How to Be A Person of Influence with Mark Victor Hansen

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. So glad that you are here for this unique episode where Dan Kennedy is going to be interviewing the founder and co-creator of the popular book series Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul. Now, here's something interesting. As much as he's going to talk about how you don't deal with negativity, how you are charitable, become a go-getter, and how you are able to ask people and the power that that gives, really we're going to be covering today is how you can influence people so that way you can get others massively excited about helping you achieve your goals. Now, at the end of this podcast, the audio quality is a little out there. The phone cuts in and out, but I want you to stick around, make sure you lean in because the value of what's being taught is far more valuable than the sound quality here. Lean in, take notes, and let's listen in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hello everyone, this is Bill Glazer and I'm here today with Dan Kennedy and our special guest, Mark Victor Hansen, who probably most of you certainly know that name. He's very famous for many things which you'll hear about in just a few moments, but most famous for his association with the book series Chicken Soup for the Soul. Today's call is going to be Our topic is how to be a person of influence, and I'm actually going to now turn the call over to Dan Kennedy. Hi everybody.

Hey Mark, are you back?

I'm back, Dan. Thank you, and thanks for being patient with me today. That's all right.

Let me just lay in a little quickie intro.

All right.

Obviously your fame precedes you, but still. Mark and I have known each other longer than either one of us cares to count, but certainly back into the '70s. And Mark's probably best known as a speaker and/or as the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul omnipresent, everywhere you look to the point of being annoying empire. How many millions of books is that thing up to?

144 million we've sold, sir. Our goal is still to sell a billion, which no one's ever done, and we thought it'd be fun for us to do it.

Yeah, well, you know, $144 million, and as they say in the South, a fat hog will get you through the winter.

That's correct.

You know, I keep joking that you can't get to the billion because you're running out of titles. The latest one I have for you is Chicken Soup for the One-Legged Daffodil Farmer's Soul.

Well, that One-Legged Daffodil Farmer's Soul is going to be a big issuance of our book, so I'm convinced it'll sell at least 2 copies. There you go.

There you go. Also author of a best-selling book with Robert Allen, The One Minute Millionaire. Countless awards stacked up, including the Horatio Alger Award.

And you did forget one other book. I just finished one with Art Linkletter called How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life: 10 Ways to Add 10 Years to Your Life.

Yes, and I should be kicked for forgetting it because We have Art working with a client of ours, Miracle-Ear, and—

By the way, that's right. He is going to sell more hearing aids than have ever been sold because he's the one who got the electric blankets sold in America. And he said that after he had electric blankets with GE, he went from no kids to 5 kids and the blankets sold like crazy. And he said he can do the same thing for Miracle-Ear.

Well, if you can popularize an electric blanket. The purpose for the call today, I mean the traits and the skills that over the years that we've known each other that I've watched most closely with you that you don't teach or talk about much have to do with what I would call becoming a person of influence. Attracting the interest of persons of influence and most important maybe getting the support and the cooperation of people of influence, getting people on your bandwagon to open doors for you, to do things for you. I've always said you're a master at asking and a master at collecting people, having actually just demonstrated it. So that's really what I want to talk about today. Before we dig in though, Mark, is there anything about the bio or your current activities that I have omitted that you think is important for people to know?

Well, we've just finished a new book series called Ideas That Can Change Your Life. And even I didn't believe 3 of us could do what we've just done, which our goal is to write 101 books in 101 days. We did 101 books in 97 days. And it's going to be the new iteration of books called 10 Minute Books. Which I'm going to ask you to write, Dan, and I'm going to ask you and Bill to endorse, just like I've asked Wyland, and he's agreed to do it. So we're going to, we're going to change the world and end illiteracy and make reading as fun, because they'll all be 10-page books, they'll all be electronic, they'll be backed up with an audiobook and a video book. And it just—

we—

I am here to say that, as you know, my parents were Danish illiterate people, you know, born in 1904. That was 2 years before the automobile or the airplane or, or gasoline with our friend Rockefeller in Titusville. And Titusville— and what happens is that they didn't have a shot, and I do. And I used to watch Dad, uh, you know, be humiliated, not able to read a men's room sign. And I said, as a little kid, I didn't know how to change it. But now with the computer and electronics and bandwidth and storage capacity on a computer, I see for the first time ever we can change that. And I think a lot of the people that are listening on the phone would like to participate in that. And that's one of the things I'd like to talk to too, Dan. Cool. Yeah, and yesterday, just Wyland and I wrote a 10-minute book called Don't Be a Starving Artist because Wyland is the highest paid, most prolific artist in the world, now surpassing his teachers Dali and Picasso.

And I was a starving artist.

