looking for, “Hey, just tell me what to do.” And these people are usually older and wiser, and they’re kind of similar…so the advice fits. But what I noticed is that the same advice never works for the same people…for everybody, I mean. You could be in a church and there’s a pastor talking, “Here’s what you do with this problem.” Well, some of the people in the audience will be like, “Oh, that really resonates with me.” and they’ll go home, they will be like, “This has changed my life. This is amazing.” And other people will be like, “What? That doesn’t make any sense.” And they might try it and just feel really uncomfortable but they feel like it should work for them. So there’s this thing that just drives me crazy that’s so common. That’s like, “I tried and people said this is how it should be and I don’t know.” I don’t think it’s inherently just the people are insecure. But it’s this lack of self-awareness of not realizing that even though something worked really great for your friend, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. For me, my goal is self-awareness.

 

Richard Matthews  14:24

Yeah.

 

Beckett Hanan  14:26

I mean, that’s the core problem with a lot of the personality tests out there. People take them but they don’t understand themselves. I’ve kind of been building this test over the course of a few years and it’s about to get launched into beta finally. It walks you through, like people say, even taking the test, they start to be aware of their own thought processes more because it helps them to reflect. Too much introspection is not good, but there’s a lot of people that could definitely do with a little bit of more and have a little bit of guidance with it because if you don’t know where to look then you don’t even know where to start. So I give people this little thing of, “Hey, you know, you wanted to just be happier and enjoy your life more, and all this kind of stuff, you know, start by understanding yourself a little bit better, and then connect with people that are similar to you.” If you feel like you’re totally different than everyone else, then the advice from them is probably rarely going to work for you. Then you’re always going to feel like, “Oh, everything works for them in life.” You can go find this community and add a couple people from that and now all of a sudden, you have these people that get you and you talk about your frustrations and like, “Oh, my God, I know.” and you have similar experiences. I think really, self-awareness leads to fulfillment, to everything working out way better. Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  15:42

It’s really, really cool. I think it’s powerful, too. You hear people talk about like…I listen to a lot of podcasts and all the successful people do these things or all the successful people have this morning routine. The success does leave clues but-

 

Beckett Hanan  16:02

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  16:03

There’s truth to some of those things. But some of the things that you hear, you think, “Well, I tried to do those things and it just doesn’t fit for me.” I like one of the things that Gary Vanyerchuck said, “Just ignore your weaknesses and focus on your strengths.” Too many people are trying to get their weaknesses to become strengths and that’s just not the way it works. You want to work on the things that are strong for you and what you talked about is…in order to do that, you have to know what your strengths are, right? So you have to know what your weaknesses are. When someone recommends that you do something that is in one of your weakness piles, “Hey, you know what? That’s just not gonna work for me.” instead of dealing with those frustrations?

 

Beckett Hanan  16:46

Yeah, it gives you permission to say, “I don’t have to do everything that everybody throws at me. I can be selective.” Like, “Okay, I know my mom wants the best for me and she wants me to do this thing, she thinks it’ll work.” It’s like you can just know and feel good about saying, “You know what, that’s okay, I’m good.” Or, there are a lot of people that talk to me and they say, “Oh my gosh, like, all these things that I thought were bad about me are also my strengths. I’ve just never been able to see them in a positive way Because everyone teases me about them…” or they’ve always experienced problems because of them. And they’ve never gotten to experience some strengths. So that’s huge for somebody to realize. Like, “I’m not just a crappy person, you know.” It’s like, they were so heavily focused on your weaknesses and it’s not necessarily their fault. It’s the people around you who don’t see that as a strength. That makes it really hard for you to see it that way. If everyone’s always telling you like, “Oh, you’re this and that.” then it’s going to be hard for you to see like, “Oh, but that is the awesome thing about me.” You need that for the direction of like, “Hey, usually the things that are your greatest weaknesses, the other side of it is also your greatest strengths.”

