Find Your Archetype

 

The Misconceptions of the

Un-Researched Mind

I have spent years playing sports and all of the various typical training regimens associated with them.  Soccer, my first love, I played since age 5 all the way through travel and high school varsity, attending the University of Indiana Soccer Camp, one of the most storied programs in the nation.

 

In the winters it was ice hockey and indoor soccer.  Both line-changing sports required bursts of exertion followed by rests on the bench.  This involved training to increase coordination, speed, acceleration, and agility along with interval conditioning.

 

In middle school, I began distance running and as such was exposed to methods to increase my endurance.  I went on to eventually anchor our high school 4x400m relay as well as compete individually at every distance up to the 2 mile.  My favorite was the 800m run.  It required the perfect balance of guts, endurance, and speed: long enough to demand a keen sense of strategy in timing your kicks, but also short enough to require sprinting ability as well.  The 800 got to the point faster than other races.  By contrast, the 400 was too short to be a real mental battle, especially if one was in peak shape, and the 1600 was too long to demand much of a sprint – although an event more dreaded due to having to endure pain and a mental battle for 4 laps instead of 2.  The 800 dared you to try an earlier strike than your opponent, and the stakes of every decision of pace were doubled since you effectively had half the time to compensate.

 

In high school, I took up pole-vaulting which put a new premium on upper body strength and jumping ability as well as required acrobatic coordination and the guts to launch inverted on a coiled fiberglass pole  over basketball-rim-heights.

 

In college at the University of Michigan, I decided to try out for the boxing team.  It consisted of several grueling workouts and a final spar during which I learned a new level and type of endurance, muscular instead of aerobic.  I was fairly fit aerobically for the tests, and thanks to a successful first round I was awarded as the top recruit of the class.  My hard work in the fitness and skills over the next two seasons would earn me a promotion to Captain at the end of my sophomore year.

 

I say all this not to brag, but to inform you of the diversity of the sports I’ve had experience with and training I’ve undergone so that my following comments will be given all the much more weight.

 

Until I decided to begin researching the best ways to obtain my objectives in the areas of health, fitness, and productivity, I had practically no knowledge of the human body, nutrition, enzymes, or the effects of various forms of exercise.  This being the case despite of all of the exposure and coaching I’d received in sports over the years.  I had even run from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and back during the semester I studied abroad at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Throughout all that time no one ever told me about the link between diet and mood or diet and energy, and if they mentioned it, it went in one ear and out the other because their argument wasn’t factual enough.

“Yeah right… I can eat whatever I want and still be healthy because I have good genes and I’m active and thin.”

Sorry, even though you are thin you aren’t in your peak performance state until you master nutrition, sleep, exercise, and positive thinking.

For me, diet and exercise are the easier ones to control because – I can’t just will myself to sleep… (yet).  But I can will myself to eat right, and work out for 10 minutes a day – and so can you, so can anyone, because everyone has 10 minutes a day they are spending on something less important:

TV and email, need I say more?

 

Now, my point is that unless you’ve read a few books on health and fitness, you really don’t know jack.  I didn’t, and I’d had some of the most versatile training any kid could hope for.  If you want to be great at something, you have to read up on it with an open mind, taking nothing anyone has ever told you as fact or gospel.  You need to read books and fact check endnotes to back up someone’s claims.

Searching for the ANSWER?
What most people want is an ANSWER:  “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” they say.  At least that’s what I wanted.  I wanted the answer.  Here is my goal.  What do I need to do to accomplish it??
Just tell me exact steps, and I’ll follow it!

But the answers weren’t just given to me on a silver platter, and although I’m trying to hand them over to you, undoubtedly you will need other answers as well.  So, you have to do the searching.  It’s part of the quest that is life.  You’re on a quest for the right information, for the answers that you need.

Find your Archetype
My advice to you is this:
Find the best exemplar of who you want to be and learn from them.  Read what they write.  Read what they read.  Watch interviews of them.  Do what they do.  Think how they think.  Say everything they say.

Copy them like a good and trusted shadow.

Andrew Carnegie and

Napoleon Hill’s “Power Cabinet”

Napoleon Hill, the writer commissioned by Andrew Carnegie to conduct a 25-year study of millionaires and the one who coined the phrase “All we have to fear is fear itself” discovered a method he credits as giving him massive gains in personal growth, development, inspiration, and creativity.

Seen Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
If not, it’s pretty cool, they go back in time and gather up some of the most influential people throughout history and bring them back into the present for a school history project.  San Dimas High School Football Rules!!  Lol.

The Invisible Counselor Technique is much the same.

Here is how it works:
You decide what qualities and insights you would most want to acquire and add the person who exhibits that quality or possesses that knowledge to your Power Cabinet, a group of advisors that come to you in your dreams (night and day) and teach you the things you most want to know.

Sound like a load of bull?

It might be…

But Napoleon Hill was a pretty smart dude, and it sounds cool, and since the cost of trying is zero, it’s worth checking out.  Plus, I think whether it works as Hill says or not, it is a beneficial exercise to nail down what exactly you want to improve at and finding a person who is an archetype of that quality.  By giving yourself time each day to imagine and visualize these characters come to life you undoubtedly will improve at acquiring and integrating their qualities.

My Power Cabinet

 

Napoleon Hill – Author

Andrew Carnegie – Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Author

Brian Johnson – Entrepreneur, Philosopher, Author

Tim Ferriss – Entrepreneur, Author

Warren Buffett – Investor, Philanthropist

Josh Albert – Entrepreneur, Researcher, Author

Carl Drew – Salesman, Speaker, Author

Biranchi Das – Coach

Steve Prefontaine – Front Runner

Leonardo da Vinci – Inventor, Artist, Author, Designer

Pablo Picasso – Artist

Thomas Edison – Inventor

Mahatma Gandhi – Leader

Michael Jordan – Athlete, Author

David Blaine – Endurance Artist, Magician

Harry Houdini – Athlete, Magician

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Author

Ayn Rand – Author, Philosopher

Frank Lloyd Wright – Designer

Jeff Bry – Manager

My Uncle, John Coopes – Father

My Uncle, Dave Springgate – Businessman

My Grandma Coopes – Willpower

Lauren Baldauf – Interviewer
Brian Johnson, Philosophers Notes
As a 24-year-old law school dropout turned Founder/CEO, Brian Johnson, led the creation of eteamz – the world’s largest amateur league sports website provider.  Eteamz won UCLA’s Business Plan competition, raised over $5 million of capital, grew from 3 to 45 employees in less than a year (including the CEO of Adidas and the eventual winner of Apprentice II).

Brian decided to sell the business for over $13 million of stock and cash in 2000, and give himself a Ph.D. in Optimal Living.

He couldn’t find a program that integrated everything he wanted to study—from old school philosophy, positive psychology and spirituality to nutrition, health & fitness, creativity, business and modern self-development. So, he decided to create his own doctoral program.

He read hundreds of books and traveled a bit studying Jesus in Jerusalem, Marcus Aurelius in the Danube of Hungary, Rumi in Konya, Turkey, and Socrates in Greece. On his return, he created A Philosopher’s Notes and the Entheos Academy where he began distilling “More Wisdom in Less Time.”
Tim Ferriss: 4-Hour Work Week and the 4-Hour Body
I knew Tim Ferriss was one of my archetypes when I stumbled upon his first book the 4-Hour Work Week while perusing Barnes & Noble one day in July of 2009.  His intro hooked me.  Among many accomplishments, Tim founded BrainQUICKEN, a drink sold on the internet, outsourced his company and then his life to go on to become the National Kickboxing Champion of China and win a world title in Tango in Brazil.  He speaks several languages and travels the world, now a best-selling author and blogger.

He had achieved what I had wanted and the book gave me all the tools I’d need to follow in his footsteps.  Later I’ll talk more on his next book about fitness and diet called the 4 Hour Body…

Josh Albert: Potentialism.com
Founder of Potentialism.com, Josh Albert, told me he had lost 60lbs by following Tim’s simple plan in 4HB, but since I wasn’t looking to lose weight I put off looking at the book for a long time.

I felt I had to get other things done first – a mistake I can see now is a classic barrier to success.  I feel another lesson coming on…

The Urgency of Energy!!
This reminds me of a story about two lumber jacks.  They were both told to chop through a certain amount of the forest as part of a race.  No this is not like the tortoise and the hare, lol.  The one lumber jack took off chopping with a fury, continued throughout the day without taking a lunch break and into the night.  The second lumber jack worked at a steady pace and after each tree would sit down to rest.

By the afternoon he had caught and passed the first guy.  When the first finished, the second was done and waiting for him.  Upon his arrival the first lumber jack asked the second how he had beat him when he had started first and taken no breaks.  The second smiled and said, “Every time I sat down I was sharpening my axe.”

 

Never postpone learning about things you do every day for finishing a big project.  The energy exercise, diet, and sleep impacts every day of your life starting tomorrow.  Your body is your axe and these things are what sharpen you.

The knowledge you learn reading about nutrition and fitness innovations will transform your energy and life instantly.  This makes it URGENT info.  Get it ASAP, even if it’s only 10 min a day.  Download Tim’s audiobook and listen to 10 min a day.  Buy his book and use it as a buffet, he’s even set it up that way.

Gain Muscle? → Geek to Freak
Rapid Fat Loss? → Slow Carb Diet
Stronger but not Bigger? → Become Superhuman
Long Distance Running Endurance? → 5k to 50k in 12 weeks

Each goal has its own recipe set up with a list of chapters he tells you to read for each.

I Don’t Need to Read about Health, I’m Healthy.  

I eat Healthy!  I Exercise!
If you just bought a new dishwasher with hundreds of buttons that you didn’t understand but you knew it was some new updated technological wonder of a dishwasher, would you check out the manual or just throw any old soap in there and hit some buttons hoping the light would turn green and clean dishes would come out?

What if this dishwasher cost you $100,000?
How much is your body worth?

How many years has it been since you checked out updates and guidance about how it works?

 

Remember that cool phone Zack Morris used to use that was the size of his head?  That cool new thing called a cell phone?  Yeah that’s a little outdated now, just like a lot of classic health knowledge!  For instance, have you heard of the GLUT4 protein?

A Fat-to-Muscle Switch
It is essentially a switch that tells the body to turn food into fat or muscle.   Activate or deactivate the GLUT4 and you will make muscle not fat.  It’s that simple.   How do you switch the GLUT4 in your favor you ask??

You exercise.

You can do as little as 40 air squats or 50 wall presses right before you eat, and bam: food turns to muscle not fat.  You also should do the same or another exercise for approximately the same duration 90 minutes after you eat as well to keep the GLUT4 activated.

So if you keep thinking that’s all there is to the human body, you might want to take a look at Tim’s 600-page masterpiece called 4 Hour Body.

From reading Tim’s book I found dozens of new phrases I didn’t even know I needed: Paleo Diet, Pose Method of Running, and Occam’s Protocol.

Become NEO from the Matrix
So now I had new power phrases to Google and download to my brain.  I swear, every time I download something, especially an audiobook, I feel like Neo in the Matrix when he turns to Morpheus and says “I know Kung Fu.”  Yes, god bless the internet.

“How’s he doing?”
“8 hours of combat training, he’s a Machine.”

Born to Run
So a friend recommended I read Born to Run a while back and until I finally downloaded it on audio I couldn’t get to reading it.   The subtitle is so awesome I knew I’d like it.  “A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen,” by Christopher McDougall.

McDougall gave me another key phrase: the name Emil Zatopek.
à Read p. 95 of Born to Run

 

It outlines a fitness regime that allowed Zatopek to go undefeated in 64 straight races, setting world records and winning gold medals in the process.  Think you are in shape?  Try it.
Think you couldn’t be a champion?  Try it.

I challenge you to see how good of shape your body is capable of getting into.  Are you really genetically inferior to Zatopek (hard to believe if you read up on him) or are you just not following through?

… OR how many medals did you win??  :)

If there is a limiting factor, I’ll bet it is your mind, NEO, not your body.
You think that’s air you’re breathing?   Hmm… <Raises eyebrows>

Born to Run (BTR) outlines a documentary of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico.  The tribe runs for hundreds of miles at a time.  The entire tribe – 60 year old men all the way down to 5 year olds.  They exist for the most part on a seed they boil to make tea and their own home-brewed beer.

This diet allows them to sufficiently run hundreds of miles and in nothing but thin sandals.
There had to be a way to change my body into that.
So I began reading, and discovered my answers:

Emil Zatopek: 400m repeats
Dr. Nicholas Romanov: Pose Method of Running
Brian MacKenzie: Crossfit Endurance
Robb Wolf: The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet
Ken Mierke: Evolution Running

Ok enough of my rant.
Let me now give you the best formula I can for effecting the change you seek.

Sound good?
Good, check it out yo!

On Failure

On Failure

Seek failure in everything you do.  Most people when they are lifting weights – or anything else – go to COMPLETION (if they don’t quit early).  That’s the norm.  Draw a line, go to it, and stop and pat yourself on the back, “Good job, you did it.  You finished,” you tell yourself.

Mental Gaskets
In order to increase the strength or your muscles you need to push to FAILURE.  You do reps until you can’t finish – until you are breathing and fighting and blowing smoke and the weight is just sitting there motionless.

And you fight it and fight it and fight it.

You see how long you can keep it up there, and you blow gaskets trying to get that weight up one more time.  If it starts to drop, you throw another log on that fire inside you, and you fight to get that thing going back the right direction.

When at last you see that all your strength (and you know you aren’t willing your arm a break) is still only stalling it since it is still moving down ever so slightly, you close your eyes (to block out the thought of it from coming down) and you grunt and yell and keep fighting.

You do mini reps.
You keep moving up and down, little pumps, until you again hit a 2^nd motionless point, and you repeat the grunt and this will be your last rep.  You hold your position as long as your body will.  You keep fighting until your arm is all the way down.  That is FAILURE.

The Last Rep
The thing about the exercise – whether it’s a set of bicep curls or a phoning session or some other life trial with no clear end – you do all the preceding work in order to get to that final exam, the last rep, the last call, the last whatever.

Yes I CAN, Yes I WILL
You don’t count your reps every time you do it.  You don’t measure your strength, that’s not why you exercise or phone (to see how strong you are).  You work to get stronger. You want to get to that last rep.  You are wanting to fail.  You are rushing toward failure as fast as possible.  You want to destroy that muscle, that phone will.  You do your reps like business as usual until that last rep, and you never know how many it will be, and you don’t care.  It’s about saying YES, I WILL MAKE IT ONCE MORE.  YES I CAN, YES I WILL.

Each time you let that weight down or press the disconnect button.  How many doesn’t matter.  It’s always one more.  One more. One more.  One more.

This one Makes You GROW
When I get to my last rep I am saying to myself this is it.  This is WHY I’ve done the other 20, or 100, or whatever.  This is game time!

I’m going to GROW on THIS rep.  THIS is the rep that MAKES ME.  I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.  I’m going to hold that weight up for as long as I freakin’ can.  I’m gonna shake and sweat and turn beat red holding that thing up.

I don’t decide I’m done, my arm does.  
You can take that power of your mind with you in anything you do.  Go out and run until your legs can’t move.  It’s scary as hell.  When you aren’t trying to aim for the PR (personal record) or being strategic and having to save some and pace yourself to “make it” but instead say I’m going to run for 6 minutes as HARD and as FAST as I can go for every second of it because I WANT to “die” not at the end, but ASAP because I WANT to FAIL… I WANT COMPLETE FATIGUE…

Daaaaannnnng…

That is scary business my friend.  
That would mean you all out sprint 100m, 200m dash pace for the next 200m, then 400m dash pace for, well you are probably lead by now, but you have to keep “sprinting” until 6 minutes is up.  You have to dig deep.  You have to FAIL.  You have to completely exhaust yourself, guaranteed.

By the time you hit your second lap you’ll be lead.  You’ll be driving your legs like you are pushing a sprint, but they’ll only be pumping out a jog.  That’s the feeling that makes you want to quit, that and your breathing is so fast.  But you just say this is what I ran the last 400m for, to get to this point so I can tire myself all the way out.  I want to “die.”  That’s the whole point.

Sign me up for 15 miles, Coach.  Anything but failure.

