Episode 010 – Nic Lucas

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Richard Matthews

Okay, we’re live again. My name is Richard Matthews. The host of The HEROES Show. I’m on–live–with Nic Lucas. Can you hear me and see me there, Nic?

 

Nic Lucas

I sure can. You come through perfectly.

 

Richard Matthews

Awesome. Glad to have you here today. So we’ll quickly we do an intro for you so people know who you are. This is Nic Lucas. He is a neuro-digital strategist, coach, consultant, author, and speaker. I’m going to look forward to figuring out what a neuro-digital strategist is. You’re the CEO and founder of X10 Entrepreneur and I found some of this stuff really interesting. I pulled out your bio here. You’ve got five degrees including a PhD from the University of Sydney. Is that right?

 

Nic Lucas

It’s actually a disorder of accumulating….

 

Richard Matthews

….disorder….too many of them. You started doing live teaching in 1997 and sold your publishing company to one of the largest medical publishers, which is incredible. I want to hear a little bit more about that later. And you’ve been in….in 2009 says you shifted entirely online and you’ve got students from all over the world now and that you’ve been teaching your neural-digital strategy. Is that correct?

 

Nic Lucas

Almost. But I’ll tell you about that when we get to it.

 

Richard Matthews

Okay, awesome. Well, let’s just dive right into it. What are you known for today? What is your business like? What is it that people, you know, when they think of Nic Lucas, what do they think about?

 

Nic Lucas

Well, you know, you might appreciate this too, it’s a smattering of things because there are quite a few things I do. But essentially, there’s kind of two camps I’m in. One is I tend to work with CEOs and entrepreneurs and it’s actually mostly around their thinking. All the thinking that has to be in place for them to not just become great entrepreneurs, but actually great people and have a great life at the same time. I’ve seen too many people just focus on entrepreneurship and have everything else fall apart or just not be anywhere near as good as it could be. So it’s really about optimizing the life of the entrepreneur. That’s one thing. The other thing is just applying a whole lot of really cool neuroscience principles to you know, the art of being an entrepreneur and so that’s where the whole digital strategy stuff comes in. I love marketing. I love crafting messages. I love being able to use the internet as this tool to leverage our time. Which is why it’s, you know, Bonanza for entrepreneurs. So there are two camps.

 

Richard Matthews

So on one side, you have the internal processes that like people are struggling with, to run their business. And then you have the actual tactics and strategies they use to create sales digitally online and you marry those together for a unique outlook on how to grow your business in today’s digital world.

 

Nic Lucas

I should just say that.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, it seems really interesting. I’ve never actually met anyone who focuses on the neuroscience side of entrepreneurship. I’ve heard a little bit about like biohacking. Is it in the same vein or is it more on how people are thinking? Where does biohacking come into it all?

 

Nic Lucas

Well, I mean….Look, everyone’s interested in mind stuff. I mean entrepreneurs, especially, are talking about mindset. I’ve come through an entirely different path of understanding the brain and neuroscience. I guess I just have a certain approach and a certain level of expertise that a lot of the other people don’t. I can bring that to bear. So in the end, we still end up having the same conversations about, how do I get and how do I think probably about being an entrepreneur? How do I think about my customers, clients, all that sort of thing, but I get to bring my experience, you know, and which is often contrary to a lot of people think because we know there’s a lot of myths out there. Because it’s coming from a scientific perspective, it just brings that information in and that expertise in.

 

Richard Matthews

And it also comes with a level of authority that a lot of other experts don’t start with. Does it come from just having what you call the disorder of too many degrees?

 

Nic Lucas

Yes, that’s exactly right.

 

Richard Matthews

So tell me a little bit about your origin story. We talk all the time here on the show, every hero has an origin story. It’s where you started to realize that maybe you were different. Maybe you had superpowers. And maybe you can use them to help other people. What started to develop or discover the value you bring to this world?

 

Nic Lucas

The superpower thing didn’t come until a lot later….probably after all those degrees, I was very, very much an earned superpower as opposed to one bestowed upon me because I happen to do this atmosphere something

 

Richard Matthews

More like Batman rather than Spider-Man. Right. We had to work for it.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, exactly. Right. And go through a lot of pain. Exactly. So I guess the quickest way….the origin story is incredibly humble beginnings. You know, I grew up in a little tiny town in Outback, Australia, where at the time, the population was 6000, and I think that might have included like, 1000 sheep so um, you know, very small little town and my dad was a pastor. And so we ended up moving a lot. So by the time I dropped out of school, so I was I actually was a high school dropout. By the time I dropped out, I’d been like 11 years of schooling. I’ve been to nine different schools

 

Richard Matthews

wow

 

Nic Lucas

So that I wouldn’t say at the time that was necessarily a healthy thing for me personally, some other people might Thrive With that I just found it very disruptive and, and I think it probably brought with it its range of insecurities because you’re always the new kid and

 

you know that there was a range of things about that whole experience of what they were okay. I mean, we are who we are, because of how we’ve come to be, but it was okay. But it was also not okay. It wasn’t, wasn’t the greatest experience. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. And so I was a high school dropout wanted to be a muso. Oh, and, and so that’s what I put myself into. And if anything, I’d say that’s when I began to discover what a superpower is and that is just when I go in for something, it’s just 100%…  110%. It’s like all of a sudden, nothing else matters except the one thing that I’m doing. And so music became what I did and everything all my money which didn’t have very much but it all went into etc. And then I fell in love with Rhoda who’s my wife. And I realized that this music gig wasn’t going to necessarily the great long term income and I had to figure out what to do… and you know, won’t go into that done that big path but I ended up going to university and to get a degree so I could get my career going, other than being a muso with a big pirate earring. I had it…

 

Richard Matthews

Oh, nice.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. So yeah, so I guess that that still there was no entrepreneurship really going on, Although you know, just went through, studied, and I fell in love with learning how to learn. There’s a difference between learning and learning how to learn. I learned how to learn. It was a real struggle at first because I was a dropout. When I went back to university I ended up getting in through an alternative pathway–an adult pathway but I still then landed myself as someone who’s older with a bunch of kids who just came out of school a lot of them really smart and you know, I felt threatened I felt like it was a fraud like, I shouldn’t be there among the kids with really traditional upbringings. They’ve been through two schools primary school and high school and the University and it was like a straight path and mine was very different. But you know, I learned how to learn and I did really well at uni… Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews

That’s awesome. So, when did the transition from university into entrepreneurship happen?