 

Richard Matthews  17:44

Yeah. It’s really powerful in a lot of things when you realize that and you do it in your own life, and you start even with the relationships. My wife and I checked out all the time she’s “How could I be better at this or that or the other thing.” She wants to be a better wife and a better mom to me to my kids. Well, I’m really clean and organized because that’s just part of my personality. As I grew up, if I put like my socks inside out in the dirty laundry, my mom probably would have had some sort of psychic premonition and I would have got struck by lightning or something. Because of that, I’m just clean and organized. My wife, on the other hand, is not. She’s a very creative person and she’s not as clean and organized than I am. But she’s like, “I want to be more clean and organized.” I’m like, “If you want to work on that, that’s fine but what that leads to is, it leads to your incredible creativity.” She does these incredible original 3D carved cakes and she’s made T-Rexes out of cake and dolls and all these other cool things. She homeschools our kids, and the projects and stuff that she comes up with for them. I’m like, “Don’t focus on the things that are your weaknesses. Focus on the things that are your strengths and don’t worry about it anything else. I think that it helps us just knowing that about each other.” You don’t get on each other’s nerves about it, right? And it helps us be…

 

Beckett Hanan  19:19

…able to respect that you’re different and not be concerned about it.

 

Richard Matthews  19:24

Not, “I need you to be like me.” Instead, “I need you to be the best version of you.” And I think what you’re doing really is so powerful for people because if they can understand themselves and understand the people they work with, or the people that they have relationships with, it just helps everything work better like a well-oiled machine. Yes.

 

Beckett Hanan  19:42

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  19:43

So, I want to talk a little bit about your tool belt. What are some of the tools that you use with your clients? It could be psychological tools or tools like Evernote or whatever it is that you use on a regular basis that really help you do the work that you do for your clients?

 

Beckett Hanan  20:05

On a practical basis, I love all of Google Docs. Everything that’s cloud-based is super helpful for me. Working with my team, we can be like, “Hey, let’s write this thing together!” They can do suggestions and comments. And we can go back and forth and really refine stuff. Honestly, even though I don’t love social media at times, but it tends to not affect me that negatively. Most people I know complain about it all the time. I just do what I need to do and then get off of it. I use that for refining. I’m very careful with my personality descriptions. I’ve had tons of comments already. They’re not even officially released. But I write them with the people of that same type. What you commonly see is that people say there’s somebody like me and I’m going to write all these descriptions. Well, the farther away from your own understanding of yourself, the more different they are from you and you don’t have people around you like that, then the more vague and theoretical they get. So you can get way off because you’re just guessing. What I’ve done is, because I see that happen so much, I’ve written it with people. So some of those collaborators are in other countries. I write it with them over Google Docs and we chat about it. Then, I’m able to publish it into the Facebook group or a forum for that type and they’re able to give lots of really good feedback because I wanted to be more universal. I don’t want it to be really specific to the one person I collaborated with and not work for everyone else. I love being able to just find 1000 people that have already said, “Hey, this is what I’m like.” And I can get their feedback instantaneously so that stuff helps me a lot. I want to get more into the Five Dysfunctions of a team. It is a common tool for working teams through stuff. I’ve read through that and I don’t officially use it yet because I don’t even know if you need to get some kind of certification to be cool with that. I do like giving people that as a tool and saying, “Hey read through this you’ll probably laugh or cry and you’ll see all these things of reflecting your own issues as a team when it comes to bigger businesses.” It’s amazing how they recommend that you go through and you get a personality expert to help with a lot of that team dynamics. That’s kind of fun to have them just see that sometimes we’re not aware of how many problems we’re having until you read it in a story which is how that book is written. They have a little fable and you read through that and you start to go, “Oh, man, like we totally have that” Sometimes you need to make that awareness of the need before you can really help them so it’s useful for that. I’m the kind of person that gets lots of ideas all the time. I have tons of notebooks and I try to scatter pens all around the house. The other night I woke up at two in the morning and I was writing stuff down.

 

Richard Matthews  22:52

The big notebooks that I keep on my desk.