Can you Imagine someone who says:
“I don’t have time to work out?”  
“I’m just too busy with all my responsibilities to get a workout in…”

WHAAAAT???

You are telling me you can’t take 2 minutes to run as hard as you can twice each day?  If you did that ONE workout once (2 x 2min max distance run) each day, I guarantee you will get in the best shape of your life.  Mentally and physically.  Guaranteed.  It would take 6 minutes.  2 minutes on, 2 rest, 2 on.  If you are reading this doubting that you can achieve peak fitness – or rather your PR fitness level – in 6 minutes a day with as short of a workout as that, I will tell you a secret: You don’t work out to burn calories.  You work out to signal your body (in the sense of enzymes and proteins) to do something.  Increasing your heart rate is comparable to brushing your teeth – twice a day to remind your system to keep building a better stronger heart and muscles.  The exercise is like the order from the architect to the foreman to get back to work on that skyscraper.  Results are not directly proportional to the length of time you work out.  That would be like the architect harping on the foreman for an hour about how they need to get back to work.  All that is needed is a reminder – quick and powerful though.  The foreman will get back to work harder and more effectively if you get right in his face (go to failure) than if you just ask nicely (completion).
Mental Barriers Justifying Your LAZINESS
So let’s walk through these mental barriers that are justifying your laziness, yes laziness – or weakness if you prefer.  Toughen up.  It’s not going to kill you, it’s going to MAKE you.

Ok so here’s how it usually goes:

1. I don’t have time
2. I don’t have time to do the other stuff (change, shower, etc.)
3. I don’t have what I need (clothes, equipment, etc.)
4. I just don’t care that much
5. I will do it (or more) later
6. I just don’t feel like it right now
7. I’m hungry, hungover, sore, tired, etc. (sick is purposely not included)
8. It’s too cold, rainy, snowy, windy, hot, dark, etc.
9. I just did X yesterday

Let’s take these one at a time.

I used to run to work and back 3 times a week, that’s 7.5 miles each way for about an hour each way. Then in 2012, I did some reading on endurance.

The best way to improve your long distance endurance is by doing interval training (400m repeats for instance) – that’s awesome I thought, I can train with like ¼ the time investment.

Today, I did a 400 (one lap) as hard as I could (75 sec), waited 90 seconds, then did another 400 as hard as I could (80 sec), then waited another 90 seconds and ran my last 400 because I quit.  Yes, I quit.

The instructions were to quit if your pulse doesn’t come back down to below 120 measured after 90 seconds of rest.  I should have just banged it out, but I let the excuse of my pulse stop me.  Some will say that’s wise, but my pulse was 124 after 90 seconds of rest, and I’m not sure how accurate that was.  I basically just didn’t want to push myself again.  So I quit.  I hate admitting it, but my mind had so many excuses to quit.  The track was covered in ice for the last 100m, it was my first day doing interval training, and it was only 7:30am, I was better in the afternoon, etc.  They all piled up on me and got the better of my judgment.  My willpower was depleted.

You know what got the best of me out of all of them though?

“At least I tried.”
I hate that.  That is an excuse you should never let win.
I find these hard rules are great for personal progress.

Once you find a little slogan like that that your mind wants to use as a good reason, i.e. “At least I’m DOING intervals at 7:30am…“

That’s crap.  BS.  You can’t let that type of thinking into one cubic cm of your brain.  The goal was to run 4 x 400m as fast as I could.  Period.  The game is to NOT give up, and today I lost.

I share this with you because I want you to see:

THE POINT IS:
1. Yes you do have time to exercise
(I could make you so tired in 10 minutes you’d feel it for a week, and EVERYONE has 10 min)
2. FAILURE is SUCCESS and SUCCESS requires constant FAILURE
3. QUITTING is laaaaaaame
4. Recognize “Excusitis” – the “disease” of making excuses
5. Set Hard Rules to Trump your Excuses

My RULES to TRUMP EXCUSES

I’m never allowed to say any of the following phrases to myself.
1. “I don’t have time”
This one is easy to fall into.  You have to just never let get you.  It’s never justified.  Do a blitz workout: Working out only takes 9 minutes.
Run 4 x 200m on the minute (4 min). Do 3 sets of pushups to failure with one minute rest in between. Good. Done. You have to time your rest!  Don’t laze around for 10 minutes between sets.

2. “I don’t have time to change, shower, and change back…”
Try this for me right now.  What time is it?  Note the time.  Now change into your workout clothes, note the time, then change right back.

Get up and do it.  Put this book down.  Do it now.

How long did that take?

My point exactly.

Changing clothes seems like a workout sometimes but it’s just a mental barrier.  Often the decisions of what to wear or finding the clothes take way more time than the actual action.  Sooo true for most things!!

The decision making is what takes time.
Lay out your clothes the night before.  Your workout gear will be all ready for you to quickly don.

Shower for 2 minutes.

 

2 minutes RJ?  Yes.  Set a timer.  Rinse only – if you have to.  Ok the timer hasn’t gone off yet, grab some soap and do as much as you can.  Timer goes off.  Obey it, stop, rinse and get out.  You’ll be cleaner than when you started, and that’s all that matters!  In this case, good enough usually is!

3. “I don’t have what I need” (clothes, equipment, etc.)
Ok, fine.  Do some pushups, situps, shadow boxing, air squats, supermans, simon says, etc.  You don’t “need” workout clothes for that.  So what if you sweat in your clothes?  Are you going to wear them again before you wash them anyway?

You don’t need to go to a gym to workout!

I used to let all these little minuscule reasons stop me from keeping my resolution.  Like oh I don’t have my running shorts…
Huh???

Drop and give me 20.
Do a wall sit.
I don’t care, just fail at something immediately.  Get up, rest, then fail again.  Fail 5 times and you’re good.  You’re more than good, you’re a CHAMP!

“5 a day is a CHAMPION’S WAY!”

4. “I just don’t care that much.”
I do care!  My mind in the moment is saying I don’t because I’m tired or lazy and then when the real me comes back I have all those negative feelings about being a lazy bum.

Thoughts like: “See, RJ, you can’t do it, you are lazy.  You can’t actually be as successful as you think you can.  You can’t even…”  Fill in the blank.

So, whenever my excuse is that “I just don’t care that much” that means I HAVE TO GET UP and DO IT NOW.

#4 is pretty much my panacea.  It works for every problem I’ve ever had with any GTD stuff.  Getting Things Done.  Great book by the way, read it.  Getting Things Done by David Allen.

#4 works for getting up to wash my face before falling asleep after a long day and I decided to take a little breather and lay on my bed before changing – a habit I’m especially prone to, sadly.

5. “I’ll do it (or more) later”
Not for exercise or diet or any other item that has a clear “time prescription” aspect to it.  If it is a to do list item on the other hand, that is fine to put it in the calendar for later.  That way you won’t forget and have planned on getting it done.  It’s often better to plan things that aren’t urgent for later and design a plan around killing more than one bird with one stone anyway, so this is OK as long as you do write it in your calendar or on a task list.

Abide the 2-minute Rule though: if you can do it in 2 minutes or less, do it now.

6. “I just don’t feel like it”
This goes especially for running and socializing, and for either one, I have to immediately get up, put my running mix on, and go for a run.  That is the solution.  Get up, warm up, and jog.  Once you are jogging you’ll feel like running, and you run until you feel powerful, happy, and energized.  Yes, running energizes you.  Your running mix will energize you too.  Endorphins start firing, and you’ll be feeling great in no time.  You just have to get over that hump, and once you feel how amazing it feels to run without feeling tired you’ll be hooked.  You’ll run like the wind!  The positive cycle starts and keeping in shape is easy.

7. “I’m hungry, hung-over, sore, tired, etc.”
You’ll see if it’s a shorter race or workout as soon as you start your hunger goes away.  Usually this is enough time to finish it and then eat.  Don’t stop to eat.  Don’t do something that will make you face deciding whether to work out again in another hour.

Go now and do your best.  Just go and work as hard as you can.  It’s going to be less than if you were well-rested, well nourished, or what have you, but going on these days and in these moments as you will see only makes you stronger mentally because when you finish you will know that feeling of going on empty and the next time you are not feeling like it for a lesser reason you will say if I could go on that one day after an all-nighter I can go now, and you will be able to follow through all that much easier.

Remember: obstacles are opportunities.

8. I’m not allowed to say “At least I…” or “Well, yesterday I…”
This is called resting on your laurels, and an excuse I am especially prone to.  It’s what did me in today on the track.  I felt like I was already a success even though I quit.  A little bell should have gone off, but the heart rate rule let me off the hook.

If you find yourself justifying subsequent mediocrity by letting this phrase pass through your mind, set this rule as rule numero uno.  It’s especially fond of high achievers because we don’t know where we ought to draw the line with our work.  We fight battles with ourselves about “Am I overworking myself?  Am I enjoying life enough?” and these doubts usually lead to cyclical performance.  On fire one week, totally lethargic the next.

9. It’s too cold, rainy, snowy, windy, hot, dark, etc.
This is actually really easy, but soooo many people get stuck on this one.  Once you are running, you are always fine.  Hot, cold, whatever.  The heat is a way better reason than the cold to not run, but people let the cold stop them way more often.

Too Cold – Get in gear.  Wear gloves, pants, t-shirt, and hooded sweatshirt with hat and scarf wrapped around everything but your eyebrows to your chin.  Look like a mummy.  Put ski goggles on.  And then do 1 min each of the following inside: High knees, Arm Circles, Butt Kickers, Squats, Shadow Boxing.  You will be sweating if you are doing it fast.  Now go outside and you’ll love the cold.  You probably will be over-dressed and have to shed layers.

Too Hot – Wear only what is essential.  Soak yourself with a hose.  Run.  Hot again.  Pull over, run to some random house turn their hose on, rinse and repeat as needed.  If they come out.  Smile and say sorry I’m running and I’m soooooo HOT!  Then run off smiling and laughing your ass off :)

Raining – Repeat process for too cold without all the layers.  Simply warm up to a sweat while inside before you go.  Rain is kind of nice actually.  Fun too.  You’ll come to like it.

Snow – I love the snow!  Stop looking at your watch every two seconds – your times will be terrible compared to normal because of the traction, but oh well who cares?  You’re doing this to work and FAIL, remember?  Ski goggles can be key if it’s really coming down and you are having a hard time seeing where you are going because snow is getting in your eyes.   Just run for fun and work hard.  Snow too deep?  Obstacles are opportunities remember?  Push through it.  More glory on the other end.  Love the snow, especially when trail running.  Beautiful.

Too Windy – When I heard a runner complain about the wind, I seriously just thought well it’s like a treadmill, you work harder faster so you get to your goal quicker… a little wind pffff no biggie bring it on!  A lot of wind?  Even better.  Remember when you train to fail instead of trying to set PR’s or hit milestones on distance, you aren’t measuring yourself every day.  You have a time trial once a week.  That is when you measure.  Until then, beat yourself up, then baby yourself and recover.

An Aside on Rest & Recovery
You train hard to maximize the signal to your body to do something when you aren’t training, when you are recovering, so when you are recovering, baby yourself a ton.  This is why you did the last rep, so that you could nourish your body.  Eat the best foods, sleep as soon as you can, drink all the healthy green tea (or even better: white tea – it has more antioxidants), and water you want.  Stretch, breathe, relax.  That is when the gains are made, so don’t over-train.  Don’t stay up late, don’t go drink (alcohol) right after a workout.  You work out to prepare your body to FEED so it will redesign itself.

Too Dark
It’s never too dark.  Go run.  Quit whining and making excuses.  You won’t fall down and if you do, big whoop a few scratches maybe, big deal.  It’s no reason to flake.  Street lights provide plenty of light.  If you are worried about traffic, buy a reflective vest – or just move off the road as they get near.  Go buy a headlamp with 200+ lumens.  Running at night becomes a blast.  It’s like a whole new world out there.  Get a dog to run with.  They will be having so much fun it’s contagious.  This is really not an issue.  The bottom line is you shouldn’t make a judgment on any of these reasons without going out and trying it.  Once you get out there it will cease to be an excuse and will be a source of empowerment.  You’ll tell yourself, “You are such a warrior!  You’re out here even at this hour putting in the work.  What a champ!”

Visualize Your Breakthrough:

A Plugin to Smash Mental Barriers

<Youtube and play The Intro by XX (long version) as you read this>

Envision a warrior
He or she is walking confidently toward you.
That is you.
That is your warrior self.
Now see from your warrior eyes.
YOU are walking confidently.
Feel yourself waking with the stride of a warrior.
Look down and see your arms and legs.
They have the markings of the warrior.
You are powerful beyond measure.
Imagine your goal, your creative endeavor.
Feel the feeling of victory.
…

<Begin reading here at 42 second mark, when the up tempo happens>
Now you are at your obstacle
Your opportunity
Your canvas
Be it track or field, pushups or alarm clock,

piles of dishes, laundry, homework, a meeting, or a phone.
This is one of those times you are feeling tired.
You don’t want to get up.
You are thinking about an excuse as to why this time you don’t have to.
But you remember this moment.
You have seen it before.
It is in this moment you become great.
This is the moment.
This is when you decide to switch tracks

.
You are a driving a freight train with a head full of steam.
You are accelerating to 88 miles per hour.
You are the train and its engineer, its driver.
This is the moment.
This is the moment you become great.
This is the moment you switch.
You lean out the side and swing the shovel as hard as you can.
And you hit the switch.
You see ahead the track shift over.
And your train goes the other way.

Steaming along, you are chugging up a hill.
And as the discomfort of fatigue becomes familiar,
You put your foot on the gas.
You throw your first booster on the fire, the GREEN BOOSTER.
You say YES I CAN, YES I WILL.
You know it is just momentary unpleasantness.
Your body is still working.  Your mind is still alert.
You CAN actually still do this.  You know it.
It’s funny, this feeling.
It makes you laugh, like a bit of dizziness after spinning around a bat.
Just like that, you are getting used to this feeling of fatigue.

So this is fatigue? you say.
You want to bring the feeling on faster, but deny its effect.
You know the feeling will stay like this for a while

It’s just a bit of unpleasantness.
You keep pushing on your gas pedal, noticing it’s not all the way down.
You push it down again,

and you notice it’s pushing back on you now.
You have to keep pushing it to keep it all the way down.

Then you understand something.
You have only to think about pushing on the gas petal,
and as long as you are deciding to push on it,

it stays down.
It stays all the way down.
It isn’t stronger than you,
It is sneaky though, a sneaky gas pedal
And if you don’t keep trying to push it harder every 10 seconds or so

It will start to come up.
Keep thinking about that pressure you’re putting on the pedal

and don’t be discouraged by the speed of your legs.
If they are fast that is fine.  If they are lead that is fine too.
It just means you are almost done.
You are closer to your goal.
You can keep the gas pedal down.
You realize you can just keep it pressed.

It’s just a brief time of discomfort.

It’s becoming easy now

to push the pedal down through the discomfort,
It’s easy because you know that breathing fast is perfectly normal.
Even though your legs and arms are slow they are quite alright,

and will be completely better in a matter of minutes.

This is just a part of the process.

You’ve been here before.

This understanding gives you another realization.
The part of you that wants to let the gas pedal up is a worry wart.
Pfff you say.  Just relax you Worry Wart you.
You’ll be awesome in just a minute here.

That realization is your second booster.
You throw the YELLOW BOOSTER on the fire.
And you feel your body respond.
You feel new SPEED enter your body.
You say BRING IT!  I’m READY!

Just a minute is all – this is no do or die.

No judgment you are trying to win against.
You aren’t trying to see if you are what champions are made of.
You are.

You are powerful beyond measure.
You are a champion.

You need polishing is all.
You are polishing yourself each second you keep pushing.

Keep pushing.

You are closer now to uncovering the true genius you are, the champion inside.

Now it is time for the RED BOOSTER.
Throw the RED BOOSTER on the fire.
Feel the surge of energy enter your body once more.
You are now a sprinting warrior.

Your hill is nearly vertical.

But you are taking it with SPEED.

Your train is chugging.

Pipes bursting with steam.  Wheels driving.

Heart pounding.  Breathing as hard as you can.

This is just a simple repeated decision.

A WILL.

You are in control.
Push that pedal down again.
Push it down and keep pushing.