 

Nic Lucas

Well, I was doing a master’s degree with no money as we would have to go and look in the clothes basket sometimes to see if a $1 coin would drop out so we could go and have coffee. We were totally skinned as I say. So to read books, we would go to the local bookstore and it was a Borders. They had chairs and we would read books in the bookstore because we couldn’t buy them. And I read, one that a lot of people have read, which is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That book literally blew my mind wide open, because I hadn’t had a reason to study money before. I mean, again, because of my background money was the root of all evil. The pursuit of money, as opposed to the pursuit of being a good person. That they were almost different. So I hadn’t gone to read business books. I hadn’t gone and pursued that. But it blew my mind wide open. And I realized that I had an incredible father, but he definitely wasn’t a rich dad. And we hadn’t had any of those lessons. And so this really, really was the turning point. So it wasn’t long after that, that I launched the publishing company that you talked about. I did that while I was still doing my master’s degree and that was really born out of a passion because the thing that we published was something I was very passionate about. It was a scientific journal. And there was a certain type of research that I was really looking to promote and that just that journal was a lot of hard work but it took off and we ended up with subscribers all around the world and then got taken up a lot like by Elsevier, which is the world’s largest medical publishing company. It was great–such a ride.

 

Richard Matthews

That’s incredible. And I liked the story to it actually. I don’t know if you notice that it mirrors mine–the book that got me started in the business was Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The difference was my dad–virtual fist bump–my dad put it in my hands at nine years old or 10 years old. I was really young and I became a man obsessed from a young age and I started my first business by the time I was 13–had it shut down by the government like six weeks later and….

 

Nic Lucas

What was it you were selling?

 

Richard Matthews

I was buying candy wholesale at the big-box store and selling my wares to my friends at school and then I got away with it for about $1,500 dollars of profits before I was told that I couldn’t sell food on campus without a business license and I was too young to get a business license. My first government shut down when I was 13. But I convinced my parents–I was 13 or 14–that they should drop me off at Barnes and Noble–which is similar to Borders–after daycare camp because I couldn’t afford the books I didn’t have any money so I would just sit in their chairs and read them after school.

 

Nic Lucas

So how cool is that?

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, the same kind of thing. Driving into a business so very cool. My next question for you is from your origin story. It’s interesting how you went from being a pastor’s kid to late-term University to running a successful business. What’s the weather like? How did you discover your superpower? In this neuro-digital strategist stuff….can you describe what your superpower is now and how you figured that out in that journey?

 

Nic Lucas

Again one of those things. It was hardly one but I had an incredible lecturer when I was at university in neuroscience and you know, she was amazing at what she did, she was a very active researcher as well. So we’re not just a teacher. So she was doing research publishing research and I just found her amazing and she took me under her wing. And I actually ended up then becoming a teacher in neuroscience and it kind of set me off on that path. I ended up lecturing neuroscience for 10 years. But you know, that was when the real discovery of the brain you know, excited mate, just too cold to me, you know when they say it takes all the people not the other way around. That was how that worked. So you end up understanding a lot about the brain when you have to teach it and then of course given the background I had with my dad when I grew up in the house… Our house was full of people who also had a lot of problems because of the workers in there was a lot of people there who came in who were injured people that were hurt people but our goal growing up was to help those people thrive, right? The idea is this amazing purpose that everyone and the question is can they enter into that and we all get injured us in some way, you know life and those things hold us back. So you can see the big where it began was this whole, you know, life experience from a very young age of seeing people who are injured who also want to thrive then learning all about the brain and then learning all about business you can’t help but then begin to apply all of those lessons across to the doing a business and so you know, for a while there later on… when I got into the publishing side of things that I fell in love with internet marketing, I just went gung-ho in that I learned about SEO and I ended up having an SEO agency, because I was good at it. So I helped other people, there were all these things that I, I got good at these other skills and people would ask me to help them and I’d help them. And as I was helping them, I’d realize these people were broken, you know, people and, and not not broken as in necessarily need therapy but broken as in they didn’t believe in themselves enough or they weren’t prepared to take a risk, like they needed to invest in something and they wouldn’t because of fear. And then I go, Well, why are you afraid and all this stuff would come up and it became this natural occurrence of me working with real people helping them on the business side of things with the technical cool stuff that I learned how to do webinars, how to do videos, all these kind of things, but it would always spill into the actual person what’s the person experiencing… and so the reason I call it near a digital is because the whole thing that I that I’m excited about can continue to be excited about is is the way we can leverage ourselves through these digital mediums. But of course, even though it’s like a

 

Richard Matthews

Unlock it with your mind. Yeah,

 

Nic Lucas

Exactly. So for me, it’s applying this to the digital things and it’s that mix together that puts me in a unique situation to be able to talk about both those things. So one minute I can talk be talking about how to get a big idea for a new product that’s going to capture who people and and and get them excited at the same time I might be talking to the CEO about you know, science just happened with the staff because one of these key people are just about to leave and that person was to leave that everything would fall apart so how does he go about being a great leader and a great person to deal with this other situation that’s just as important as the big idea…. and that’s where that comes from.