 

Beckett Hanan  22:57

Yeah. I hate ones with lines. They always drive me crazy. I love just being able to draw or whatever. I don’t even really draw, but I just don’t want the lines. I don’t know

 

Richard Matthews  23:06

I do the same thing. I never used the notebooks that have lines on. I finally got a big blank one. If it’s blank, then I can use it.

 

Beckett Hanan  23:14

I don’t know, I just feel constricted. The main thing for me is, right now, I have three businesses on top of my job. I’m about to start the fourth one. I’m on the computer all day. To be able to just go and have my notebook is just really good for my brain. I can feel that I’m able to think a lot more clearly if it’s just me and my notebook. I’m away from my computer, I put it away because I know I’m at this point where if I’m trying to be creative on the computer, my brain is like “Nope, I don’t want to do it.” So that helps me a lot.

 

Richard Matthews  23:49

So it’s changing your environment a little bit to bring out your creativity.

 

Beckett Hanan  23:53

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  23:55

I’ve got to say that it helps a lot for me. If I need to do creative stuff on my computer, I will leave my desk. I’ll take my computer with me and go sit outside. I have to change my environment because my desk is not creative. My desk is for getting work done.

 

Beckett Hanan  24:20

It’s funny because it’s one of those things that is definitely starker for everybody. I used to go to work, instead of working from home. I would go to work and come home to just change my clothes because it was the same. I’m like, “All right, you’re not at work anymore.” I needed that even on top of the physical transition. I feel like intentionally changing your environment stops your brain from getting super exhausted. You’re in the same spot for 10 hours on the same computer, doing the same stuff. Even if you change tasks, your brain doesn’t really fully get it. So yeah, I love that I will be able to physically shift things to tell your brain like, “Okay, now we’re doing a different thing.” It seems to make a big difference.

 

Richard Matthews  25:03

Yeah, I know. I do the same thing in my life so hopefully, that’s something our listeners can pick up on. Change your environment if you need to change what you’re working on. It helps a lot.

 

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It helps a lot.

 

Beckett Hanan  26:04

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  26:06

Talk a little bit about your mission for Type In Mind. I talked about Spiderman fights to save New York, Batman fights to save Gotham, Google fights to index the entire world’s information so we can search it. What is Type In Mind’s mission?

 

Beckett Hanan  26:23

A lot of it comes down to the self-awareness but there’s a couple of specific types and they are really misunderstood by the general population. What’s really sad is they have so many gifts and they end up just being ignored or pushed to the side because they don’t necessarily have the ability maybe to sell themselves. Even though they have an amazing brain. Maybe they’re just not as good at knowing how to present that to people. You see this a lot with mathematicians or programmers where they have skills that are really needed yet when it comes to actually present them, there is usually a trade-off. So you could have a really amazing mathematical brain and not so much socially. What’s hard is, for me, I found that I really like doing all the math stuff or all this really complex theoretical stuff. But then you can’t just study it, you actually need to share it with people to feel fulfilled. It’s really tough because I would love to just be learning all day, but you have to actually develop the skills to share it and teach it. So I want to find these people -these types that are really really intelligent -and help them find ways to share their stuff because I feel like there are so many of them that were just missing out on all the knowledge that they have in their unique ways of thinking. And I want to help them. Specifically, there’s one type where I feel like often they are really struggling with their teenage years. I think it’s because as parents, they’re quite rare. They’re quite different. And so parents don’t really know how to parent them because they’re just not what they expected, necessarily. And they’re usually very different from them as parents. So it’s things like that where it’s like, there’s this clash. And you’ve got this beautiful person and they have an amazing mind. And yet they can end up having a really crappy life because they’re misunderstood. All you need is language

 

Richard Matthews  28:22

…they don’t understand themselves to start with…

 

Beckett Hanan  28:23

Exactly. They can say, “No, no, I’m more like this.” because the language is missing. There are actually studies where they saw that deaf people, if you even teach them sign language before a certain age, as long as you teach them some kind of language, they’re able to think like anyone else. But if they don’t learn a language by a certain age, then they’re thinking is actually impaired because even though they don’t necessarily always think everything consciously but the unconscious seems to be impaired by not having language. Even on the computer, the fact that we’re having a conversation right now only exists because of language. Not only because we’re speaking, but because of the code that underlies the software that we’re using in our operating system. Everything is the same language, even DNA is as a code, right? For me, what I’m passionate about is language. I want everyone to understand themselves. And not just that, but have the language to express it to other people because that’s where the communication comes in.