Now break through the floor.  Crush the pedal.
Put all your force, all your weight,

every ounce of power and energy into that pedal.
It is starting to crack, you almost have it.
It is giving way.
Imagine you are chopping with an axe.
You are swinging your axe as hard and as fast as you can imagine.
Your swings have turned into a blur.

You can feel power surging through your entire body.

 

CRACK!

SMASH!

 

And the pedal gives way.

 

 

You have broken your barriers three times.
:)

Congratulations,

you are one step closer to

becoming the best version of yourself.

Fear Itself

FEAR #1:

Fear of the Bad Idea

“Somebody else has probably already thought of it.”

Quite counter-intuitively for some, this isn’t true simply because the multitude believes it!  Most people don’t make the effort to investigate their idea because they figure someone else would have already have thought of it.  As such, many great ideas get shelved in the attic our minds because one thinks them impossible.  This is exactly why there are so many opportunities for those of us willing to think optimistically and investigate when struck by a moment of inspiration.

Secondly, most people, even when handed a viable opportunity – even one which has been proven to work (which is much more than just an idea that hasn’t yet been tested or even researched) – the average Joe defeats himself before he even starts because of thoughts like this one.  He thinks it must be a scam or believes in the age old maxim: “If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.”  He finds every possible reason why the odds might be stacked against him:  He has an inferior location, he hasn’t the connections of his competitors, etc.

He is stuck in the Matrix.  His mind is not free.
Pay him no mind!

Thirdly, the fact that the failure rate of a startup is 90% after 5 to 10 years (translate for your own endeavor) convinces the masses that it’s a chance not worth taking.

Expected Payout (V)
However, they forget to figure the stakes into the equation.  Let me give you a little geeky math that sounds harder than it is.  However, if you eyes seem to glaze over, this is the hardest part of the entire book, so just skip to Doubting Thomas a few pages up and come back later.

Say there is a 20% chance of an idea being good (P = .20), which means the chance that it is bad is 80% and you lose your money (1-P) = .80.

The money you would expect to make on this idea is:
V = P x G + (1-P) x L

Written out in words this means the
Expected profit (V)
= How often you win (P) X how much you win when you win (Gain) + how often you lose (1-P) X how much you lose when you lose (L)

For Example
Let’s say you have an idea to create a product like the Snuggie…

Let’s estimate the good outcome or gain (G) is that a million people buy it and you make 10 million dollars.   And that if they don’t, you lose your time and money (L) that you invested – say $100,000 to create the product prototype, infomercial, and buy airtime etc.

If 90% of businesses fail, that means that P = 10%.
So our equation becomes:

V = 10% x 10,000,000 + 90% x -100,000
= 1,000,000 – 90,000
= $910,000 expected payout per infomercial product (on average per product try)

HOWEVER:
This also means you’d lose 9 times and succeed 1 out of 10 tries.
(90% of the time you get the $100,000 loss.)
So after doing 10 different ideas, 10 different trials, your results could look like this

1. -100K
2. -100K
3. -100K
4. -100K
5. -100K
6. -100K
7. -100K
8. -100K
9. -100K
10. +10,000,000
= profit $9.1 million bucks after all said and done
This would average (divide by 10) to yes, $910,000 profit per try as I’ve mentioned.

But imagine this scenario playing out.  It might not be until the last try (as it was in this example) that you hit the winner, and you would be negative 900K with a 90% chance of losing on the 10th try as well – most likely wondering if this infomercial thing was a good risk to take.  Most people would consider the first 9 tries as proof that it is a terrible business investment.

It is these odds that seem to dominate the decision making process instead of looking at the numbers and knowing you have an expected average profit per trial of a whopping positive $910,000 gain. IF YOU KEEP PLAYING LONG ENOUGH TO LET THE NUMBERS AVERAGE OUT.

A couple of points:
1. One shouldn’t write off a long shot endeavor simply because you are 90% likely to lose your money.  One has to take the stakes (how much you could gain vs. how much you need to risk for that gain) into account too!

2. One should plan for taking twice the number of tries it might take to achieve 1 success.  For example, if success rate is 10% plan to take 20 shots.  Furthermore, one ought to have the conservative mindset and self-control to only invest 10% or less of one’s total capital allocated for start-up (high risk) investment into a new business.

For instance, if you have $100,000 total, that means the maximum you should be investing into a startup or high risk investment would be $10,000 total, and that $10,000 is divided into 20 shots of $500 each.  So, $500 each on different things.  Understand?  You don’t risk your whole bankroll ($100,000 on a high risk play even if it is a high reward.)  Plan for the failures you are likely to experience so you will always have reserves on hand for your next shot.

Fourthly, beware of the Doubting Thomas.
This is a phrase I picked up from Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich.  It’s kind of outdated, but I liked the ring to it.  I suppose the fact that the name Thomas is so formal that anyone who would go by that name these days would probably be too afraid to do anything remarkable.  You know what I mean?  Like, “No, please call me Thomas.  Tom and Tommy are just too whimsical for me.”

Before you ask anyone for their opinion on your idea, ask yourself:

Have they been successful at something similar to what I am trying to do?
Have they known me a long time?

If the answer to the first is no, and you ask them anything they are going to tell you the answer that validates their own path and their own results: toe the line, get a real job, and climb the ladder like everyone else.  You are basically asking for a kick to the gut of your idea and future potential.  People who haven’t achieved much are quick to defend their safe, conventional existence despite thousands of counter examples.  You can’t blame them.  It’s all they know.  They in most cases think they are saving you from a life of ruin, disappointment, and heartbreak.

Unfortunately, parents can sometimes fall into this category.  We get used to going to our parents for wisdom and advice because they often lead us right in life’s questions, but there comes a point where we need to admit they have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to our business.

WE do.  WE have the experience that brought us to our idea, and we must remain steadfast in our convictions until our own research and data prove otherwise.  If you must test the idea, go to a group of people you are thinking of selling to and ask if they want a WhizBang (whatever you’d like to make for that niche).  Ask how much they’d pay for it, then charge triple and make it the best damn WhizBang they ever had.

PS, I find WhizBang a way cooler term that widget.  Why make a widget when you could make a WHIZBANG!?  Sounds smarter and like it’d be some sort of cool fun gadget toy robot tank that shoots fireworks or something.  Lol.  Ok class, let’s all quiet down again, you are so immature!

 

FEAR #2:

Fear of the Limited Market

“What if I run out of people?”

This is FEAR, False Expectations Appearing Real

If you are trying to raise capital or make sales…
There are thousands of people that you know or could find through your own hunting and the hundreds that will listen to you out of those will refer you to thousands of others who will be even better and even more receptive.  Your supply of prospects is truly infinite.  Your lack of knowledge or polish will not inhibit the true champion from liking you and your cause.  He or she is waiting to be found by you.  They are hoping and thinking in the back of their minds: I wish I could invest in a WhizBang… but I’ll have to look for one of those when I’m less busy down the road.  You just have to make the call!

Mean people will reject you straight away no matter how polished you are, no matter what you say or what your cause.  You can’t and shouldn’t move through life trying to avoid rejection or embarrassment.

If you are trying to create a product, be an artist, or start a business…
This is also like thinking that you are too unique and there are hardly any people out there that want what you want.

You aren’t a unique snowflake – to take one from my favorite movie Fight Club.  It probably will give you confidence to think back to Fear #1:  There are hundreds and thousands of people just like you, and everyone in your type of life or who has your type of goal or passion has probably wanted what you are thinking of making.

The difference between success and failure is not in that you have an original idea it is that you decide to EXECUTE the idea despite all your fears and lack of polish.

“But I don’t know how to…”
Oh man, just this one ability is KEY KEY KEY.  If you don’t know how to… just ask, ask anyone who to ask, ask GOOGLE!  Be the kind of person who is constantly troubleshooting – Google for answers and methods to the things that at first would be a way to stop you.

For example, “But I don’t know the legal jargon of how to write a contract…”
Answer: it doesn’t need to be airtight.  Write something, write a lot, make it clear in plain English and this will work with 95% of the people you might need to file suit against.  It really will.  The judge will read it and understand it as you meant him to, and unless they have some super sweet lawyer, you are 99% sure to win.

For example, “But I don’t know how to sell others on my ideas but still protect the rights to them so others can’t steal them…”

but I don’t know how to contract manufacturing…
but I don’t know how to hire good help…
but I don’t know how to draw…
but I don’t know how to program a computer…
but I don’t know how to… the list goes on forever.

The difference between those who are successful artists, entrepreneurs, salesmen, or capital raisers, and just plain ol’ people and those that never quite make it is that the first group put that item on a task list then at some point went to Google and typed in a query while the others let that stop them in their tracks for good.

You have to think like Michael Jordan.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over in my life…

And that is why I succeed.”

As I read it again, I think to myself, “What a GREAT quote!”
It’s not how many misses, but how many scores!

–> Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained.

 

 

FEAR #3:

Fear of the Phone

“What if I bug people and burn all my bridges…”

There are thousands of methods, each with their own merit, and if you want to sift through other alternatives I’m willing to bet somewhere down the road some other expert is going to say: pick up the phone and ask people to meet you and listen to your idea (and probably not too far down the road).

My Own Experience
In 2001, I took my 300 or so contacts and called ALL of them, every single one.  The ones that liked me, the ones that didn’t, the ones that were super important and busy and might be annoyed (or so my mind worried to me) and the ones that were so close to me they might feel guilty or obligated by my call.

ALL of these fears were felt on my heart.  I thought about it for a night or two as I lay in my bed wondering if what I was doing was wrong…

Here is what I thought:
“All I’m doing is calling them up and asking them a question, how much of a pain is that really?  They are free to say no thanks I’m busy.  And if they do say no are they really going to say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he’d even ASK me to see him.  Who does he think he is to call me up and ask for my time to listen to him?”…

ONE Minute
If they say no, in all likelihood, they will forget about it within a matter of minutes, no – even one (1) minute – proceeding the phone call.

Can you really imagine that person, sitting there contemplating your ask for another 2 or 3 entire minutes?  Nah, he is back to his evening paper with a shrug.  Aren’t you doing your champion (my what?  more on this in a minute) a disservice then by not trying to find him or her due to some small fear of interrupting a few old buzzards reading the evening paper or watching dancing with the stars?

In 2007, I started up my business all over again after finishing college at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  I didn’t know anyone in the good ol’ A², but I called through a list, got a few appointments, and within 3 weeks of solid calling (20-40 calls a day) I was back in business.  I finished in the top 10 in the nation in sales that year (with only ⅔ of the year to sell might I add).  Not to brag but… I made it happen, and you can to.  That’s why it’s not a brag.  I’m not special.  I don’t have special abilities you don’t have.  I just decided to make the calls.  That’s it and that’s all.

What are you PROUD of?
Think back for a moment.  Think of the thing you are most proud of…
Got it?  You probably cycled a few and debated.  As you cycled through different achievements or what have you, did they not all involve a challenge?  Some difficulty?  Something sacrificed and a degree of self-control exhibited and achieved?

Now think of all the time you spent NOT working on one of those items…

Lesson is:
It’s the hard and important things that make you – that make life – meaningful.  These are the experiences that make one grow, and these are also the experiences that make one happy as we shall see in the section on Flow.

Why You Should be a Mover and a Shaker

Here is what I know:  I know that only I know what I have to show to people, but they don’t.  If they did, they’d have me over and buy my investment, product, service, artwork, song, speech, idea, CREATION.

Then they would say what they only say years afterward:  Thank you so much for coming over and showing me this with such enthusiasm; it was the one of the best investments I ever made.

If they knew what I know.  But they don’t yet.  Having me over to listen to me is a necessary contingency in order for them to know and understand!
I am not going to be pushy, so there is nothing wrong with giving it a shot.  The idea is to just give them a chance to say yes and see what happens.  

FEAR #4:

Fear of Asking BIG

“What if by asking for a large sum of money I insult or they think I am being greedy.”

This is such a common fear that in fact it’s rampant.  You are probably odd if you don’t have this fear, but let’s examine this one for a moment because for me this is the easiest one to get over.

What is your cause?
To change the world you say?

“Yes, to some degree… the bigger the better, but I’m happy to make some kind of difference because hey it’s something.”

Ok.  Perfect.  You want to make a big difference but you are happy with any kind of positive change.  Great.

Are you greedy then?

You want to show your prospect why a bigger change has economies of scale
“Mr. Jones, if you were to fund our water pump construction at the cost of $100,000 we could supply the village with a clean water supply for YEARS to come.  This small fixed cost could eliminate future ongoing costs and would be absolutely transformative to the livelihood of the residents.  Hundreds of people would owe their lives to your foresight and generosity.”

(People love the word foresight.)

“In the past, we’ve used smaller donations to provide the area with water in less efficient ways because it was all the funding we’ve had available.  Well we have found a solution that will end the continuous need for small asks and reliance on treatment instead of cure.   How great would it feel to say you solved this problem for hundreds of people, Mr. Jones?”
“I’m sorry, RJ, I don’t have the $100,000 to spare.”

“Oh shucks, well that is our goal.  We need to find enough funding to make the project a go.  What if several of your friends agreed to pitch in to help?   They could make it your club’s private project and you all would feel like you came together to solve something for the world.”

Big Ideas are EASIER to Sell
It takes just as much time to talk about a big idea as it does a small one, and people accept big ideas just as readily, they really do.  It’s about the idea, the benefits and the costs and the relative value of those that gives a person a feeling of Yes I Should or No I Don’t Want To.

A note on “Can’t afford to…”
I was at dinner telling close friends about this philosophy of asking big, and like most people who have never done it they said they thought that it might turn people off.  They said if someone asked them for a large sum of money they wouldn’t be able to give that much… a $10,000 dollar contribution was out of their range.

I said lightly, “Well you could…  if you really wanted to.” <Shrug, and take a bite of food, chew, eyes averted so as not to be confrontational.>

He looked up at me from his plate with a bit of incredulity.  No we couldn’t RJ, we aren’t made of money.”

I held his gaze and said, “Of course you could, you would just sell some stock if it was a cause that was important enough to you.  People give gifts of stock all the time.”

Do you know what he did?

He said: “Oh yeah…  I guess we could do that… I suppose… If we really wanted to.  I thought you meant just write a check…”

HA!

It can be done for a BIG idea so easily.  In fact, to your champion in waiting, it will be easier.  He wants to make a BIG difference for someone too.  He wants to concentrate his power on something to etch his name into the world just as you do.  It is this man or woman that you are seeking.

Can you think of someone you know who might be my champion?
I want to build a camp to empower people’s minds to overcome adversity in the areas of success in physical and financial fitness.  A “fat camp” if you will for people who are poor (fat) in 3 areas: health, money, and time.  Jot him or her and me a quick email.  You can and should also use this for finding your own Champion!

Copy and paste the following:

To them:
Hey, I recently read a book that reminded me of you since you are fit and I’ve admired your accomplishments.  Just curious, but what would you do with $10 million dollars to make the world a better place?

The author is looking to start a fat camp of sorts: one for people who want to empower themselves in the areas of money, time, and fitness.  It’s for aspiring entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes.  He wants to give them a mindset of how to think and what to do to overcome all obstacles that stand between them and their dream of being successful in their endeavor.

It sounded like a cause I thought you might be interested in checking it out.  Should I send him your contact?  Or would you like to contact him directly?  If so his email is rdelong@umich.edu.  Simply copy the following email to him:

Hey RJ, a friend told me about your camp.  I’m interested in hearing more.

To me from you:
Yo RJ, just sent out an email to a contact of mine who might be up your alley.  Let you know how it pans out.  What’s up?  Liked your book.  We should talk.

To you from me:
Thanks bro!  Wow owe you a solid!  Very nice of you.  Love to talk!

 

FEAR #5:

Fear of Asking for Names

“What if I put them in a difficult position…”

Underline it.  Bold it.  Circle it.  Tattoo it on your arm.
ALWAYS ASK FOR REFERRALS.

I put a period there for a reason.  It’s end of discussion.  It’s NEVER right to not ask.

Referrals are the lifeblood of business.  They are end all be all.  That’s how every single trend, movement, business, product, president, book, artist, you name it, ever was anything.  People spread the word to others about them.  They said things like “call so and so, check out such and such.”  They TOLD their friends to do something.  They didn’t call them up and wimpily ask them if they minded if they could tell them about something they loved.