 

Richard Matthews

It sounds to me almost like–the picture I’m getting my head is–you’re the entrepreneurs’ version of Professor X. You’re helping all of us mutants understand our powers and leverage them.

 

Nic Lucas

I’ll go with that.

 

Richard Matthews

That just what popped into my head. But yeah, so they the superpower I guess is just being able to get into someone’s head and see where the blocks are and help them unleash their creativity–to unleash the things that they’re doing with their business, because you can help them get past any of the things that–you call it the injuries they’ve got it in their head.

 

Nic Lucas

Well, another way to look at it too is that if someone comes to me with a car and they want to put a rocket booster on it… and I help them do that, but their car is pointing in this direction. And if it’s not the direction they really want to go, all they’re going to do is get there faster because of the rocket booster. Very often the rocket booster on which direction are you really wanting to go–it comes down to two things that people choose to sell and whether it is actually enriching their lives. They might be making it and we might be able to speed the making it money up. But we’re also speeding fulfillment up at the same time. The two aren’t always the same and that’s one of the things that I have a problem with in terms of 10X as it’s thrown around. One of my mentors is a cognitive scientist. He’s actually the inventor of 10X. So his name is Michael and he did his first Ph.D. in Lateral Thinking. So, having learned it from the source–the whole idea that I think most entrepreneurs have on 10X is, “I just have to earn 10 times more and I’m prepared to work 10 times harder to do it.” Very often that leads to 10 times more trouble as well. So I’m like, “Well, hang on. Like there’s nothing wrong with only 10 times more or 100 times more. But there’s more to it than that. Right. It’s actually 10X thinking.” That’s actually where the first idea came from. “How does everything become 10 times better not just how do you get 10 times revenue.” And that’s a very practical discussion I’m having with a lot of people. It’s weird where my kind of X10 Entrepreneur comes from as well as getting people their whole life to be 10 times better not just in terms of revenue.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, I really like that it’s one of the things I talked about with my clients a lot is you have to be careful of the monster building. Make sure you’re the business you’re building is going to give you the life you want and nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of people see specific businesses…they compare themselves to other business…all these guys doing this amount of revenue, these guys are having this kind of effect and they want that type of business or something. They don’t look at what the life result is that comes along with that. Sometimes it’s exactly what someone wants. You have people that are like the Steve Jobs or Michael Dell where they build huge massive companies and that is their fulfillment. It’s what they want, but it’s not what everyone wants and I think people need to figure out what type of business they want and how that fits with the lifestyle goals they have.

 

Nic Lucas

So if an idea–like the idea of a million dollars a year, for example. If that idea, which is a meme if it’s taken over your mind–just because it’s taken over your mind and it’s directing all the other activities, doesn’t mean that it’s a valid idea. What I find is a lot of people don’t even question the idea. Who would question to earn a million dollars a year, of course? Boom! It goes in and my aim for the next 10 years is chasing this goal, or five years or whatever it is… and the scientist in me is…this is the other thing about it is to actually say, “Okay, you have an idea in your head it’s a very simple idea ‘Is it true?’ Let’s test this if there’s some science on this.” That’s a hypothesis that you want a million dollars a year. Okay. If that one hypothesis was an alternative hypothesis–I don’t know if you’ve done science or not–but that’s when you do an experiment you also add the hypothesis that you’re testing which is “I’m going to be happy if I own a million dollars.” Then you’ve got the alternative which is, “I don’t need a million dollars to be happy.” Or “I’m not going to be happy if I have a million dollars.” There are alternative hypotheses and you actually test them and so I end up laughing with my clients because sometimes the biggest breakthroughs that they have in their thinking come from me asking the most simple questions… nothing complicated… just challenging the underlying ideas robbing them in the first place you know.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah what’s interesting is that actually I I never did that experiment but I came I came to a similar conclusion for a long time I thought I need to hit you know $100,000 a year or 250 or a million dollars a year I had like an income goal in mind and realized that that’s not what I wanted and it was a number of years ago actually my company name now is it’s FiveFreedoms and I talked about the five freedoms are essentially Spiritual Freedom, Political Freedom, Financial Freedom, Time and Money, or sorry, time and time and location and realize that the most important ones for me where the time and location freedom and the amount of money that it takes for me to have the time and location freedom is significantly less than a million dollars a year.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, right.

 

Richard Matthews

And I’ve talked to a few of my clients about that now. I got one of the guys that I just helped cross the million dollars a year mark in his business and he tells me that he’s jealous of me. He’s like “I’ve got a million dollar a year business but you have the lifestyle I want.” And I was like “I realized a number of years ago that there were things that I wanted more and I started building my business around getting those things.” It’s interesting that you teach that because it was something that I stumbled upon.

 

Nic Lucas

I have an insight into your lifestyle and it looks great. I know that you’re going through another particular change right now and I have to ask you outside of the call about whether anything eventful has happened,

 

Richard Matthews

So yeah if referring to our baby number four, who is on the way, and anytime now my wife could burst through the door here during our interview with the “Hey it’s time to go.” but it has not happened yet.