 

Richard Matthews  29:24

Absolutely. That reminds me of something I tell people, in jest, about my children. That my children are my social experiments. Right now, I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old. When my son was born, I remember I didn’t know anything about kids other than I’ve got this little tiny child who’s a completely blank slate. I don’t know what to do. So I might as well experiment on them, right? What I mean by that when I say that is, I wanted to like to test the commonly held beliefs. Children can’t learn things. So why would you take time to explain it to them? I remember you know, just a couple of years ago my son was two and we were in the backyard and he was throwing a ball he wanted to try and get it up on the patio. He couldn’t do it because he was standing like right under the patio and it was straight up. So I sat down and I talked to him, he’s two years old. He can count to 10. Basically, that’s his language abilities and he can say “Mom” and “Dad”. That’s it.

 

Beckett Hanan  30:37

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  30:38

I sat there and I explained to him the whole physics behind why he couldn’t throw it up there and talked to him that he had a shallower parabolic arch on his throw. You can take that same amount of work you’re doing and you can get it on there if you step back 10 feet. And my stepdad comes out, he’s like, “Why are you explaining physics to a two-year-old?” And he’s like, “Two-year-olds can’t understand that stuff.” And I was like, “I don’t know that. I don’t know what he can understand and what he can’t understand.” Then about two weeks later we come back outside and he wants to throw the ball again. He looks up at me “Daddy!” he said, “Parabolic arch!” He said the word. He stepped back and he threw the ball and got it on the porch. It’s interesting because what I’ve noticed over the years of teaching my kids is, the bigger their vocabulary is, the more advanced their play becomes and the more advanced their imagination becomes. And it’s like a direct correlation that the more I teach my kids about the language we speak, the more vibrant their imaginary world has become. It’s like a direct correlation that the better they become at communicating, the more thoughts they’re capable of holding in their head, and I’ve got this working theory now, you just talked about the deaf children. If they learn a language, they can think better. I’ve noticed my son now spends a lot of time with language. He’s six years old but he doesn’t talk like a six-year-old. It’s like talking with a young teenager. And they’re just blown away. I think it has a lot to do with language because his level of thinking is not determined by his age or his status. It’s determined by the amount of language he has command over.

 

Beckett Hanan  32:38

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  32:40

I think that’s really fascinating.

 

Beckett Hanan  32:42

Yeah. People often say get your kids to read. I think I was three and I was begging my mom to read, for her to teach me but she was busy. She was doing Nursing at the time. I was born in Ireland. When we moved to the States, she wasn’t working anymore. I was four. At this point, she’s like, “Okay, I’ll teach you how to read.” So, by the time she took me to go to kindergarten, I was already reading chapter books. And she was like, “What is she going to learn?” They’re like, “All the colors and the numbers.” And she’s like, “What? She’s already reading.” So she homeschooled me. I was homeschooled through everything. I finished school year early. And I just taught myself from 11 on. She would ask me a question but I was like, “Just get me the textbook, I’ll go read it.” She told me when I was two, we were having sophisticated conversations. I don’t remember that. But I think when you treat your kid as just a person that’s small, they don’t know as much as you but they have the capacity to really know anything. It’s limited, but I feel like so many times we teach and we treat kids as if they have nothing going on almost up there. And we forget that they have all of these thoughts of their own and they can’t actually express themselves the way that we can. I think like you’re really empowering them by giving them that kind of language. Then they might not remember everything, but that’s not the point. It’s just to expand their world and give them that ability to imagine and to understand concepts. If you didn’t tell them about it, then they might just not ever.