Well, you NEED to speed it along when you are small and you have no radio or TV or record label broadcasting you across the universe.  You know this… but…

“I don’t want to offend anyone or be pushy…”

This is the commonality in all difference-makers.  
We have realized something.
First of all…

No one ever gets irritated by one ask.
They get irritated by repetitive robot persistence that isn’t listening to them.   Don’t be a robot, ask and ask confidently and ask big, ask for 15 names.  Ask for 20, but don’t keep telling them why they should change their mind.  That’s all you need to do.

Don’t be persistent with the same person.  Be persistent with different people.
Be persistent by picking up the phone 100 times a day.
It will only take 3 of the 8 hours you have.

One other thought comforts me here.

A Tale of Two Tribes

Why would you worry about letting the people who don’t share your passion prevent you from meeting the ones who do?

In the one scenario you stay safe and don’t tell people about what is important to you or ask anyone for any introductions, so you don’t offend anyone, and your network stays the same size.  On top of that you don’t really develop quality meaningful relationships with as many of those people as you could because you were afraid to reach out and tell them what you care about.

In the other scenario you do venture out and open your mouth and show your heart, and you ask them to connect you to like-minded individuals.  Some will be turned off by your passion or your approach, but not if you do it right.  By the way, you inevitably won’t do it right with everyone since everyone makes mistakes, but the people you reach out to will get to see the real you and introduce you to a host of others who share your worldview, passion, or mission.

Why would you keep the first tribe when you could meet the second?

You can’t go swimming if you don’t want to get wet.
So, you just have to get over it.   Learn to shrug and say, “Nobody wins them all.”

NOBODY WINS THEM ALL.

Some people are going to like you and your idea and some aren’t.  Some are going to LOVE it.  And those are your champions.  Those are the people you are on a quest to find.

Hearing NO can be like hearing the ball bounce at basketball practice.  Hearing YES can be that way too, and that’s when the fun begins – see the chapter “How I Made $5,000 in a Week”

How I AVERAGED 10 Referrals per Appointment

Sale or no sale.  10 was my average (not counting zeros, because I purposely kept no record for those).  If they gave me names, they gave me 10 (on average).  I’ll tell you they gave me names more than they didn’t too.  Probably 2 out of 3 referred me to people.

I didn’t push to try to turn the No’s to YES’s.
I pushed to turn the Yes’s to give MORE names.

That’s very important.  Why?  Because fighting to turn a No into a few (3 or 4 probably) is going to be tough and it’s going to be the WRONG 3 people.  It’s going to be the people that they feel most comfortable with referring – their closest friends and family, NOT necessarily who is the best for your goal.

When I say “push” I don’t mean I was pushy.  I just asked one more time.  One bonus ask.

If they give names, they are already onboard.  They want to help your mission, and they want you to help their contacts.  They will be less likely to just refer who they feel safe not offending.

1. Nonchalance Need
I asked nonchalantly and normally.  It was business as usual, as I said: “So here’s what I need you to do, Bill, just jot down 15 people that I could give a quick call to and say what I said to you when I called you up: ‘I’m working on this project and Bill liked me and said I should give you a quick call and see if you had any interest in hearing about it like he did…’  I promise not to be pushy or ask twice.  Just make your own page just like this…”

2. Smush Proof in Their Face
I demonstrated the norm was to refer by showing massive pages of referrals and saying “Everyone does their own page.”  <Flip through pages of names filled in your referral book, all of them.  Only one book though.>  (If you don’t have pages of referrals you will, don’t worry.)

3. Grab Your Address Book
“I’ll tell you what, most people find it easy to get their address book out so they don’t have to rack their brain but just scroll through their phone or facebook, and give a mental yes or no and jot away.  So here’s a pen and my book, and as you do that I’ll straighten up.” <Clean up your information off the table and get ready to go.>

4. Distance yourself, don’t hover over.
Stay busy, don’t finish and sit there tapping your foot so to speak.  I would polish my knives, or read.

5. Just Do Your Best
If they reject the number and say I don’t know that many or something like that, just say “Oh I know what you mean, it does seem hard at first, but most people are surprised how many they can come up with once they look through their phone or whatever.  Just do the best you can.”  Just keep shrugging and repeating the phrase “just do the best you can” until they understand you don’t care if they hit the number, you just want them to do their best.

6. ASK For More
Once they hand it back and say they are done, you don’t reach your hand out to take it, just look down and note the number (it doesn’t matter how many they have they will write more names when you ask them to).  This IS NOT being pushy.  It’s holding them accountable.  It’s one simple little ask.  Just say the following:

“Oh, you have 6 (or 12, or 17, 23, whatever they have), that’s great!  Thank you so much, Mr. Jones, that really helps me.  You know what though?  If you could just jot down 4 more, it would help me almost DOUBLE.”

“See the whole thing about our success for this cause rides on this one principle: I have to meet as many awesome people just like you as I can.  You were great, I don’t have conversations like this with everyone, I bet your friends are the BEST aren’t they?

“As you were going through your address book there were probably some people you almost put down but wanted to see who else was in there before you did.  Do you think you could just jot down a few more of those it would really help me a ton.  Let’s see if you can make an even __.”

<Any number that feels right.>

If he’s given me 4 I’m going for 10.  If 7, I’m going for 10 or maybe 15.  If 16 when I asked for 15, I’m saying awesome you even gave me one extra, THANKS.  How bout 4 more to make it an even 20?

It doesn’t matter what he gives me first, I’m asking everyone twice.  It’s not greed.

It’s just me knowing that for however many people he put down, there are about twice that number he considered putting down but decided to wait and see how the list came out first, then decided it was good enough.

To him, I am as calm as a pool of Japanese Koi swimming ever so gracefully. “Do you think you could just jot down a few more to make an even 20, Mr. Jones?  It would help me a ton.”

I’m telling you 80% – no 90% of people will do it.  Their thinking goes like this, “Well, I’ve ALREADY given him names so what’s a few more, and he’s a nice guy.  I guess I could throw down a few of those names I almost put down but skipped over…”  And off they go writing.

I also make it worth their while.  I will tell them, “Since your helping me so much I’d like to give you this gift (value equal to 20% of the value of the lead).  Show them your averages and numbers, and let it make sense to them.

For example, if you are financial advisor writing financial plans for prospective clients priced between $500 to $1500 per plan, I would show the client exactly how my business works and explain that if they help me grow my business they will also be helping their friends by bringing them to the most honest and straightforward advisor.

The problem is most business owners always want something for nothing.  You have to be willing to share the rewards with your clients that refer.  Most people will see this is very generous of you, and they won’t take advantage of you.  They understand professional people that provide good service are entitled to make money and want to do well for themselves in life by growing their business.

7. High Five
When they hand it back, you say YOU DID IT!  Thanks so much!  Offer then a hug or a high five and leave it up to them.  They usually go for the latter, and it’s less corny than if you just offer them the high five straight away plus it shows them you really care and like them.  Give them a high five, no joke, they smile and laugh, and it’s a great feeling on both sides.

How to Warm your Leads

Ask them how to pronounce the names, ask them what the people do.  They are totally on your side now, so they want you to be successful and liked by their friends, so they will tell you just about anything you ask.  Ask a lot.  They get what you are doing, and they are ok with it.  If they weren’t they wouldn’t have given you ANY names.

Ask them to put letters next to the names to indicate certain things
For example, put an E next to the ones that value education.
Put a V next to the ones that love to do volunteer work, etc.
Ask for whatever would be best for your goal.
Ask if they can tell you “a little about them.”  Listen to every word and take notes.

Ask them to treat their friends names like they are stocks.  
“Treat them like they are stocks Mr. Jones – who do you think will give the most?  Put a star next to the ones you think I should call first.”

No joke, this seems like too much right?  Wrong.  It’s ballsy, but they love it.  They really do.  They do.  No, they do.  They look at me and smile.

I’ve said this EXACT phrase hundreds of times and it ALWAYS works.  I’ve never had anyone complain or be insulted.  They have never taken their names back or given me a funny face.  EVER.

They laugh, smile, shake their head, and start putting stars down.

They KNOW what I’m doing.

I’m trying to RAISE MONEY.  They get it, and they want me to be successful.  They want their friends to buy or give because it validates their decision.  That and they BELIEVE in my CAUSE.

They want victory for the cause, and I am it’s AGENT.  I am the one bringing it into existence, breathing life into the fire of that IDEA they fell in love with.

I’ve spent 30 minutes qualifying 15 leads so many times I can’t even count, and its ALWAYS worth it.

Every mark on that paper, every word they say is another vote of confidence from the person who gave them to me and how much they liked me and how much their friend will like me when I pick up the phone to call them.  It’s absolutely fantastic to get a nice 15 pager with full qualified letters and stars.  Mmmm gets me feeling all warm and toasty just thinking about it.

 

FEAR #6:

Fear of Not Being Cut Out for Sales / Fundraising

“I just don’t have the natural power of persuasion or outgoing personality…”

This one is so normal.  They all are, but even the Zig Ziglars, Frank Bettgers, Carl Drews, and Jon Berghoffs of us have had this feeling.  Zig Ziglar started his career selling Cutco as did Carl Drew and Jon Berghoff.

Frank Bettger wrote a book on this exact subject, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling.  It is one of the Top 5 books I’ve read on success.  I’ve taken a few things from that book and given them to you today.  6:00 club, and Sunday being self-organization day.

Frank Bettger was going to quit before he’d even given himself a chance to really start, which is so common it makes my heart sink.  On the day he was packing up his things, a visiting manager was speaking about success and he overheard something that made him decide to stay and give it another go.

That sentence was this:

“Gentlemen, after all, this business of selling narrows down to one thing – just one thing… seeing the people!  Show me any man of ordinary ability who will go out and earnestly tell his story to four or five people every day, and I will show you a man who just can’t help making good!”

Why, that turned Frank’s game around.  He said, “Why look here Frank Bettger, you’ve go two good legs.  You can go out and earnestly tell your story to four or five people every day; so you are going to make good – Mr. Talbot said so!”

He said a feeling of great relief came over him because he just knew he was going to be successful.  “It was as though the sun had suddenly burst out from the clouds.”

One of the most important things in effecting CHANGE
And do you know what he DID?  He decided he was going to KEEP RECORDS – just to make sure he was in fact seeing 4 or 5 people a day.  By tracking his inputs, he realized he could make a great many more calls.  He also realized that to average seeing 4 to 5 people a day was a big job.  It made him realize just how few people he had been seeing before.

During the next 10 weeks, he sold more than he had sold the preceding 10 months which proved to him he could sell; Mr. Talbot was right.  At age 29, Bettger actually met Dale Carnegie by chance at one of the famous public speaking courses.  He asked to be signed up right away.

Carnegie said Bettger was a total failure of a salesman when he met him, but would watch his meteoric rise over the next 12 years to buy his own country estate and said that he could have retired at 40.  Carnegie was the one who inspired him to write his book.  It’s an absolute MUST read for anyone who is in the business of influence.

Carl Drew, one of my favorite people and personal mentors, sold only $2500 on his first 80 appointments.  To put that in perspective, the national average for each appointment is over $100 in sales which would put average for 80 appointments at 8 grand.  Carl was barely cracking 30% of average, but he got some help and kept trying.  He eventually went on to break dozens of records and is in the top sales reps in the history of the company.

When I first started I wondered if the people I wanted to emulate had something I didn’t have – some special power of persuasion that people were born with, and maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this business.

The First Time You Close Someone
Every top salesperson and every great promoter or professional fundraiser didn’t know the ropes when they first started out.  We all go through that experience of closing someone for the first time.  The feeling of what it’s like to hear “YES.”

If you haven’t yet had that experience, let me tell you it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.  When I made my first real sale (when the client’s perspective is changed and buys or invests the amount you believe they should) it was as if she had said “Yes, that makes sense to me.  I agree with you.  You’ve convinced me.  I can see your product or service is worth it.  That meant my pitch and my decision to be a salesman and make that pitch was ethical and right.  She was saying “Thank you for pitching me.”  That’s what the complete sale represents – that you are right about what you are pitching: people should invest, and you CAN do this!

I drove down the road with my music blasting, bouncing around in my seat, pumping my fist, and slapping the top of the steering wheel to the music.  I utterly on cloud nine over the realization that, “Yes, this could work… in fact, it would probably work.  I could do that again and again and AGAIN.  I just made $70/hr talking to someone about an IDEA.”  As a high school student at the time, I’m telling you man, that was pretty exciting stuff.

 

My Best Piece of Advice

If I could give you one piece of advice about increasing your success with people (on the appointment, selling big, and getting more Y-E-S, building friendships and partnerships, being more entertaining at parties or otherwise) it would be this:

-> Let out your heart.  

Let out your true thoughts: your passion, your beliefs, your vision.  Tell them in no uncertain terms why you believe what you believe.  If you don’t, don’t sell it.  Find something you can really get behind with all your conviction.  This isn’t being pushy.  Let’s go back to our definition of PUSHY.

 

FEAR #7:

Fear of Being Pushy

“But I don’t want to be pushy…”

Definition of PUSHY – when a salesperson persists to ask them to do the same thing twice – especially without showing they’ve listened and understood the client’s feelings and objection.

By contrast, what I’m advising you to do is to let your heart out to them upfront, not as a rejoinder.  You are already telling them first anyway, tell them harder – BEFORE they say no.  Be more sincere.  Be more open.  Say things like, “Mr. Jones can I tell you what I really think (or how I really feel)?

How I know that letting out your heart works

Upon graduating from U of M, I had an interview with a healthcare consulting firm in Washington, D.C. and upon the ending of the first interview having answered her questions to apparent satisfaction, I asked if I could say something.  Like most interviews, it followed the typical format: she asked and I answered.  I always tried to answer the questions they asked, and tried to keep my answers short to be respectful to their time to get all their questions in – something I regret wholeheartedly looking back.

The point of the interview is to reveal yourself in the most positive way and make a good impression.  Short typical answers don’t do that.  Let out your heart man!

So this time I wanted the job quite a bit more, and I really felt her questions hadn’t given me the opportunity to reveal the best parts about me.  So when she asked if I had any questions I said I did, but I wanted to kind of give her my sales pitch on myself if she wouldn’t mind because there were a few other things I wanted to say.

She beamed.

She was so pleased I wanted to demonstrate my skills and take the initiative to grab the chance without being served it.  I went on to say that what I felt my strengths were and why they would allow me to be more successful than other candidates.  I said it off the cuff and from the heart, and it was good.  Sure she liked the words, but I could tell she liked the fact that I made the effort even more.  It was the energy I let out.  I didn’t matter what the strengths were!

A question I really like to ask in order to get on stage

“Can I tell you how I really feel?”
“…Sure…” Curious listening intently.

(Here’s the cutco version, translate it to your own product, service, or vision.)

“I LOVE _____.  When I first started, I didn’t know if people would spend (price) on this stuff, but I knew they SHOULD.  I took it to everyone I knew and everyone bought.  Do you know why?  I’m not saying that this is something you NEED, it’s not.  You’ve gotten by without it up until now, so you obviously don’t NEED it.  I’m telling you what I realized about _____ is that it’s WORTH it.  It’s something you can use everyday, and will last forever.  It works better than anything else on the market, and it costs half as much as the next best thing.  It’s a great value and it’s affordable.  Think of all the other things you’ve bought that you didn’t need and didn’t end up using.  You aren’t just spending money today.  You are making a TRADE.  You are trading a small bit of money, you could probably make that in a week or even a day, for something that will give you and your family and your children’s family someday a benefit every day.  It comes out to only _______ a month and ______ a day for ONE year then it’s paid off – the next 30 years are FREE.  You pay your cable each month and you have to keep paying. (Continue to make analogy after analogy against all other products they spend money on: groceries, stove counters, snow blower, law mower, sewing machine, golf clubs, etc. until you feel you’ve covered your points then ask them a either or question which assumes they are buying it.)

For example:
So if you were going to invest in _____ today, which option would you prefer?