 

Nic Lucas

With kids is–they don’t just require quality time they do require quantity time. That was one of the things I’d always promised myself as I was always going to be a dad who picks my kids up to school and pick them up from school and they’re both in high school now and I still do it. I don’t have to. They’re quite able to go to school by themselves. But I want to do it because I get to have even just that little ride in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s the same thing you can appreciate. Other things become more important–for me, at least I’ve chosen those as my priority.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, and I did the same thing. When my first son was born. One of the commitments I made to my wife–and it’s just very specific because it was something that I really wante-dI wanted to be able to have lunch with my kids every day. And it was specifically lunch, not breakfast or dinner because a lot of dads get to have breakfast or dinner with their kids but not very many get to have lunch with their kids every day. My son’s nine now and I can count the number of times I’ve missed lunch with him over the last nine years on one hand and mostly it’s just for business events and things like that. Even one of the last business events I put on for a big one of our big clients. I got to bring him and show him what we were doing because he’s getting to that age where it’s interesting now to him. You choose what your priorities are and it helps–it really helps. For me, it helps define business decisions. It’s like the filter that you use when you look at business decisions. One of the questions I asked myself, “If I do this…if I invest my time and resources and tough in my business and this thing is that going to mean I have more or less lunches with my kid?” You use those as your lens, your filter.

 

Nic Lucas

There are two times–you know, we’re not all perfect–I’ve made decisions that go against that. I think I’m going to make them just for a short period of time, right? Because there’s some other goal that has come up… with some of the projects that are too good to miss and everything, then whenever I’ve done it, it has actually never–to me–been worth it.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah,

 

Nic Lucas

I guess I’ve had to have that experience a number of times just to have it lived and experienced.  I should have gone through those experiences because they were the teachers…the experiences of me to have a better filter to be able to make better decisions in the future because of–

 

Richard Matthews

Lesson repeated until lesson learned, right?

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, exactly. Right.

 

Richard Matthews

To move on a little bit from superpowers–to the other side of that, which is the fatal flaw that every superhero has. Superman has his kryptonite. I tell people that my fatal flaw is I tend to be a perfectionist. And I will let perfectionism get in the way of accomplishing things. I’d like to talk a little bit about what you think your fatal flaw is, and then what you have been doing or what you have done in the past to help rectify that and overcome some of that in your business?

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, well my take on fatal flaws is you can’t have the good without the bad you can’t have one side without the other side. There’s a saying, “The bigger the front, the bigger the back.” if you look at a circle. Rather than it being good qualities and bad qualities, every quality is just a quality that has good and bad application. So that’s the way I see it. One of the best things that I’ve learned to do is to learn as a result of that because I’m so capable of it. The Curse of that is the needing and wanting–that constant stimulation of learning new things. Now, some people might class that as Bright Shiny Object Syndrome. And it’s not because when you look at that, those are people who are unable to stick with something and just literally keep on jumping from one thing to the other. I just find myself so deeply interested in so many things that there’s not enough time in the day. If all I had to do was to work out, look after the kids, and to spend time learning… I could easily find myself just doing that. The thing is, I’m learning stuff but I also really enjoy getting results as well. But funnily enough–this is just a statement, where I’m coming from. The results of great. But I’ve always enjoyed the learning more than the results are. So that means I can go ahead and learn something, almost apply it but they do not need to be applied because I already got the satisfaction from learning something. Especially if I might teach that or share because I’m just a natural born teacher. I like to teach what I’ve learned and what I’ve found out. A lot of the times–and this is kind of contrary to what’s in the marketplace–a lot of the times, I’ve taught things to my clients that they’ve gone and done and that have worked even though I haven’t done that exact thing. But that’s the beauty of it. Information isn’t validated whether I’ve done it or not. Information is valid–especially scientific information–it’s valid because it’s valid.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, I call that head knowledge versus heart knowledge, heart knowledge being stuff that you personally experienced, that had knowledge being stuff it’s just knowing like, you know, gravity makes you go down.

 

Nic Lucas

I mean, I don’t have to put up an opt-in form and collect names and emails to know that if you put up an opt-in form, you’re going to collect names and emails. So anyway, I would say here, that would be it. If I look at all of it, I would say it.

 

Richard Matthews

What’s interesting is, I’ve never really thought of that as a flaw in myself that I have the same problem where I tend to learn more than I like doing the things…and I find that I’ve had to build systems for myself. A part of my learning process is “How do I turn this into a system that someone else can do for me,?” because I know I’m never going to do it. I’m more interested in learning whatever the next thing is. If I have to do that in my business, I’m like, “Okay, I’ve learned it. Now, the next part of the learning is “How do I turn that thing that I learned into a system that someone else can do for me,?” Then they get to do it and the whole learning process that goes into where the problems are with that system and fixing it–making that better. And then after I’ve done that, I can step away from it. I can go on to learn something else. That’s how I’ve dealt with that problem. Because I would do the same thing. I could spend all day reading and listening to books and never actually accomplish anything because I would be totally satisfied and broke.

 

Nic Lucas

And broke! Look, there is a whole lot of character traits that have been found to define entrepreneurs and success. A whole lot of qualitative research has been done looking at entrepreneurs from different industries, different sized businesses to find out what is it that makes an ultra entrepreneur and there’s a whole lot of skills and interestingly one of them is what they call profit focus. Only one of them got the other nine things I think creativity and ability to delegate and a range of other things but one of those is profit focus. What I did is I had to look at myself. I was strong in almost everything except profit focus. It wasn’t just a natural thing for me to get up and looking…”What are the numbers today… How much money are we making?” So that’s something that I’ve had to say, “Okay, because I recognize that it’s something I’ve had to do on purpose as opposed to just getting up and being natural. That’s the system I’ve had to try and apply to remind myself to be profit focused. Oh, yeah, there’s an outcome here. And it’s not a weakness.