 

Richard Matthews  34:18

My children have consistently surprised me with what they’re capable of understanding. Just a couple of examples, my son learned to read an analog clock at two years old and he could read a calendar by the time he was two and a half. Those are all things that you wouldn’t expect from a two-year-old. He can barely even run, like, he falls over.

 

Beckett Hanan  34:46

… two-year-old kids trying to read a calendar or an analog clock…

 

Richard Matthews  34:49

But he thought it was fascinating. He’s six years old now. He would just barely be starting kindergarten but he’s doing second and third-grade curriculum for a lot of his work with the exception of writing. He’s six, he can’t hold a pencil yet. He doesn’t have the dexterity. I think a lot of times we hold our children back based on the physical. It takes a while to get your body to that level but their mind can come out ahead. There’s a reason why they’re one-third head when they come out, right? They have these powerful amazing minds. I think it was just very poignant what you said that if you can help someone get the language to express themselves and express what’s in their heads, then they can communicate with other people and they can be more productive in their lives. They’ll be able to value what they have. They can give it to the world in a far greater capacity because they understand themselves.

 

Beckett Hanan  35:55

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  35:58

Long way to say, I think your mission is very cool. So, transition a little bit here, talk a little bit about your own personal heroes. Frodo had Gandalf. Luke had Obi Wan Kenobi. Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad. Who were your heroes? Were they speakers, authors, peers that were just a couple of years ahead of you. And how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in your life?

 

Beckett Hanan  36:22

I definitely have to say, my parents. They have been entrepreneurs my whole life but they never had this hugely successful business. They never had this huge breakthrough happen yet they still keep doing it. And being able to say, “Look, this is how I am. I’m an entrepreneur.” And not just say, “Well, if it’s not working, then I guess that’s not me. I should just go get a job.” There have been times they considered it. But at the end of the day, they’re entrepreneurs. They can’t help it. We just started a business with our whole family as an agency for startups. We’re like, “Hey, we’ve been doing all this stuff separately. Why not do it all together?” And they always keep going even when they’re like, “I don’t know how we’re gonna pay the bills this month.” It’s not like, “Well, why don’t we just go get jobs and go back to the normal, easier…” it’s easier sometimes to go for the stability and that kind of thing yet they never do that. I would have to say, Perry Marshall as well. There are not many bosses that will let you have a job the way I have where I get to say, “Hey, what about this thing?” and come to him with all of these crazy ideas and move around and work on different things. I never would have thought I would have enjoyed the whole world of marketing and sales. I thought it was completely just all of these people manipulating each other. I was like, “I want no part of it.” And I started working for Perry, it was actually through a friend of mine. She was like, “Hey, we need someone else for customer service. You want to come join us?” And I was like, “Hey, I love the idea.” I love that I’d be working online. I got to go through all carries material and I started going through these courses. One thing that he’s known for is, in this place where a lot of people are just trying to scam people out of their money, he’s got integrity.

 

Richard Matthews  38:17

Yeah.

 

Beckett Hanan  38:18

He’s also similar to me in personality. He gets into that theoretical principle stuff, but he also was like, “Hey, if you’re ripping people off, I don’t even want to talk to you. Like, I’m here to help people.” The main core of it for me was the understanding that marketing is really just about connecting the right people with each other.

 

Richard Matthews  38:36

Yeah.

 

Beckett Hanan  38:37

And realizing like, “Oh my gosh, like my parents they need marketing.” That’s the main thing. They do awesome stuff and people don’t know about them. And realizing, “Oh, my gosh, marketing is the solution to the problem of all of these amazing people that have great skills, but they’re just not making enough money because they don’t know how to market themselves because that’s not their skill.” And realizing that it can be a tool, just like I said. It’s like with type, it can be used to stereotype and make people angry and put them in boxes or it can be used to change people’s lives. Marketing can be a horrible thing when it’s used by people that don’t have good intentions, but it also can change people’s lives.