The Principle Behind Passion Selling
See the truth is, unfortunately, it took me 7 years to understand that.  Fundraising, like sales, is INFLUENCE; it is a battle of ENERGIES.  Whoever has the stronger of energy wins, and it crucial to move first.

Be First to Act
Like a man betting in poker (where usually you want to act last), sometimes it pays to bet first.  If you bet so big by pushing all of your chips in, those acting after you have to play by your rules.

They can’t raise back at you.  You’re already committed.  Move first in sales too, because if you let them tell you no first, giving your passion speech is all a big argument instead of a great presentation.

Sales is Art – Influence is Passion:  The Art of Speech
Let your passion and conviction out slowly and build your energy until you feel you’ve given them the best speech for buying and believing in you.  It will take experience of trying a little more and a little more with your gas pedal before you feel comfortable letting it fly like really want and envision yourself doing.

The Parable of the Boiled Frog
A frog will not stand being put into a pot of water that is already boiling, he will jump out.  But if he is placed into a pot of water which is at room temperature and then gradually heated up, he will not notice the rise in temperature or jump out.

My First Big Step: Spectacle or Evidence

I have achieved one of the levels I never thought I could, and in that realization, I built a platform to achieve even bigger things in the future.  I realized I was GREAT in the way others had been GREAT to me.

I once heard a speech I would later title “Spectacle or Evidence.”  I don’t know what the actual speaker had named his speech, but if it were up to me, I would have named it that.  In it, he was talking about sales conferences.  He was talking about the natural reaction of newbies when they witness results they previously thought impossible, and witness them as repeatedly as they do at our events.

Our events are the perfect environment for a driven.  You have thousands of rookies who are so young and green – brand new and have no idea what is going on and then you have hundreds of every other experience level from starting to grasp it all the way to the experts.

We breed sales champions.  We produce year after year more successful sales people than any other company.  We have more new recruits every year than the US Army.

My first conference was a mythic energy blast like you’ve never seen.  Thousands of teenagers all packed into a 5-star hotel with noisemakers, balloons, streamers, fog horns, confetti, lights, ACTION!  They had a full boxing ring set up in the middle of the conference hall where a mic was lowered to the GVP just as if he were calling a fight.  The music was blasting and two guys that looked pretty important were called to the center of the ring to the beginning of “Eye of the Tiger.”  The lights went out except for a few bright spotlights shining down on each of them like it was Ali vs. Frazier. I’m telling you, it was pretty exciting stuff.

Over the course of the next hour the sales results (or as we call them in the business, “Push Reports”) were called out.  It was a Count Up, meaning we started with anyone who sold anything in the last two weeks stands up. Well just about everybody stood up, myself included.  I think I remember 2 or 3 thousand in sales being an important cut off for something and I was still up.  Then it was 5 thousand and I was the only one in my office still standing, but there were HUNDREDS of people still up all around the audience.

Then 6K, and if you sold over 6K you got to go up on stage and read your report into the microphone.  Cool!  I was down for that.  Some people were saying their number and then saying “at Half Baby,” after it, and I remembered from training that meant they were an FSM, which meant they had hit $25,000 in career sales and were now making 50% commission on everything they sold.  Half Baby was a dream and a half.  How I wanted to be an FSM!  They were champs!  Successes,  they had made it!  If you could sell $25,000 you weren’t worried about leads anymore, you had done the thing man!

Well, I got up there and said, “Hi, I’m RJ DeLong, from the Kalamazoo Wrecking Crew…” and my team yelled our sound effect (a bomb falling noise with an explosion sound – all the teams had some cool name and sound like that – it was awesome) “and I sold Sixty Three Hundo… of KNIVES, baby!”

I was pretty jacked up, I must admit.

…But I was just a peon.

The reports went on and on, 10k, 15k, 20k, 30k, and then there were two guys left…  I don’t remember the second place finisher – he was one of the greats as I seem to remember, if I heard his name, I’d know it.  He wasn’t some flash in the pan, but the truth is I don’t remember it.  Hmmm, funny how that works.  Well, the two of them stood there in their sharpest suits and ties standing with their hands held behind their backs in good stature awaiting the telling number to fall.  “35 Thousand?”  And he stepped.  The other man stepped forward to indicate he had to sit down, finally.  We had a winner!

So we went on to see how much the winner had sold.  40 Thousand…  “HIGHER BABY!!!!” The crowd cheered.  “45 thousand?” the GVP asked.  Nope he was standing tall and still.  The crowd went nuts.  This turned out to be no contest.  He has smashed his nearest competitor by a whole 10 thousand, more than 80% of us had sold in our entire contest.  We were thrilled, I’m telling you that place was going ape.  I imagine now if there were some fine dining event in one of the adjoining rooms it would be all heads turned to our wall not a fork or spoon moving, haha.  “HIGHER BABY!!!”
“50?” Still standing.

They brought him a chair as a lark because he must be getting tired with all that standing he was doing.  He went ahead and sat all by himself on that stage and we all soaked it up with him.

“60 Thousannnd??”  Still sitting idly by.
“70 Thousand, 80, 90…”  We couldn’t believe it.  At every number we kept yelling HIGHER BABY like there was no way we’d get to yell it again.  Each time we were given an encore.
“One Hundred Thousand Dollars??” the GVP said with a huge smile.

Yes, he was staying put.
Arms crossed he even put a leg up on his knee… he had made 50K in two weeks.

I was starting to think I had struck an even bigger gold mine than I knew (and I had).  The number went all the way up to 120k.  120!!!  I’m not kidding.  This one guy, John Ruhlin, had sold a 120 thousand dollars of knives in two (2) weeks!  He had made 60 grand just selling some little ol’ knives by referral appointment.  He was retired for the year if he wanted to be.  And it wasn’t just him it was dozens of F-S-M’s – they said it stood for Future Student Millionaires.

It wasn’t a joke though.  He’s a millionaire now, and so are many others.  Jon Berghoff, Hal Elrod, Carl Drew, and many other Vector greats aren’t just making bank they are living out their dreams.

Carl Drew founded LifeClimb.org and bicycled across the US from LA to Boston speaking in schools along the way.  He’s climbed K2, the Matterhorn, Denali, and many others.  He’s completed and finished 5 Ironmans and a host of other adventures including kayaking the Everglades solo – a 21 day expedition among 14ft pythons, alligators, and a host of other nasties and didn’t see land for 11 straight days.  No toilet, no shower, and no way to cook… trying to sleep in a kayak without falling in the water…  On top of that he had to paddle 210 miles, the equivalent of nearly 8 marathons.

Oh yeah, and weeks before the expedition he didn’t own a sea kayak, had never been, nor knew anything about it.  He was about to leave Florida when he started reading a book about it and decided to postpone his return home, study for weeks to learn everything there was to know about sea kayaking and open water survival, and spend the next 21 days living out a dream most would never get around to making happen.

The Mystique of the FSM
Anyway, back to spectacle or evidence.  There are many who would make John Ruhlin or Carl Drew a spectacle, but there are many others who realize he is EVIDENCE that it is possible and so they can do it too.

 

 

FEAR #8:

Fear of Failure: Fear of Thinking Big

“What if I don’t make it?

I don’t want to set a goal I can’t realistically hit…”

Perhaps one of the biggest differences between those that are successful and those that become GREAT is that the GREATS think BIG, whereas the goods follow the rules.  They play it safe, don’t over-commit, and are afraid to see what is possible because they might lose face.

We all have the natural reaction to be “realistic,” but what is realistic anyway?
You really don’t know.  YOU DON’T KNOW.
The likely progression then is to say well I’ve done this much so (throw out a nominal percentage gain of your choosing, usually 5 or 10%) is a good next step for improvement.  This fear is closely linked to the Fear of Burnout because we don’t want to set a goal that is too big or we might lose out on life…

Losing out on LIFE
As many top sales people will tell you: I don’t know anyone who ever wished they didn’t work as hard for a push.  I’ve never heard one person say, “Geez you know what – I wish I would have scheduled less appointments and sold less.  I just over committed my reserves.”

We might look like an All-Talker.  If we set a big goal and don’t hit it, our own mind punishes us with thoughts like, “See, RJ, you aren’t that good.  What makes you think you can claim a goal as big as that as doable.  You’re totally living in a dream world.”  And on and on it goes.

Also, when you tell others who are not schooled in the area of positivity or goal setting – Matrix Minds – they will think those things about you when you share these goals, but part of their heart will be very afraid you’ll succeed because it will mean you are right and they should have done what you did, not play it safe.

Destroying Others Doubt
Destroying these people’s doubt by following through and having your averages come out or better is one of the greatest feelings in the world.  When you say you’ll do something BIG, then do it, you feel like Muhammad Ali.  You prove you have so much control over your own fate you can’t help but look at Matrix Minds with pity.

If only they knew what they were capable of…

And this is precisely why I do what I do.

Obstacle Running, The Young Minds Foundation, and Potentialism.com are an effort each in their own way to help athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs free their minds.  To stop worrying about what MIGHT be possible and instead focus on knowing that what might be possible, IS possibly possible, and therefore possible. :)

Besides, it’s not about finding happiness on the summit of your figurative mountain, it’s about enjoying the climb in and of itself and also the fact you are making progress.  I enjoy the excitement of the possibility of a new plan or idea and the potential that would come from successfully bringing it to fruition.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

– Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1846-1912)

 

My Breakthrough Push – Part I

So in 2007, after having building my Cutco referral book up to about 200-300 names, this same conference, SC2, was quickly approaching.  We were all setting a goal.  How many knives could we sell?

Well, at that time nothing bothered me more than some punk sales rookie saying he was going to sell 10k when he couldn’t even get himself in the office to make calls twice a week on meeting days.

A 10k push was really the hallmark of a breakthrough champ type of a push.  10k was really the number the GREATs banged out like it was nothing.  Keynote speakers were introduced by how many 10k pushes they had done.

The Worst Reasoning Ever
To this point, I had sold 3k but never 4k in a week, which would have been an 8k push.  10k was a realistic breakthrough goal for me.  It wouldn’t be easy, but was definitely doable and therefore a good solid goal.

Well, my good friend, Leah Hsieh, who was also in our Ann Arbor office, said her goal was a 20k push.

Now, Leah was a talented and solid salesperson, but at the same time I had a higher average order and consistently higher number of sales each week.  Not only that, but she had never had a 10k push let alone a 20k.

I am ashamed to say this was my thought process at the time:  “Who was she to set a 20k goal?  Why not set your goal at 10k then do 15 then do 20? “Well, that was just about the WORST reasoning I ever had used in my life.

If 20k is a number achievable by others, it is achievable by Y-O-U.  You just have to complete the inputs and copy their system.

It’s a numbers game
What is her average order?
What is her closing ratio?
How many appointments can she cram into her schedule?
How many minutes on the phone to schedule one meeting on average?
How much phone time does she require?

WILL SHE DO THE PHONE TIME? → That’s all that matters!!!!!!!

A Push is Always Worth It
Now, pushes can go well or they can go poorly.  I’ve never had one not go well for me, but that same year our other close friend, Marianna, had a terrible first week of her push.  She was shooting for 10k, and only sold 2 her first week.  She kept phoning and busted out her 2nd week goal of 5k for a total of 7k for the push.

She had never sold 3k in a week before that, and so seeing a 5k week happen was revolutionary for her, not to mention the mental toughness achieved when you are way behind your goal but don’t just throw in the towel.  She and I earned LIMO NIGHT because we each got over 6k… and that LIMO NIGHT was one of the best nights of partying and feasting I’ve ever had.  I write it in all caps for a reason, it was that cool.

Let me tell you how I made 5 GRAND in a week.

How I made $5,000 in a week

In a word, momentum.

Momentum: the residual effect of consistent past effort – a build up, if you will.  This was the key.  In this case effort combined with a bit of luck and a streak was born.

For a salesman, an entrepreneur trying to raise capital, an athlete in training, or an artist of some kind looking to break through anonymity, momentum may come in different forms.  However, our definition above serves all of those looking to reach others and acquire an audience.

Well, the most as I’ve said before that I had sold in a week prior to this was 3k but never 4k.  Selling 5k would have been a great breakthrough, but in order to earn $5000 I needed to sell $10,000.

Luck is a Fickle Mistress
Selling $10,000 in a week was so high of an idea for me I would have been happy to do that over two weeks.  We are talking tripling the best week I’d ever had.  So yes, there was some “luck” involved.  I didn’t set out to sell $10,000.  My goal was $5,000, but my average order was higher than usual.  You could call that luck – like I stumbled upon some good prospects, or you could call that skill because I purposely called my best people and momentum helped me do an excellent job on the appointments too…

Either way, I did have things go well for me, so I’ll admit it was partly good luck or good fortune.  I have no problem with that.  When you work hard, you get lucky more often.  Luck and effort go hand in hand.  Luck is a fickle mistress.  Ignore the effort, and Luck turns her back on you.

So here’s how it happened.

Typically, I tried to make phone calls from 7-9 at night Mon-Thurs, from 9-11 on Saturday mornings, and 6-9pm on Sundays.  I didn’t call every night, would aim to, but would miss several due to appointments in the evenings, lack of follow through out of laziness or weakness of mind, or deciding I had sold enough that day that it warranted a “break” – how convenient, that break came during the most important time in my schedule!!

So, for this push, I decided to commit to hitting every single phone time I could.  8-9:30am every weekday plus 7-9pm every night for 12 days.   (In hindsight this was not the best plan, it was actually fairly difficult energy and decision management for reasons I will enumerate later.)

Twelve days.

That’s it.  I wanted to see how many appointments I could book up and do, and my goal was to sell $10,000 over the two-week period.

Week 1

Blue = Sale
Green circle = No Sale  (seems backwards, I know – but I like BLUE better!)

Pink = No show or Cancel

Week 2

 

Orange Circle = Sales
Green Circle = No Sale
Pink Highlight = No Show / Cancel

I called on my best leads.  One page in particular I had saved to call during this push.  I knew that page would be particularly good because of the time I spent qualifying them (getting to know them through asking questions about them from the person who referred them to me as I taught you to do earlier.)

I started calling the day before the push started (also not optimal).  In the chapter 8 to 8 for 108 we’ll see starting your calling a week before is a crucial key to putting together a 20k to 30K push.

The yellow line at the top of my schedule was for our 10K alliance.  It was for any of the reps who had a goal of 10K or greater for the push.  Our manager, Ken, had us sign a contract agreement with him to promise we would be in the office every morning at 7am for a morning meeting to listen to some motivation and report our previous day’s results and then make some calls.  It held us accountable and kept us consistent which was a big reason I was successful in hitting my goal.

There was definitely one morning at the very beginning (I would say day 2 or 3) that I was lying in bed and my mind said to me, “Aww, why am I doing this?  Who really cares that much if I have a 15K push and win a dagger.  I have enough money.  Trophies don’t mean anything, and years from now none of this will matter…”

Ha! And here it is years from now and I am writing about that very day that was THE day I flipped the switch and jumped out of bed right that very second!

I shook my head violently, and leaped to my feet!  I said to myself, “NO!  Oh no!  I’m not letting you even take ahold of me for one more second!  I’m doing this!  I can’t even let that thought into my mind I got to get to the office!”

I was proud of that day.  I still am.  I didn’t do anything special to get motivated.  There was no trick, no secret.  It was just a decision, but I could make it because of the following desire:

I wanted to see what I was capable of.

I wanted to answer a question:
If I hit every phone session, what could happen?

And if I missed even one day, one phone session, I wouldn’t know.  I wouldn’t be able to say I had done everything – and that was in a sense the victory I wanted more than the $10,000 push result.

There is a difference between reading 2 or 3 pages and not opening the book at all, between making 10 calls and not even getting off the couch to pick up the phone, and between running 1 mile and running zero.

Sure 3 pages, 10 calls, and 1 mile is hardly anything, but the act of willpower to get yourself up and start is the biggest hurdle.  Once you clear that, 90% of the time you can continue on with your normal workout and complete your goal.

So let me tell you what gave my whole push a boost!

The 2 Appointments that Transformed My Game

If you look at the schedule for July 11, the very first day, you will see two names on there.  Sanford and Larsen.  Those were my momentum sales.