 

Richard Matthews

I think that’s it. That’s a really important thing for people to understand. If you realize what your natural inclinations are then you don’t have to be stuck by what those are. You can be intentional about doing things differently. One of the things I tell my kids all the time actually is you are defined not by how you think, but how you act… and you might not think as a profit-focused person, but if you get up in the morning, you’re like, I have to set an alarm I have to look, you know, add on to my calendar. Look at the numbers today. Then you go and actually look at the numbers, then you’re actually the kind of person has profit focus, even though it’s not. It’s not a thing that’s happening up here, right? You’re just forcing yourself to do that. So I don’t exactly know what to call that. But I know it’s a skill set that people needed to develop in a lot of different ways.

 

Nic Lucas

Look, there’s a lot of things in the personal development space. Thinking about doing what you love–which is great, but some of the most transformative things you can do is to learn to do something…to love something that you currently hate. There’s a really good example of this, I forgot the exact location–somewhere in Brazil… And it’s a whole lot of people who are so concerned about the environment that they actually go and spend time in the big rubbish dumps to find recyclable material. They hate going to the rubbish dump, except now, that higher purpose has required them to go do something that would be distasteful and stinky and smelly and unhealthy. Yet, they, they’ve now gone. But they’ve done it and they see the purpose that they’ve come to learn to love what they hate. It’s the same with exercise, you get someone who hasn’t exercised for a few years and you put them in a gym, they get red-faced and puffy, and it hurts and they’re sore three days later and they hate that…versus someone who’s come to love exercise. It’s a dangerous idea that we should only do what we love. You know,

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, I tell people that passion is not a foundation, but mastery is. So mastery begets passion, not the other way around. And then the better you get at things, the more you tend to like them and become passionate about them.

 

Nic Lucas

How many people are lucky enough to wake up and just know what their passion in life is.

 

Richard Matthews

I’ve not met or not met anyone yet,

 

Nic Lucas

Right!  So if you wait around looking for that to someone to hand down on you, or be shown to you, then what are you going to do in the meantime? That’s what I say to people. Look, in the meantime, what if you get really good at something?

 

Richard Matthews

One that you get really good at. Yeah, that’s amazing. So we’re to move on a little bit on what would you say your common enemy is? Every superhero has a common enemy. It’s the thing that you fight against. That if you could go into every entrepreneur all of your clients’ lives, and just remove that enemy–that villain. What would that be, if you could define it?

 

Nic Lucas

It’s thinking. It’s the slew of ideas–this massive constant string of ideas that are unquestioned….that we have that go on and that actually creates an incredible amount of struggle in people’s lives. And whether it’s struggling, or whether it’s stopping them from just doing the same thing they’re doing but much easier. That seems to be the thing that is constantly there. So all I have to do is listen to people and I can smell it. It’s all I have to do. Because I can just hear it in the language, the words that people use that reflect an underlying idea that’s an unquestioned idea. An idea that–the way that the brain works, and it’s pretty phenomenal, is that we actually have our thoughts before we become aware of them. So we’ve now got a technology called fast functional MRI that is so fast in terms of measuring blood flow that you can see the evidence of the thought being created in the brain and then you see the person become aware of it. So they’ve actually done this with chess.

 

Richard Matthews

That’s crazy.

 

Nic Lucas

Right. Where they can predict what move the person is going to make based on brain imaging before the person is aware of the decision they’re going to make.

 

Richard Matthews

That pre-cognition like computers can tell what you’re going to think before you think that.

 

Nic Lucas

That’s exactly what’s going on so we had this idea that we are the ones driving the ship but what’s happening is that our decisions are being presented to us. In the same way that our emotions get presented to us. So the way it works with a classic example of being in the jungle or something and you see a tiger. Your heart is already racing faster, adrenaline’s already been released, fear has already been generated, and then you become aware of all of this and try to process it. But you’re already starting to run. Yes, so it happens fast. But that’s the kind of order it happens in….because everything happens down in the lower parts of our brain. And when I mean lower, I mean, just literally lower down.

 

Richard Matthews

The subconscious parts.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, all those unconscious parts that are nothing to do with being politically correct. They’re not to do with thinking, or logic or anything like that at all. These are all modern concepts, right? These are just like, reactive things happening in our bodies. And so everyone kind of gets that idea. So what happens is, I see an actually–a really good example is this….if you put a frog in a cage and it had a lot of dead flies. The frog starves because what happens is when a fly is going past the frog, the image of the fly goes into the brain. But before it even then passes to the visual system, and then goes into its consciousness for it to become aware that there’s a fly, it’s tongue has already gone out and brought the fly in.

 

Right.

 

So there’s a reflex, just like the knee reflects. If you’ve ever been to the doctor and they tap your knee. That’s what’s happening to their tongue. That’s why they can be so fast. Because when they’ve calculated how long it would take for the brain to process, “Oh there’s a fly, it’s right there….I have to put my tongue out.” For the frog to consciously do that it wouldn’t be fast enough, and it would miss the fly. So that’s just an example in a frog. But it’s an example of something happening to us, our brain reacts in this unconscious level, and things happen as a result, and then we become aware of the progress.

 

Richard Matthews

I’ve noticed the same kind of phenomenon happen with driving. I’ve noticed that you can forget yourself and you will just go on automatic mode and drive. It’s because your brain is processing all this stuff and doing it. If you ever like when you’re driving, you’re just like, pay attention to how your arm is moving on the steering wheel and realize you’re not doing any of that. It’s just happening. Like your body is just making micro corrections all the time. And I’m sure it’s doing the same with all sorts of sports, but driving, it’s just, you know, you can actually pay attention to your hands and stuff and see what they’re doing. It brings credence to the idea that your brain is thinking before you are.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, it’s cool. And that’s cool. Ideo-motion and movement which is movement associated with the dominant idea that’s in your head. But you’re not necessarily aware of that. I bet you ended up in Florida and not knowing how you got there.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, right. It happens. It happens. You go from LA in Florida, I’d be like, dang, I got all across the country. But so what did you call that though?

Nic Lucas

Ideo-motor activity.

Richard Matthews

Ideo-motor activity. Never heard of that before. So I didn’t I had a name.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. William James. Psychologist. First talked about it in the 1800s? Yeah. So rather than it being a reflex, which is what the flying example was. And rather being volitional where, you know, I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel, I’m going to turn it off is all that other movement that we do that is not driven by a conscious decision. It’s just driven by decision. It’s just all happening unconsciously.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. To break it down. The common enemy is untested ideas. If you can remove untested ideas from your clients, just with a magic one. That’s what you would need to get rid of.

 

Nic Lucas

Or get them to learn how to start questioning them. Yeah, because it can change dramatically. Yeah,

 

Richard Matthews

Awesome. So to change gears here a little bit and talk a little bit about your favorite tools, right. Every hero has his tools. Thor has this big magic hammer, Batman’s got his bat-a-rangs. Maybe it’s just Evernote for you. You like the way you organize things in Evernote. What are some of the tools that you use on a regular basis to accomplish the work that you do?

 

Nic Lucas

Look, my favorite tool is a big A3 sheet of art paper–the big books. You can get a big one. Yeah, so that’s one of my favorite tools. And I’ve got different kinds of Sharpies with fine line tips and I put down my funnels on those first and I put my ideas down. I find that I enjoy that as a tool. That’s number one. And then I think when it comes to digital tools, I’ve got my stack of things that I like. And like any of us in this game, we will get our favorite tools. But you know, I love working with WordPress. I have developed mastery around certain things like Thrive Themes and other plugins to be able to do my work. I find–I mean, there are a lot because I build funnels and I just can make that stuff work. And it’s one of those really important things to decide. Because there’s a whole lot of different builders for WordPress, for example. And that could be really good. But there’s always a cost with having to go and learn another software. And even if it might be better on these and not so good on those. It’s the time and the cost it takes me to go and learn that. It’s my whole learning enemy–that weakness around “Okay, Is this me just going down another thing just because I could learn it? Or is it really going to make a difference to the outcome?” And so I’ve decided with a particular thing.

 

Richard Matthews

I find that interesting too. Because I discuss this a lot with my clients. They’ll copy like, “I’m not making sales. I’m not getting the sales I want. Maybe I need to change my scheduling software. Maybe I need to change my page builder. Maybe I need to switch from ClickFunnels to Leadpages. Maybe I need to go from Infusionsoft Active Campaign…” We tend to default the tool as the problem rather than the messaging or marketing. So I see that happen a lot. Maybe we should just stick with the tool you have and see if we can nail the marketing because pretty much all the tools at this point will do what you need to do.

 

So I did that happen a lot.

 

Nic Lucas

The only thing that I’d say about that is that be better at this whole thing about designing the life that you want. You don’t want your life to be constrained by the technology that you choose either. So there does sometimes come to a breaking point where you go, you know what this particular technology is–

 

Richard Matthews

–but is not working.

 

Nic Lucas

–or it’s making business decisions for me. As opposed to me having the flexibility to make the business decision I want. I have to make it this way. Because that’s the way that technology works. If you start coming up against hard things like that, then it could be a good reason to look at some other alternatives. But looking at other alternatives just because there is….it’s not a great idea.

 

Richard Matthews

So how would you help someone navigate that? Like if they were thinking, “I’ve got a technology problem. Or maybe do I have a technology problem or not?” It’s probably the better question like, how do they determine if I just want to change because I like to change things. And they may be misusing their time versus it’s actually constraining them.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. In a couple of times, I’ve had that particular situation arise, it’s been more about them trying to understand the capabilities of the tool they’ve got, and what’s actually really going on. If there’s an easy way to do something. It really becomes a case by case example about, you know, is the technology really in the way? Or is it would it be so much easier for him to do it this way, it’s a case by case the discussion I think it comes down to it. And admittedly too, when I’ve had those discussions, they were even going back a few years. So what a couple of key people are remembering–back then some of the technology differences were quite stark. But like you say, now everything becomes so easy. Some so useful most of the time. Like you say, the technology can do what it needs to do, no matter which one you’re using. Or if you go from here to there, what you gain here, you lose. So it is something over here. Yeah, it’s about are you worrying about stuff that doesn’t even matter to the big picture.

 

Richard Matthews

So I want to, I want to bring back your A3 paper real quick because I’ve noticed a common thread among entrepreneurs, that drawing things out tends to be a big part of their thinking process. I’m curious if there’s any sort of neurological stuff that goes into that because it’s very common that I’ve noticed a lot of entrepreneurs. Whether that’s in a piece of paper, or it’s in a notebook….I tend to use mind maps for the same kind of thing, just because I have no drawing abilities. If I draw it on paper, I wouldn’t be able to read it again. But I have to, I have to have like, a brain dumping place. And I’m curious if there’s any science behind that, and how that sort of the facts entrepreneurs,

 

Nic Lucas

Very much. What we do with our bodies has an impact on our brain. And the way it works, or even just, they’d be numerous neuroscience things to explain what you just talked about why that’s a good thing, I’ll go for two examples here. One is that if I got you to hold a plank position for 30 seconds, 40 seconds, a minute. After holding a plank, that is hard to do, but you can get up and walk. But if you’re, he went ahead, do a plank, again, you’d be tired, you’d be fatigued, because that particular group of muscles, the way you did, you know, held them has become fatigued and needs to be replaced. Our brain is of the same way. Thinking is a very, very energy expensive activity to do, and also doing certain things. So you think about this, we sit wherever, and we’re typing up…this is what we’re doing, that’s the action, it’s just driving certain neural pathways all the time, that do get fatigued. And so it can be a really good idea to do something different other than this. Getting an A3 bit of paper out, it might seem like a subtle difference. But doing this is a different movement that doing this, and I can tell you right now that this, you know, it’s very specific neural pathways, they end up getting fatigued, I mean, our body is great at replacing them, you can sit for hours and hours doing this because I know that I’ve done that. But I’m doing something different just makes a different environment in your brain. And I find that I can be much faster, you know, I’m sure there’s probably not much difference between A3 or doing it on some kind of iPad or tablet, it’s the same activity just doing something different.