I was so lucky, yes lucky, to have scheduled them for the first day of the push instead of the last.  If I had to fight the whole 12 days with all the no sales and no shows up front followed by a big streak of sales second it would have been much tougher.   That is what happens to some reps though.  They start out and luck goes against them first, but they don’t think it’s luck.  They think it’s their fault, and that they are no good or can’t sell and they quit before the averages even out.

Averages aren’t luck.

But the ordering of the numbers that make up the averages can be just dumb luck.  And that is what I got on day 1.  Just good ol’ fashioned dumb luck.  Mrs. Sanford loved cutco and owned almost everything the company made.

Some reps would look at this the wrong way thinking they couldn’t find anything new to sell her.  I knew immediately this was a HUGE advantage.  Why?  You mean, besides the fact that she told me when I called her that I had “struck the mother lode?”  She actually said that on the phone!

Having a lot of the product meant she knew and loved it and was already sold on the value.  All I needed to do was get her to like me and have a good time and then propose she do all her Christmas shopping and birthday shopping that day too – with me of course! :)

Why not, Mary?  You know this is the best gift you could buy anyone who cooks.  They use it every day and it will last forever, guaranteed.  Every time they cut with it they will think of you and be like, wow Mary really hooked me up with a nice SET of knives.  Every day they will think of you and think that.

She bought her daughter the Homemaker Set and the Gourmet Extension set.

So that was about 1.5K down on my first appointment.  Not too shabby, not at all!  She also promised to give me 50 referrals over email.  And very sweetly told me not to worry it was ok to bug her to remind her – she needed reminders to get things done.

I still have yet to see one referral from her.  I’ve bugged her a few times, but I could have bugged her more.

Let that be a lesson to you!  No matter how big the sale or how nice the promise, I’ve only had one deliver names at a later point.  It just doesn’t work that way.

Say how ‘bout I trade you, Mrs. Jones: you quickly jot down 3 right now, and we’ll talk about the other 47 later!  Once they write 3, ask for another quick 7 and you’ll be on your way you PROMISE!  They’ll smile and laugh – after all it is later Mrs. Jones!

On with the story, my next appointment was a no sale, and then I almost got lost.

I had written down the wrong address in my book.  I actually thought I might be close, since the numbers were just off a bit.  It was like 9008 or something and there was a 9006 then 9010 so I just knocked at 9006 and asked if they knew the Larsens.

They did know them.  It was them.  Ha, go figure.

I don’t know why it was off, but it was.  So we sat down and the Larsens and I became friends in about 20 to 30 minutes of chatting while I sharpened up their “complete” (so they said) set of cutco knives they’d had for a very long time.

I remember the feeling I had.  I was relaxed and happy.  I was relaxed and pleasant, and I just asked them about their kids as I sharpened their knives and got to know them.

I think that was the most important thing about the appointment.  The feeling that Sanford had given me.  I let that feeling and vibe out as I of course I couldn’t help but do while I was with the Larsens and that is what you call momentum.  It wouldn’t be a bad practice to go into every appointment pretending you had just sold the Ultimate of whatever product you sell.  Just walk in without a care in the world and live in that reality and it will come true.

I asked if while I was sharpening they would write me a nice letter I could show to people and their friends and explained to them about the referrals.

Asking before the presentation was uncommon practice, but I felt they liked me already, and I wanted to save time since they did have quite a few knives I needed to sharpen.  They gave me a full list of 20 names and wrote an excellent letter I could show their friends.

If you are comfortable asking or saying something oftentimes the other person is as well.  It’s ok to go on your instinct.  One should in fact most of the time go on instinct.

During our conversation they said they had one son and one daughter.  When I was finished sharpening their Homemaker +8 table knives, I told them how because of the competition, I had some upgrade specials I could show them a really great deal on an awesome set I loved and would go perfect with their homemaker.  It would complement it well because a lot of the tools they had were basic tools, but some of the best tools were the ones in the extension set (also known as the gourmet set).  I showed them the cleaver, vegetable knife, hardy slicer, and santoku knife and explained why I loved them and why they were better than the basic tools.

Then I asked when they first bought their set, and when they told me I asked if they wished they had always had cutco and didn’t have to have dealt with the other knives had for so long before that.

They said yes, and so I asked if they would like to give that gift to their kids – the gift of never having to have dealt with other shoddy knives.

If they wanted to look at buying one of them a starter set I could give the other set for free if they wanted to get the extension set for themselves.  After all, a cutco person doesn’t come by every day or every year, it’s only every like 5 years someone may contact you.  With it being part of my competition this would be a great time to get this done, and putting it off would just mean more days your kids would have to deal with those old knives you loved avoiding so much.

They were interested, and I proposed they buy the galley +6 for the daughter who cooked a bit more and the essentials for the son who didn’t do as much in the kitchen.

They looked at the total and then asked if by giving the set to them for free would hurt my points for my contest.  I said well, to be honest yes, it does cost me the points I give to you free, but it is something I’m willing to do to make this deal happen.  They said oh no, you don’t have to do that!  We’ll just pay for the whole thing.

I said, “Are you sure???”
“Oh yes, don’t do that.  We want you to do really well for the contest.”

I couldn’t believe my ears!  These people were the nicest couple ever.
I said, “Oh my gosh, I feel like I should throw you guys a party or something!”  They both laughed and said they had the money and they wanted to see me do well.  What great people!

Can you imagine??

I had never sold more than one set in an appointment before and here I had just sold 3!!

It was a major breakthrough in my thinking.  From that moment on, every cutco owner who had kids was the best prospect I could find.  I was proposing multiple sets on every appointment that it made sense, and Homemaker owners were better than people who only had a few pieces.   I sold a ton more gourmet sets too, referring to them as extension sets and upgrade specials and explaining how they were better knives than the basics.

It wasn’t a line.  They are better.  I always grab the gourmet pieces if they aren’t dirty.  That’s why chefs use them – they aren’t scared of them and they work better!

A few phrases that seemed to work well:  

But I should at least tell you…
Once I had explained the reasoning for the upgrade to the gourmet set I used this to intro the addition of the gifting of the starter sets for the kids.

“Well there is a deal we have going on right now, and I really appreciate your time and having me over so if you don’t want to do it it’s fine, <shrug> but I should at least tell you about it because I think <start nodding, raise eyebrows, widen your eyes, and tip your head a little sideways and back like you are motioning them to follow you> you might be interested in this <nod>.“

This seems to be a nice way to broach a topic without being pushy.  I see a lot of good facial expressions when I say this to people.  Usually they tip their head to the side and say, “Ok, yeah what is it?”  I think it relaxes them and strengthens their trust in me and in the fact I’m not just trying to sell them as much as I possibly can.

A Note on Conviction and Pushing to Sell Big
For most of my appointment I’m pretty laid back.  I just talk casually and explain the facts and reasons to clients.  When I’m cutting I smile a lot and excitedly show them how awesome it is.  I lower to a whisper and say things like, “Check this out, Lisa,” then bounce over to her with a particular food to cut.  “You’ll love this.”  When I get to my conclusion and they know the price I let out my heart about why they should buy.  What I propose is what I truly believe is best for the client.

I don’t try to sell everyone the same thing.

It’s always customized to people based on what they say they do and would use and like.  I believe in acting as a steward for the client and advising him in his best interests just as I do as a fiduciary now that I am in the financial advising industry.  I would never pitch any proposal that I didn’t feel very confident I was “right” about.

The way I try to increase sales is to get the client to think bigger.  For example, they are going to do Christmas shopping and birthday shopping for each of their loved ones in a matter of months.  The kids are going to need sets someday eventually too.  Why not take care of some of that now so it all doesn’t pile up in December and you aren’t out just randomly walking down aisles looking for something to jump out at you?  It’s not costing you any extra to buy it early.

I finished out the day with my 4th appointment which was a smaller sale – $200 on a garden set.  Not too shabby, not too shabby at all.  That brought in a record day and probably close to a record week in one day!!

Over $3,700 in sales!!  I had almost made 2,000 that day.  Wow, now that was something.  When I called my manager and told him even he was excited.  Later in the week he would also remark he was waiting for me to hit a bad day, but the sales just kept coming.  Each day was over $1,000 in sales.  The first week I sold over $10,000!  Double what my averages said I would, and the second week my averages came through just about perfect for another $5,000.

I remember I made every phone time.  I finished strong and felt great knowing that I did everything I had set out to do.  I won a dagger for completing a 15K push, and took 3rd place at the conference for the entire Midwest region.

When I went up on stage to receive my trophy and give my sales report, our Region VP, Jeff Bry, asked me how many appointments I had done.  42, although I think I reported how many I had booked, 55.

The Most Calls Wins
Both guys that beat me had done more appointments than I had.  They did more appointments because they had made more calls.  They simply outworked me.  I had a higher average order probably.  I was the “better” salesman, but really all that matters is the total sales in the end.  So they were both actually better than me because they out-planned and out-called me.  It didn’t matter if I out-averaged them.  It wasn’t a competition of averages.  It was a sales quest.

55 appointments set
42 appointments completed
13 cancelled (24%)
13 didn’t buy
29 bought
$15,800 in sales
$7,900 in income
69% closing ratio (29 out of 42)
$545 average order for the competition

My Typical Average Order = $449
*National Average Order = $180
*National Average Closing Ratio = 60%

*The National Average Closing Ratio is tracked based on Qualified Presentation Reports submitted by reps which is required for base pay, and are therefore fairly accurate, not based on someone’s general guess.  National Average Order is exact.  They simply take total sales and divide by the number of orders processed at the factory.

On my schedules above I had written down 174 reaches, meaning I had spoken with 174 people on the phone.  If they hung up before I even said my pitch I didn’t count them because I didn’t really reach them.

So the complete funnel looked like this:
32% of the people I talked to agreed to set a meeting
76% of them kept the meeting
69% of those that saw me bought, and bought on average $544 each
So 17% of the people I talked to (29 sales out of 174 reaches) resulted in ALL of my sales.

Of all these stats the one that is most significant to me was that only ¾ of the people kept their commitments to see me.  This is pretty terrible.  I’m not going to blame it on the American psychology of flakiness though.  I could probably have easily cut this in half or kept it to under a 10% cancel rate.

How to Reduce Your Cancellation Rate
At the end of the getting directions to their place after they ask you for your number in case something comes up, say the following:

Ok great, thanks so much for having me over.  Mr. Jones, where do you keep track of your appointments?
My calendar.
Is it on your phone, your computer, or your wall?
Wall.
Have you ever forgotten to look at it and missed an appointment?
No or Yes.
Last week I drove all the way out to ______.  It took me 30 minutes and a lady had forgotten about me, can you believe that?  My burning desire is to see what I am capable of.  My goal is to see 100 people in the next 12 days which means I won’t have long to spend with you because I’m doing 9 appointments a day.  I’m waking up at 6am, starting work at 8am and not finishing until 8pm.  I am going to spend over 50 hours on the phone and writing letters setting up these meetings.  Can you imagine if when the day came for their appointment everyone cancelled because they just didn’t feel like doing a little meeting that day?
Oh I wouldn’t do that, RJ.
Ok, thanks so much I appreciate being able to count on you.  When I see you I’ll give you a chance to win $1,000 shopping spree.

What this does is give the client a whole new understanding of what this appointment means and they will remember every word you said when they wake up and look at the calendar and see that ONE appointment on their schedule which otherwise would seem kind of optional to them since they are in their mind volunteering their time to help you out.  Since it’s an extra to them, they feel ok about canceling it, but when they hear your goal and know how long you spend setting up your meetings they reason if you are working all day, they can do the one little thing on their calendar.

People are never as busy as they say.  Everyone has time to squeeze in an appointment if they have to.  They all see the person who cuts their hair once a month.

Also, this is not too much info or coming on too strong.  It is just stating plainly the facts of how busy you are and how hard you work to set up your meetings.  You aren’t even asking the client to promise to be there directly.  You don’t say, “Can you promise me you’ll be there?”

Think about posted rule signs.  Keep Out.  Don’t walk on the grass.  Etc.
Aren’t those sometimes annoying?  Don’t you wonder why you can’t?  The why is important.  It’s more important than the rule.  A sign that that said Walking on the Grass Kills It, or better yet would be We Just Watered the Grass, Would You Please Not Kill It By Walking On It, Thank you :) would be way more effective.  (Ok, 3 smaller signs then!  :)

In Asian cultures they don’t yell “No” to young children.  They don’t yell Stop That.  Why?  Because they save those hard words for real occasions of danger.  They instead instill the understanding that the child requires in order to make the connection between cause and effect.  Instead of relying on fear and punishment to motivate actions (something requiring your future presence to monitor and punish bad behavior), they set up a self-regulating system.  If you do X (bad action), Y (bad outcome) happens.  For example, if you smack your toys on the ground they get little cracks in them and then after time they will break and not work anymore and you won’t have toys to play with. :(  There, problem solved!

Other interesting income breakdowns:
1. Income per appointment set
$7,900 / 55 =  $143
2. Income per appointment completed
$7,900 / 42 = $188
3. Income per person I reached on the phone
$7,900 / 174 = $45
4. Income per hour
$7,900 / 153 = $51.63 per hour
(which would be $107,398 per year at 40 hours per week), and I worked 80 hours per week.

 

Now, that brings up an interesting idea and our final FEAR.  “I couldn’t work that much.  I wouldn’t want to.  I’d have no life.”

FEAR #9:

Fear of Burnout / Having No Life

“I don’t want to trade my life away or be a workaholic…”

This fear is warranted in some ways, and that is why I have saved it for last and devote a large part of the remainder of this book to teaching you the way to overcome this FEAR and provide a system you can implement for solving the REAL problem of energy.

It involves examining where energy comes from and what activities cost energy.
We discuss what I refer to as the 3 Power Cycles and some powerful habits and mindsets to increase your mental and physical ability to work longer, but not more over the long run, just more in a given push cycle.

Life is a series of sprints, not a marathon, and the most productive people batch their projects to save time and mental energy.  Synergies and economies of scale happen when you do all of a certain process at one time, then do all of another process at another time.  It means lumping activities together.

Lessons from Henry Ford
For example, think of Henry Ford.  Good ol’ HF was a pretty smart guy.  He revolutionized production by deciding to have workers specialize in one area so they’d get efficient at doing something simple by doing it over and over again.  That’s what you need to do, but you still need to be every work on your assembly line.

Where most people lose the horse’s tail is they want to take one car all the way from start to finish in one go then make the next car.  They don’t like having 10 or 100 unfinished cars lying around.

This is where genius comes in.

Instead of building one car from start to finish, you need to build 10 cars at once but do one step in the process 10 times in a row then move to the next step, and repeat.   That way you start to gain these efficiencies by the 2nd car you do, and at each of cars 2-10 you get faster and faster at that particular skill.  These time savings build up because when you only do something once you might not think how to invent a faster way, and you just do it inefficiently.  You don’t give it much thought and fail to innovate.

Henry Ford Washing Dishes
For instance, here is an example of how you are being inefficient right now in washing your dishes.  When you wash one dish, you don’t like to get your hands wet since it’s only one dish you turn the faucet on and wait while the power of the water gets all the sticky stuff off.  Then only if it doesn’t work do you grab a sponge and scrub add some soap possibly depending if you have a dishwasher, and finally it’s time to rinse.  How do you rinse?  Do you turn the faucet back on?  Did you ever turn it off?  That running water is energy.  You are using up additional water and soap since your sponge isn’t soapy because no one was likely doing dishes right before you.  If you waited to do all your dishes at once you must deal with a mess, yes, but you also learn ways to save time.

1. You wear rubber gloves because they protect your hands from excessive heat of the water.  Should you be turning on and off the faucet several times and the temp might be too hot.

2. You plug the drains and make two rinsing tubs – if you have a dual sink – limiting your water to a fixed amount.  You don’t make a wash and one a rinse.   One sink rinses the soap off and eventually becomes soapy and dirty.  The other is the second rinse which stays fairly clean throughout the entire process.

3. The soap stays on your sponge, you don’t put it on the items you are washing. You don’t have to re-soap each plate, and this saves time and soap.

4. You start to see certain motions are more effective for rinsing and washing, and begin to speed up your process.

This saves time by batching and learning these innovations.   You will save the time you usually waste between projects.  In my appointment system, you will actually work less than half the year – less than a Nine-to-Fiver, but 2 weeks out of 6 you work 7am to 10pm.  That’s 15 hours a day.  These are in short timed bursts though: 3 days on, 1 off, 2 days on, and then 1 off.