 

Richard Matthews

So you just physically change to your space, right? You’re just doing different things with your muscles to accomplish the same thing.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. And if you’re doing different things with your muscles, there are only a very few stops between this and your muscle anyway. So the fact that you’re doing different things with your muscles major…doing different things with your brain and then you change the environment. But what you do, which kind of leads me to this next idea is that we can often own only somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of absolutely focused time. That’s about all we’ve got. And we might think that we can sit there for an hour to focus. But in actual fact, if we were to put measures on our brain, we find that after 10 minutes, we start to lose focus. We might bring it back if you get up every 10-20 minutes and you even just throw your arms around the place, even for a minute or two. This full body movement–it’s just not doing this whole focus thing–it’s giving you a chance for your brain to refresh and activate a whole lot of other parts in your brain like waking it up with a system reboot if you want to think of it that way. Then you’ll actually be more productive and be able to focus better than doing nothing.

 

Richard Matthews

The Pomadoro Technique is based on that science, I believe. Where you spend 10 or 15 minutes focused and then you take a minute to just do something different. Stand up, walk around, get a drink of water, it’s probably healthier for you anyways, to get up and move a little bit.

 

Nic Lucas

In terms of back pain, and all those kinds of things too. There was that research that came out, it’s a large study and there’s a thing called all-cause mortality. And what we know is that you sit for more than five hours a day that you increase your risk of dying from everything. All-cause mortality.

 

Richard Matthews

I need a standing desk immediately.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, one of my clients the other day, he doesn’t have just a standing desk but has his computer up on a treadmill. And when we’re doing webinars and stuff, he’s walking there with these headphones on, you can see him basically up and down as he’s walking on a treadmill.

 

Richard Matthews

That’s cool. So I really like that discussion. I like the idea. And it’s one of the things I’ve been putting off like buying an iPad or something like that, just because I know I would use it. But the use case would be very small. For me, it would just be like writing notes and stuff like that. But it might be a worthwhile investment, just in my own health and creativity to do something like this through those iPad pros so I can move around. And the other thing too, is like my laptop is…there’s a very specific position you have to be in to use a laptop, right? You have to sit up and you have to sit in front of the keyboard, you have to go to see the keyboard and you have to have it like on something whereas with a tablet or a piece of paper or something like that…you can sit on the couch or go outside and you can use it differently.
Your own personal heroes. Every every hero has their own personal heroes, Frodo has Gandalf Luke has Obi-Wan Kenobi. Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad–whom you mentioned earlier. Who are some of your heroes? Your mentors? Are they real life or are they people in books? Maybe they’re just peers over a few years ahead of you? How did they influence your life and what you’ve accomplished so far on your business?

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, well, let’s stick with the fun example. And that’s actually talking about superheroes. The first time I saw Iron Man, that superhero caught my attention–that movie. For a couple of reasons that most people why they like Iron Man. One was that–again, he wasn’t just Superman. And the reason he’s got powers is that he’s in our atmosphere. He had the privilege in terms of finance. But he had to do something with that privilege and he did. He became an expert at what he did. He had a life experience that was transformative as well. He was all about the money and then, had the life experience that what was more important. And built this amazing thing that gave him the ability to do it. But he’s a flawed, flawed character. You’ve got the good, the bad. I think so many people are attracted to that superhero because he’s not perfect. I could be like him because there are flaws. So that’s, that’s a great example. And I related to it again because it is–the word I use is meritorious. It’s like when you go through university, the way you get a reward, and you do well, is by merit. There’s no getting through, I hope there’s no getting through for other reasons, like paying a little more or, you know, did some favors. I think we want that level playing field, right?

 

Richard Matthews

Where we can work and get the result.

 

Nic Lucas

Where you can work and get the result. And there’s actually an entire discipline called Positive Deviance around this. When we hear the word deviant, we think of it in a negative context. But deviance is a statistical term where you’ve got an average distribution of people and the average is here and positive deviance is just deviating from the normal but in a positive direction. What the field of study is doing…you go into communities, and it could be anything from entrepreneurs. And you look for examples of people who are getting extraordinary results, even though they’ve got the same resources as everyone else.

 

Richard Matthews

And see what’s actually letting them do that.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. You go in, and you observe, and you discover what it is that they’re doing. And because there’s no special circumstance, there’s no, “Oh, we happen to have a gold river running by and we just dip into the gold.” And so that’s why, you know, there’s no kind of special thing. Then what you can do is learn what they’re doing. Then it’s teachable and you can help everybody to learn that. I think that it’s very much the case of online or digital business. Yes, people do have special privileges. But there’s a heck of a lot of people who are doing incredibly well who just started out–deciding to learn how to master this side of things. And it’s all available for them to learn.

 

Richard Matthews

That could almost be an alternate name for this show. Positive deviance is what we’re looking to do. We look at people who have unnaturally good results and see what’s behind the hero’s mask, so to speak. What are they doing differently than other people? They have the same access to resources that we do…same 24 hours in the day. So that’s really cool. Okay, so the last question for the interview is your guiding principles. What are the top one or two principles or actions that you use regularly? Like, on a daily basis that contributes to the success and the influence you have in your business–that you wish you knew or had when you started out?

 

Nic Lucas

When I started out I was very driven, like most people, by ambition. It’s a good character trait. That’s an ambitious person and he can get things done. Then you get status as a result of that. You always get positive feedback for ambition, except that I really found it hard to enjoy my results as I went along. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them. But it seems so temporary. Like, you’d spend all this time and effort to achieve something, and then boom, you would literally achieve it in a second. And you might feel good about it, thinking back on it. But the time came and went. The actual achievement just about came and went to so quickly. This is what I began to discover in a lot of the clients I coach. There is this driven ambition. They were angry, frustrated, annoyed at things. There’s always something going wrong, or some drama, it’s just none of this. None of this feels right. Especially when I anchor it back to the early experiences I had with my father, whose entire life has been about helping people find peace and calm right at this moment and being content at the moment. I realized that I was ambitious, but I wasn’t content. And I had to reframe how I thought about that so that it did become a guiding principle. What I’ve found is, the words have meaning for me. You might have words at me differently for me, but I’ve kind of tossed aside the idea of ambition at all. What I’ve realized is that I’m actually a very creative person, we all are. We create things. I don’t mean creative in terms of poetry, songs, and music. I’m talking about the creation of stuff and business. That’s what we’re doing. We’re creating. In any moment, I can either be at peace, I’m resting, I’m chilling out, or I can be active. And at that moment, I want to be creative on it, be creating something. And if I’m creating something, or I’m relaxing, either way, I’m content. So I found a way to be in the moment and be creative or chilled. Either way, I’m content and I’m never saying I’ll be content or happy when I’m not driven by that ambition to say, “When I finally get that, then that’s when I can be happy. That’s when I can relax.” I would say that overall, what I get up in the day to do is to find and live in that moment of contentment. But I can be incredibly creative and be working towards things for the future. I still have goals in the future. The difference is, not being ambitious about them, and then putting off being content at the moment until you get there in the future.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, it’s magical. And actually I have something similar I do in my life, I use a different set of vocabulary for it. But I call that thought–that almost the exact same thought process–I call that having contented ambition. The idea for me is that I have things I’m moving towards, but the journey is the thing that I’m enjoying. The journey is the thing that I’m having contentment with. Because that’s really where the magic is. The magic is in the journey. And because destinations, especially in life–we’re passing through time, every moment is transient. You’re just there for a split moment in time. You learn to be content in the journey, which is something you have to, train yourself for because it’s not something we’re taught culturally. I figured the ambition part of that is just having a destination for your journey. Like, I know the direction I’m going and that’s where the ambition is, but the contentment with the journey. So it’s very similar. It’s cool that you have you something similar that you do for your business.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah, because that the future actually never comes. It just never does. We all know tomorrow never comes. It’s always now. The brain works too is that anything about the future is just a complete imagination. And we’ve got a million and more ultimate futures rushing toward us, depending on what we do at the moment. It’s all about the moment and then the past too. You’ll know if you’ve come across any neuroscience research…the past and memory recall, the past is biased, by the way, this is a hazy memory anyway, it’s not like a hard drive we can go back and reread or rewatch the same thing. That’s dodgy and the future is just anything we can imagine. What’s the only thing that’s happening is literally what’s happening right now. That’s it. Some religious practices have focused on that. But it doesn’t need to be anything about spirituality. It’s about reality.

 

Richard Matthews

Yeah, that’s just the way it is. Okay, so this is really fun. I have one more thing that I do on the show, it’s not really a question. I call it the hero challenge. And hero challenge is, do you have someone in your life and your network that you think has a really cool hero story that we should tell on the show that you’d be able to, to introduce and, and bring on the show and share their story?

 

Nic Lucas

I do,

 

Richard Matthews

Who would that be

 

Nic Lucas

His name is Glen Campbell. He is now in a similar field to me. He works with leaders. But his background is incredible, actually, through advertising agencies. He’s been MD and CEO of major advertising agencies–in charge of budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. But the work he’s doing in business with leaders is really quite amazing as well. His background story is classic. He is a force to be reckoned with.

 

Richard Matthews

We’ll reach out to the show to see if we can find a way to connect with him. Last thing, thanks for being on the show. And where can people find you? If they’re struggling? What kind of things are they struggling with should they reach out to you for? Where can they reach out if they want to?

 

Nic Lucas

Facebook is a great place to find me and also the website and I’ve got a slightly different spelling for my name. So this is me when I was a kid. I was pedantic, right? My name is Nicholas. But there’s no K in Nicholas so I couldn’t understand why you would spill Nic as N-I-C-K. So I just felt it. Nic. I remember the time when I just said “Mom, you can’t call me Nicholas anymore. It’s got to be Nic.” And it is spelled N-I-C. So my websites Nic Lucas:  NicLucas.com. And that’s the same on Facebook either of places there and again. It’s really what I’ve discussed today, you know, my real passion is to help entrepreneurs better succeed in their business but with an absolute flair for helping them get their mind right. Because all the profit starts in the mind. And that’s what I do.

 

Richard Matthews

I love it. Okay, so just to recap there, it’s Nic Lucas. N-I-C. NicLucas.com or on Facebook: Nic Lucas, and they can find you. For those who don’t know, I’ve been working with Nic for a few months now on a couple of clients together. And he’s been fantastic. So if you have an opportunity to reach out and talk to him, or you have struggled with your messaging or any of the Brain Stuff, definitely reach out to Nic. It’ll be a giant positive for your business.

 

Nic Lucas

So I scratched the surface and then all this stuff comes out underneath. It’s awesome.

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:15

Yeah, absolutely. So again, thank you for joining us today, Nic and I appreciate you coming on.

 

Nic Lucas

Yeah. Awesome.