Burnout is a MYTH
It’s actually a myth… in a sense.  You can burn out, it’s true, but most of us haven’t burnt out we only question the balance of work and play and so force ourselves to say we are burnt out or would be burnt out if we keep working so as to justify some time off.

There is nothing wrong with taking a break and having some fun, but…

PLAN IT BEFORE YOU DO IT

That way you can discover how far you really can go without burnout.  It’s much further than you think, and what you will do for fun will be much more fun since you’ve given some time and thought to it, and won’t waste time trying to find something on the fly and then settling for some crappy tv or something.

What we Think Causes Burnout
What causes real burn out is not lack of time off or too much work, but:
1. improper care for the body,
2. improper sleep,
3. inadequate water, food, and exercise
4. lack of meaningful human contact.

It’s not that we aren’t watching enough of the tube, or that we are going out to the bar drinking enough, or that we haven’t had time to stay up late and party.  Many times it’s that we ARE doing these things.

Have you ever finished a vacation and said to yourself,
“Man I need a vacation after that vacation?”
It’s because we are often…

What actually causes Burnout?
Skipping steps which would preserve the body and mind because of the harried nature of working under a deadline or with some feeling that we are behind and trying to catch up or save time or get the most done, etc.  This is self-sabotage.  We are only setting up the need to take time off and slowly robbing our momentum.  Picture a snowball slowly unraveling instead of getting ever bigger.

Energy Karma and Warren Buffett’s Snowball
For example, during my 2007 push I skipped lunch and wouldn’t eat dinner until I was a ravenous Tasmanian devil at 10 o’clock at night.  I’d binge on food, fill my stomach to capacity, and pass out on food coma to awake to indigestion and other unpleasantness, not to mention poor energy karma, all without realizing it of course.  That was standard fare back then.  It was normal to be tired.  So many of us are zombies and don’t even know it because we have never experienced what a body that is exercised, slept, nourished, and stretched actually feels like.
Yes, energy karma!  It is soooo real.

We have never made the crusade to conquer the self and harness the willpower that would result from such a quest.

In his book Snowball, my ol’ friend Warren speaks of life with this simple analogy.  Just like the white pebbles that grow into giant boulders, our money and energy can amass into great storehouses this very same way.  He says, “Life is like a snowball.  All you need is wet snow and a really long hill.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFhgDdvLFWE

The Legend of Zelda: Building your Energy Capacity
Energy is a bit more perishable.  It must be safeguarded and kept full to achieve peak performance.  But when you are building your energy you are also building the storehouse for that energy.  That storehouse may empty, but the storehouse will not be torn down.  Your capacity to amass energy will not reduce over a weekend of poor energy choices.

Think of Link from the Legend of Zelda.  When you start playing the game Link has a measly 3-heart life bar.  Every time you complete an important part of the quest, he gains a piece of heart and enlarges his capacity to survive in battle.  You are just like Link.  You need to build your pieces of heart.

Let’s make that quest together!  Here and NOW!

How to have MORE FUN
What is the best way to make sure we are having the maximum amount of fun?

Let me ask you this…
Which party do you think would attract more guests?
1. One that was thrown together with venue and guests available on zero notice or…
2. One that’s been planned and invites sent out months in advance?

My point exactly.

Not that you don’t sometimes stumble onto a great party or have an opportunity arise to partake in something really fun, but planning your free time a bit by thinking ahead ensures the leisure time you spend provides the maximum fun per hour that you’re off the clock from work.

If you only had 10 hours of vacation a month instead of every weekend, wouldn’t you want to make sure you got to do something really fun with that time?

Oftentimes, we find ourselves clicking through TV channels in an impromptu search for something…
What are we searching for?

ESCAPE.

Want more fun?
Plan more.  Put planning in your calendar as a repeating 2 hour event every Sunday morning.

Don’t be an Ostrich
We are so depleted by our lives and work in one way or another we have our natural response is to numb ourselves from the world as often as possible.  Ask yourself if you planned those nightly hours each week in advance, would you put “Channel Surfing” as an everyday thing?

Wouldn’t you at least want to Tivo your favorite shows and skip the commercials?  Next time you turn on the TV and start surfing for something a little alarm should go off and you should think of the ostrich hiding with his head in the sand.

Something to Look Forward To
The other reason to plan fun activities for our free time is that it gives us something to look forward to and a reason to work.  We are working for that trip to Europe, that day at the beach next weekend, etc.  If you can’t think of fun things you want to do on your free time maybe that should tell you that you aren’t losing out on much by working a bit more until you find something you really want to do.

Learn from Hindsight
What times do you cherish?  When you are reflecting on how you’ve spent your time do you look back on your life and say, “Man I am so glad I watched those TV shows.”???  Do you ever think back on your life and feel gratitude for the movies and the video games?

Or isn’t it the travel and the time spent with friends and family at special occasions and events that form the fondest memories?  If offered the choice (because you are being offered the choice every day) between traveling the world or watching it on TV which do you choose?

Standard American Schedule
Do as little work as possible 9-5 Monday to Friday
Avoid work and thinking about work 5-9 Monday to Thurs
Friday and Saturday party, drink, escape.
Sunday rest, work, clean, and get caught up for dreaded Monday…

Dreamline Approach
Work 8 to 8 Monday to Saturday for Weeks 1-3 with timed breaks, exercise, and healthy meals
for fuel.  Focus on planning and rejuvenating from 8pm-10pm every day.  Get to sleep early and be rested for the entire push, then take Weeks 4 and 5 completely off for a global vacation rewarding yourself and really living.

Here is what I think is sustainable for a year:

8 to 8 for 108: 6 Week Cycle for World Travel

This is a 50/50 work rest cycle that I think maximizes life value.
For 3 weeks you work, then you take a global vacation for weeks 4, 5, and 6.

You do 8 cycles per year of push weeks where you work 8am-8pm doing 108 appointments in 12 “on-day” pushes.

Week 1: Phone Jamming
8 hours of calling per day.  8am-12am, break, then again from 5-9.  During the break you exercise, shower, and make dinner.
8 hours of calling yields 16 appointments
7 days of calling yields 112 appointments
1 day off to rest and prepare for a TON of driving and demos.

Weeks 2 & 3: The Push
Demo scheduled every hour and a half starting at 8am ending at 8pm for a total of…
8, 9:30, 11, 12:30, 2, 3:30, 5:00, 6:30, 8
9 appointments per day
9 x 12 days = 108 appointments
(one day off at beginning after phone week and one off in middle of push)
108 appointments set
25% cancel (this is when you eat and exercise etc.)
70% buy
$400 average order (typical for most good sales people)
= $22,680 sales
= $11,340 income

Income per week in cycle
$11,340 / 6 = $1890

Income per year
52 / 6 = 8.6  so 8 cycles per year
8 x 11,340 = $90,720 income

Now you don’t have to take a 3 week vacation.  But I wouldn’t mess with the basic concept.  Booking up your day as much as possible is the easiest way to sell because it doesn’t require you to make phone calls on days you also have to be out driving around.

This is key!  KEY!
Your day is dedicated to phoning when you need to phone, and you don’t have to then leave and go sell, and that is the better way of saying it.  You don’t let your appointments interrupt your phoning.  And it’s easier mentally to get on the phone when you can laze around all day in pajama pants at home with the TV on mute and your favorite drink in hand just dialing peacefully away!

The phone calls are done and done all up front.  So, the push is relatively stress free.  Also, by the time you get to your 5th and higher appointment in the day you have sold so much you feel almost indifferent if they buy, which is a good thing.  Remember my story of the Larsens?

Every day you bring home a fat paycheck, no matter how bad of a day it was.  7-9/day is the only way to fly.  Doing an appointment every 90 minutes also forces you to not waste time on bad people or get bogged down with good people either.  You don’t have time to waste.

Of course what will happen is you fail to perfectly book up 108 appointments.  It

After it’s all said and done, you could take a 3 day vacation, and get back on the phone.  We’ve build energy maximization into the push, so it is physically possible.  But most people want something more to life and need to feel they are working for something.

Finding the Oasis
You could also schedule more off days during your pushes.  You might want one off day for every 3 on days.  So 12 work days would require an additional 3 days bumping your push stretch to 15 days instead of 12.  Then there is the 7 days of calling beforehand, so that would take you to 22 days from 21.

P = Phone
A = Appointments

Mon  Tues  Wed  Th     Fri     Sat    Sun
P       P       Off    P       P       P       P
Off    A       A       A       Off    A       A
Off    A       A       A       Off    A       A
A       A       Off    Off    Off    Off    Off
Off    Off    Off    Off    Off    Off    Off
Off    Off    Off    Off    Off    Off    P

And the Cycle Repeats…

This looks very easy indeed.  In fact, as you can see, I added an off day in the middle of your 7-day phone marathon.  You could use one probably, and why not?  It only shortens your vacation stint by one day leaving you at a nice 18-day streak.

You have a total of 23 days off and 19 days on.  
7 Phone days x 8 hours = 56 hours
12 Appointment days x 9 appointments x 1.5 hours each = 162 hours
56 + 162 = 218 total hours
218/6 = 37 hours per week

Gridskipping

So with this plan you make $90,000 per year and have to work less than half the year.  The other half you can spend as you please.  I would take several global vacations, but that’s just me :).  The plan comes with 8, but of course they are optional!

The beauty to this plan is that it’s turning those frequently wasted hours between 5-9pm into extra whole days of vacation time!  Time you can plan to use for more fun than watching TV!

Time you can actually spend living!!

You might want to learn to play the piano or guitar?
Or write that book you always wanted?
Maybe you’d…

Jot out 3 things you have always wanted time to do:

1)_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2)___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3)_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Leah had inspired me to raise my goal out of my comfort zone even though I hate to lose – at least I did back then.

Now, I seek to fail in everything I do.  Yes, I know that sounds odd.  What I mean is this:

 

 

Astronaut Stuff

This is chapter 1 in my book, FEAR Itself.  To see and read the other chapters click on My Book at the top right of the menu.

Astronaut Stuff

For a large portion of my life I believed there were people that were born more gifted or talented, and that those were the people that became professional athletes, superstar singers, actors, top salespeople, top students, etc.  My parents, likely out of fear that I would neglect my studying, told me that I would never be a professional athlete.  I don’t know that they ever said those exact words, but the feeling I had was that it was like winning the lottery since there were sooo many people effectively trying out.  Growing up playing sports, I was never the best player on any team that I can recall, and so to think of being the best in the city or the best in the state at something was unfathomable.  Their mindset (and mine) was that the cards were already dealt so to speak.  I remember hearing the words “There is always someone better.  No matter how good you are at anything, there is always someone better.”  They did, however, indulge my dream of becoming an astronaut though, and after years of soaking up anything space, I was sent to space camp.  Lucky dog!

This was the fulfillment and in quick succession the death of a lifelong dream.  I had always wanted to go to space camp, but when I arrived I was quickly awakened to the fact that in this place, I was a dumb kid.  It was as if every kid there had won some science fair championship, and we were now at the national finals.  I, however, had only a styrofoam ball diorama of the solar system as credit to my name, and my dad had helped me with it.

Looking back, I wasn’t dumb; I simply lacked the knowledge that these other kids (who must have spent a lot of time reading) knew.  They were talking about things I still have yet to see appear on discovery channel due to the fact that the concepts were far too advanced for your average Joe watching the telly late night.  Suffice it to say: the experience was enough to convince me I was not “astronaut stuff.”

But, I did walk away knowing I had one thing those kids didn’t have.

I remember sitting in that classroom and the speaker asked for volunteers.  We all raised our hands, and he said, “No I need some volunteers.”  Some of us wanted to be picked really bad so we waved our hands and said pick me, pick me.  He nodded his head in recognition, closed his eyes, clasped his hands, leaned forward, and said again, “Ok, but you guys, I need some volunteers.”  Everyone raised their voices even more and began waving frantically.

I looked around.

At this point, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something more was needed, so I stood up and began walking to the front of the room.  Everyone went silent.  They all sat there with looks of “oh no fair,” across their faces.  Everyone wondered if it was allowed.  They waited.  I walked.  He smiled.

I wasn’t to the front yet, and I remember being afraid other kids would jump out and run ahead of me.  At the time, it was surprising that they didn’t.  I reached the front, stood next to the leader, and turned around to face them.  Still they waited.

He needed to tell them again that he needed volunteers.  It had been plural the first two times, but everyone was just caught in a trance.  The others still believed he was just kind of accepting my audacity, but that it wasn’t the actual answer he wanted.  Once he said it a third time two other kids raced to the front.  But the one who stood up first was the winner.  That still makes me happy knowing it was the one who stood up first, not the one who cut in front to beat him.

Then the leader took out two candy bars.  He said, “In life you have to ACT to get what you want.  You have to be decisive.”  He then offered the other kid his choice of candy bar.  To this day I don’t know why he offered the other kid first since I had volunteered first, but perhaps he knew what would happen.

“Which one would you like?”
“Umm…”
“Too long,” and he turned to me.  “Which one would you like?”
“Nestle Crunch.”  Bam, immediate.
“You see?” he said to the class, and he handed it to me.

I was never so proud in my life.  Maybe I was smarter than they were in certain ways…
They all followed the rules.  They were conditioned to remain where they were put until authority gave them the right to take a course of action.  They waited for approval.  They were afraid to try something that might be wrong.  They chose safety when I chose taking a chance, standing up, and standing out.

Sometimes in life it’s hard not to believe you aren’t “astronaut stuff” (translate for your own dream).  That is to say it’s hard to believe you are – but I stand by the double negative because in this world that’s the way it happens.  You see people who are taller, stronger, or somehow run faster than you even though they look like a stick, finish the test faster than you, get higher marks, etc.  You are told you are not “astronaut stuff” constantly in so many ways, and it’s hard not to accept that.

But here’s the thing: you don’t see any of the actions – past or present – that brings these people to be better than you.  You only see the current result.  You really don’t know how much time people put into their practice.  I think of a kid I knew growing up, Brian Arnold.

Brian was good at soccer and basketball in 3rd grade.  He was good.  Brian rode the same bus as I did, and his house was a few stops before mine.  I remember one day a girl said, “Watch Brian.  I bet he’s gonna throw down his backpack and start shooting baskets.  He does that every day!  I don’t know how he never gets tired of it.  Every day he gets off the bus and starts shooting baskets before he even goes inside.”

I watched, and sure enough Brian threw his bag on the lawn and ran over to the basketball picked it up and started shooting.  He made every basket as the bus pulled away if my memory serves me correctly.  I started watching him each day to see if he’d shoot baskets like that, and pretty much every day he did.  It was remarkable.

In a few years, Brian became one of the best basketball players at our school.  He developed that skill over years of short practice every day.  He practiced outside of the team’s practice.  He probably put in twice the hours as everyone else with that basketball, and that is only on half an hour a day of practice.  Most kids just practiced during the season at the team practice.  He practiced every day all year round.  That is how you become a professional.  That is how you become elite at whatever it is you want to be.

 

What is in this book?

This book distills the things I’ve learned on my quest to become the best version of myself.  I’ve been on a mission to become a warrior.  A warrior defined as one who backs down from nothing in his attempt to reach his dreams.  No setback too big, no mountain too high.  A warrior believes anything is possible.  If it’s difficult for some reason, to a warrior, it’s an opportunity to see how well he can adapt or endure, an opportunity to test his strength, an opportunity to overcome, a victory to be remembered for future challenges.

Obstacles are Opportunities.

You will get the following out of reading this book:
Empowering Beliefs
Mental Strength
Mastery of Self
A Mental Toolbox to Cope with Negative Emotions
The Warrior Physical Fitness Plan
A Scientific Understanding of Happiness
An Efficient System and Lifestyle to maximize the 3 Forces of Power: Time, Money, and Energy

I hesitate to use the word power because it has almost a negative connotation since one who seeks power is sometimes thought a power monger.  One may say, “Oh I don’t want power; I am happy to be and let be.”  Agreed, power should be used to empower not exploit, but in order to be and let be you need a certain amount of power, capisce?  So with that understanding, there is no other substitute I feel is as fitting.  We’ll leave it at that.

At the heart of every hour I spent researching and experimenting to learn the information that I have poured into the pages of the book you now hold in your hands, was the drive to find the most efficient method to achieve the desired result.   How does it work?

In designing the system that you now hold in your hands, I went about my research with an intense curiosity of how things work together, how one thing impacts the other.  I wanted the best bang for my buck in all senses.

I wanted a simple system to follow, because the more complex the system, the more decisions one faces, and the more opportunities to bail and fail.  Follow through is everything.  I wanted to be able to program this system into my being so easily and so strongly that I could execute it on autopilot.  I didn’t want my program to take away from living but rather enable it.

Ok Specifically, What is in this book?

Parts 2 and 3, Fear Itself and On Failure, are essays on two of the most important aspects of the process: developing a winning mind.

In Part 2, Fear Itself, I cover the 9 basic fears that cause people to take the safe routes in life instead of the effective “difference maker” routes.  This book will help you develop a positive psychology around achieving your true potential.

In Part 3, On Failure, the idea of Failure is redefined. You will learn how to turn challenge, obstacles, stress, discomfort, pain, sadness, depression, and many other “tough” things into opportunities to demonstrate strength or build toughness.  Exercise is shown as a process to failure and failure as a process to strength and success.  You will be given a new viewpoint and scripting for your mind’s toolbox as it goes through future mental battles of quitting vs. failing.

Part 4, Find Your Archetype, will help you identify those who are exemplars of the type of person you aspire to become.  In addition to showing you an action-based system for contacting present real world examples, it shares a powerful method for learning and acquiring the talents of any person one chooses: Picasso, da Vinci, Einstein – all are available for selection as advisors in one’s Power Cabinet.

Andrew Carnegie commissioned Napoleon Hill to conduct a study of millionaires spanning greater than 25 years including such famous people as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, William Jennings Bryant, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, and FDR.  In fact, Hill served as an advisor to FDR and is credited with coining the phrase of the famous speech, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  Cool huh?

Part 5, Habitizing Productivity, provides you with both the ingredients and a simple recipe to follow in order to bring about change and success.

Part 6, Power Cycles, explains that by spending time, money, and energy we are exchanging these assets for something of greater value to us.  It provides insight on conceptualizing what and why something is purchased and how the power cycle is affected by this decision.  It denotes which items serve as tools to expand our power, and which serve as poisons or drains sapping our power away.

Part 7, Music Mixology, Music influences the emotions to a degree mere text or words can seldom achieve alone. It discusses the scientific effects of music on the brain, specifically how sound can shift the brain between any of the 4 types of brain waves: alpha, beta, delta, and theta.  Included within are playlists for motivating the mind before a challenge, calming before bed or after a trying situation, stimulating alertness for enhanced learning ability and memory before reading or studying, or energizing before and during exercise.

Part 8, The Warrior Manifesto, is an essay of inspiration.  What is your highest self, your greatest potential?  A call to arms, this book provokes each of us to examine who we are and who we could become.  It details the experiences and training to draw out the modern warrior in each of us.  Drawing a line in the sand and dares you to cross it.  Cultivate and manifest the warrior inside you.   It includes a diet and exercise plan based on the latest research in cardiovascular endurance development, weight loss, and muscle gain.

Part 9, Androidization, serves you on a silver platter the best apps of for productivity.  How much time do you spend checking email each day?
Where is your to do list?
Interested in tracking progress to your weight loss goal?
Curious to see what you’ve eaten over the last 3 weeks?

This guide will serve you the best tools for tracking your progress in the most common areas of self-improvement: Diet, Exercise, Organization, Money, and Time.

Part 10, The Elephant and the Rider – It is sometimes said the self can be viewed as two separate beings, each attempting at different times for control.  The rider sits atop the elephant and orders him about with his planning and goal setting, but often the elephant revolts and the rider’s plans are useless.

Captured in this piece is the actual dialogue of the mind’s struggle between the part of ourselves that makes plans (the rider) and the part of ourselves that acts (the elephant).  It shows an inner battle between the two and provides an agreement to gain the elephant’s cooperation once and for all.

Why This Book Covers So Many “Different” Things

WILLPOWER is a function of ENERGY.

Willpower is in effect an energy bar, and when you use your will to do something that you don’t feel like doing you deplete your ability to continue to make those decisions.  This energy bar is actually linked to your physical energy capacity.  So when you are tired or hungry you have less WILLPOWER.

The human body and mind are tied together; what you do to one affects the other.
Therefore, if we are to achieve right ACTION we must first maximize our ENERGY.

1. Mental Energy – aka WILLPOWER – the ability to say yes I can, yes I will, stand up, and ACT is maximized by physical energy, music, and ideas that enter your mind that you find inspirational.

2. Physical Energy is maximized through healthy behaviors – specifically what and when we eat or drink, if and how we exercise, and how and how much we sleep.

3. Mental Strength – aka BELIEF – the I Can Do Anything Mindset – is achieved by a experiencing a Breakthrough – an event that destroys a previous limit to what one BELIEVES is possible.  In other words, setting new PRs.

What this means is that we must take on new challenging things to have breakthroughs and build mental strength, and that we must get our health in order for once – no matter what our burning desire, no matter what our quest.  We will be more effective at tackling the difficult barriers to success if we have more energy.

What Qualifies Me to Write This Book

What would qualify a person to write this book?
To recap, the goal of this book is to provide expertise on maximizing BELIEF, WILLPOWER, and ENERGY in order to achieve SUCCESS.

So, one would have to have developed a very strong belief in their ability to determine their results, be someone who has faced numerous setbacks and risen back up to conquer them, and have insight on the efficient use of time, money, food, exercise, and sleep as pathways to energy.

About Me
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but figured you’d ask sooner or later…

I graduated from the University of Michigan in Economics (go BLUE!) where I was captain of the boxing team.  While studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa I ran from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and back.
Since graduation, I placed top 10 in the nation in sales at a company that out-recruits the US Army every year.  Air drop me anywhere in the country and within 3 months I’ll build a successful referral sales business from the ground up.  I can turn a profit of $10,000 in any 3-week period I choose – regardless of the territory, regardless of the economy.

I used the funds from these early successes in sales to improve myself.
I taught myself a form of speed reading and have spent the last 10 years researching the best ways to get things done.  I am licensed to sell financial investments, and I’ve tracked and categorized nearly every minute of my time and every dollar of my money using free web apps.  During this process I’ve researched dozens of apps to select the best ones for maximizing productivity.

DISCLAIMER: This book is not about sales tactics.
It is about the self.  It is about your beliefs and your ability to control your own thoughts and actions.  I will discuss sales, but it should be looked at as a one particular method of pushing the self and strengthening one’s beliefs.  I recommend you translate my lessons as examples of how you can go about expanding your sphere of influence with respect to your particular endeavor.

Sales is an art of many skills.  Sales and economics go hand in hand.  We salespeople have to be efficient because if we aren’t productive we don’t get paid.  We, unlike most professions, are incentivized to maximize the productivity of our time.  We are constantly thinking of ways to get more done with our hour.  That qualifies us to be time consultants.

We are paid to set and hit goals.  We are paid for thinking and believing big.  That qualifies us to be strength of mind consultants.  We are paid to speak.  We are paid to listen.  We are paid to understand, figure out, relate, motivate, and inspire.  Words are our art.

The week of July 10 – July 16, 2007, I sold over $10,000 of cutlery face-to-face with clients by setting appointments over the phone.  I conquered the self.  I mastered the power of my own will.  I didn’t let fear, laziness, or excuses beat me even once for 12 straight days.

“12 straight days?” you say, “Big deal.  I could do that.”  Good.  You are right on both accounts, but like most things, it isn’t as easy as it sounds.  For those 12 days I did exactly what I set out to do.  I thought big, I believed big, and I sold big.  The 29 people that bought from me in those 12 days spent an average of $545 each.  I outperformed the national average order of $180 by 300%.

I went on to place #8 in the nation for the year of 2007 out of thousands of representatives working only 7 months out of the year.  By October, I had increased my monthly average to as high as $749 per order with 66% of my appointments resulting in a sale.

 

Why this Book is an Act of Love

As an aspiring entrepreneur, I didn’t have anyone that could tell me: “Take these classes, get this degree, get this certification, get these initials after your name, get this license, then you will be a __________.”  I had to find and forge my own path, and this book is my attempt to share some of my trailblazing lessons with you because I want you to be successful in your quest.

Your life is a quest for some burning desire.  Maybe one you haven’t fully become aware of yet, and if that is the case for you, you are on the right track.  Keep reading.

My Life Aim
I want to make a visible difference in people’s lives.  I want to look back on my life and say I gave people an experience which helped them along in their quest.  So here’s to you!
May you never, ever, EVER give up!

Yours in success,
RJ DeLong

ONEplace Talk: How to Raise a Million Dollars in…

I gave a talk to a group of fellow non-profit fundraising professionals at the Kalamazoo Public Library yesterday. The experience was very rewarding for a number of reasons – not the least of which being that it gave me an incentive to get down on paper my system for productivity. The talked included a list of 21 habits I’ve established which provide maximum energy and focus.

 

Outline

1. The Ideal You – A Visualization and Journaling Exercise
   
2. Ingredients (tools needed to implement the habits and techniques)
   
3. The 21 Habits of Energy & Productivity
   
4. The 10 Beliefs of Empowerment
   
5. FEAR Itself – The Top 5 Fears that Inhibit Success and How to Conquer Them (from my 20-page ebook, FEAR Itself)
   
6. 8 Steps to the Phoning Process w/ Sample Scripting
   
7. 8 Steps to the Meeting
   
8. How to Persuade
   

 

Self-Evaluation

First of all, I regret talking so much, or at least not asking for more feedback and letting us discuss things after certain topics. I felt a bit guilty for dominating the time and using it all to do all the talking. I think since it was my first talk in a while and I didn’t know how long it would take, I was worried I wouldn’t finish or that I’d forget things and would kick myself later for not mentioning. So, if you were at the talk, I am sorry for not making it more of a roundtable and planning out action questions for us to discuss as we went through. I’ll make a point to do that from now on.

Some things I Forgot – “Example Weight”

In general, I was happy with the way the talk came out. I felt I did a good job remembering almost all of the important info although I regretted getting off track at one point and not telling the story of how I got 40 referrals from one client. Also, there were a few other stories I could have told that would have probably added valuable “example weight” and by that I mean it is usually the examples we remember which help us to in turn remember the principles behind them. If a speaker or author doesn’t share examples, they are just sharing beliefs not facts, and that opens the window for readers to doubt.

On Omitting Explanations of the Habits

I regretted not going through and explaining WHY I use each habit, because I definitely expect those that were there to scan them and rule out many of them as unnecessary in their particular case (even though they aren’t) simply because I didn’t explain the WHY or the mechanics of the result of the habit. I’ve outlined them below.

 

21. Stacking Habits

Possibly the most important habit and I put it last on my list?? A mistake I am correcting now. Stacking Habits means deciding to let one habit be a reminder or a signal that it’s time to do another habit too. For example, in order to remember to wash your face or improve the health of your skin, stack the habits of rinsing your face when you wash your hands. You’ve already established the habit of washing your hands after you go to the bathroom (an action that occurs without a reminder) now stack on another action that should occur at the same frequency. Another example that has worked well for me is to stack the habit of making a bowl of vegetables for grazing during the workday on top of my habit of booting my computer. As soon as I log in and am waiting for my computer to boot up, I decided instead of being idle and staring off into space thinking about random things to go get my energy needs ready so it’s easier to make a good decision on what I eat later.

I have stacked my habit of turning off my alarm clock that is buzzing really loud with chugging water. Each time I do one I do the other, so the self-regulate. Try to think of habits you can stack this is absolutely KEY!

 

1. 6:00 Club – Get up at 6AM

I would have said that one of the books I read, perhaps it was GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen) said to always trade 2 hours of evening time for an hour of morning time. Frank Bettger, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, was the one who originally suggested the habit and said it was absolutely key for his productivity. It is true, the norm is to look at the clock to determine what we should do, this makes hardly any sense however, because the priority of our projects and tasks don’t change based on the clock. There are deadlines such as having dinner ready on time or running an errand or something that we have to do, but putting watching TV in as the action item simply because it is after 5pm and “work” is done is nonsensical. You might think TV helps you “wind down” but it doesn’t it is just an escape and excuse. If you are tired from work you don’t need to wind down, you need to sleep. If you aren’t tired then you ought to work or exercise to get tired so you can sleep. Winding down would mean you are energized and need to calm down. Really what people should say is that they want to escape from the stress of their day and not think. TV makes you think though. You think about what is going on and your mind wanders to thoughts about how you might apply what you are watching to your own life, etc. If you want to “not think” you ought to just meditate because that is what meditation is – it’s letting your mind be empty for once. This can be achieved a number of ways, but for instance picturing one thing in your mind and focusing on having deep consistent breaths.

 

Philosophy of Aging & How These Habits Maximize Energy (Applies to Habits 4,5,6, and 13)

I would have liked to mention the basic Philosophy of Aging – that we age due to the toxins we carry around in our body. As such, a cornerstone of good health is eating antioxidants and going to the bathroom often as well as getting more than 8 hours of sleep to repair and restore. It is the repairing and restoring that actually makes us stronger, the workout is destroying the muscles so that our body will repair. Since this could have turned into an entire other talk very easily…

 

5. Food Log: Using LoseIt and NutritionData sites as well as Taking a Picture of Each Meal Before You Eat

I would have liked to show a screen shot of nutritiondata.com diet analysis tool as well as how LoseIt allows single click meal loading. I think by highlighting those in say 30 seconds or so, my success rate for getting the audience to utilize them would have gone up over 500%.

 

6. Warm up / Stretching in the Morning

I would like to have shared some study data and support for why it’s important to get the blood flowing in the morning and talked about the anti-aging effects of stretching. This is one of the most important morning activities.

 

7. Time Log: Toggl and RescueTime

I would have liked to have screen shots and explained these apps so the audience could have seen why they are awesome. This is also true for all of the apps: Goal Reminder, Alarm Clock Plus, Mint.com, Evernote. Again this probably would have been 50% of the value of my talk.

Keeping track by logging your activities not only gives you a useful record to show others (especially good for job interviews) it also holds you accountable and rewards you for using your time well. Just being able to look at your pie chart and see your stats is enough incentive to keep doing well with your time. Mint.com provides this same incentive for money.

 

18. Empathize with the Future You: Prep your future Arrivals

This went totally unexplained. On the surface, the concept is pretty basic: prepare for tomorrow ahead of time, but to really understand why a deeper look is required.

Years ago, I would have said I didn’t need to prep everything ahead of time, there is no difference between cleaning something up at night or in the morning or filing something away is pointless if I’m just going to take it back out tomorrow, or laying out my clothes for tomorrow is pointless because I can just get them out when I’m putting them on. This seems true on first glance, but WRONG, it isn’t. The biggest difference is that by laying out your clothes you are visualizing your morning going smoothly and seeing your intentions. You naturally catch snags you would have run into in the morning as well, i.e. crap I don’t have clean black socks, or crap where are my keys, wallet, phone, oh yeah I have to drop off the dry cleaning tomorrow – is that all together? You set out all the things you need so you don’t fall behind and arrive late.

 

Philosophy of Being ON TIME

Being LATE is a concept I’ve totally changed my philosophy on. That’s another paragraph or chapter for another book, but for now suffice it to say that in a way, THE GAME OF LIFE all boils down to being ON TIME. Everything in a sense is on a clock: not just important meetings and conversations, grocery shopping (food is consumed as a function of time, so you should never run out of anything; buy it BEFORE you need it, but also and most importantly bills and retirement. Getting ahead is really apt phrase. One of the worst epidemics of our culture is letting LIFE push us through life. We procrastinate and avoid work until we are forced to deal with it. Why not get it done ahead of time because no matter when you do your work you are only going to do so much in order to retire. Take mini retirements as Tim Ferriss recommends if you don’t like the idea of putting “too much time” into work. Being LATE is a sign you are disorganized and THE GAME OF LIFE is beating you. By getting ahead in TIME, you will be ON TIME, and be getting ahead in MONEY too.