And he was a starving artist and thought it sucked. And you and I, Dan, are old enough to remember when we were starving. Starving writers. Starving writers and things have gotten better for us.

Yes, yes, well, whoever's line it was— been rich, been poor, prefer the former.

Yeah, exactly. And maintaining the former— earn it, keep it, and then return it.

Let's kind of— let's, let's, let's start with my topic, if we will, before you run off with the whole call.

Yes, sir.

And so, so let's talk about creating and collecting Leveraging relationships, I mean, it's my contention and observation that people do it randomly. Very few people do it by strategic intent. I mean, whoever moves in next to them is who becomes their next best friend. And in a long-ago book of yours, I was flattered to be included on a list you had built of people you intended to meet, keyword intention. So if you would, tell people about that list and then sort of how you go about creating relationships with all these celebrities and influential people, Wyland included. How you choose, how you connect, how you make this happen.

Well, what you just said is sort of correct. I think it's a trilogy. It's intention, attention, and then retention of friends. And the goal, as Solomon, the wisest man of all time, said, in Psalm 72, you ought to be an influencer of influencers, and to be that, you've got to decide you're a person of influence, number one. So I said, well, I'm going to go from being a nobody to a somebody. That was my personal decision and mission and value system. And then I wanted to get to hang around the who's who, and like Wyland and I are down here in the Keys, and yesterday he introduced me to the world's foremost photographer who does everything from covers of divers' magazines and National Geographic to Victoria's Secret, and he and I quick befriended each other. And the way I do it is I say, what is it I have to give or source or support this individual with? And like, the guy's name is Stefan Frink, F-R-I-N-K. And I said, look, we're doing these books, and I never thought about doing picture books before, just like I never thought about selling artwork to our Ideas That Can Change the World. And you know, suddenly you say, wait a second, because of a book called The Long Tail, which I hope all your people have read, which says basically, you know, computer storage is infinite, bandwidth is going to become infinite within the next year or two, and, you know, so everybody can put something online that's going to sell to some marketplace that never knew it existed. And, you know, we want to be the capacity of Amazon or eBay to do exactly that in the book, tape, video business for the whole smorgasbord of writers, authors, artists, playwrights, musicians. I'm now starting to see that we're going to have a million authors in this wonderful thing called the long tail. Be the content provider of all content providers. Did I overstate that and talk too long, Ben?

No, no, no, no, no. I think the thing that I hope people got is you go at each one looking for who you know or what you've got that you can provide to them.

Exactly. I'm a go-giver rather than a go-getter, and as a go-giver You know, a guy like this guy yesterday gave me his whole intellectual property on a software disk that's worth tens of millions of dollars. Now, I'd never rip off anybody's IP, or what's called intellectual property, because I am a total believer everybody's got some and everybody can get rich with it, which is one of the little books I wrote is that there's 38 kinds of IP, intellectual property, that we all, some, every one of us can make a fortune with one of them. How's that? Isn't that interesting?

All right, here's the next thing I want to bridge to, is you're also very good at getting people to work for you, often for free. Yeah, uh, Chicken Soup for the Soul being, you know, a great test.

Best example, huh? That's the best example.

I mean, it's a great example. And, and so, uh, how do you get people so excited about helping you achieve your goals?

Well, at the front end, Chicken Soup had no money and Jack and I were about $140,000 upside down and we had 67 stories that we'd personally written that we thought were kick butt and got standing ovations at the end of talks. And then we went to all our peers like you that were speakers and said, please, please, please give us a story. And like we got one from Tony Robbins and Art Buchwald and, you know, Weiland and Bob Proctor and, you know, Rita Davenport and a few other people. And we just, we just ASKed and GET and what you said correctly in the beginning, in my bio is that I am a master asker, and that's why Jack and I even wrote a book. We were going to call the— just like the book that you were in with me was Dare to Win, and then we're going to do one called Dare to Ask. But Berkeley, as you remember, said, no, you're not. You're going to call it The Aladdin Factor. And, you know, we sold 2.6 million of it. And the best student that we ever had of it is a lovely lady named Deborah Asada Shaw, who went out, asked herself what she could invent. She came out of lived in Spanish Harlem with no money and could look through the holes in the wall at her neighbors, you know, and listen to the tapes on Aladdin Factor done by Nightingale Conant. And she went out and made an umbrella that lights up the handle. And last year she made $306 million take home to herself with an umbrella that you just press the button and it lights up at night so you can see the sidewalk. And, you know, now she's on the board of Office Depot because she learned how to ask, and Walmart, and PepsiCo. So this thing about being able to ask, once you learn it, it leverages you. It is one of the great leverage points. I mean, there's a spiritual line that says, "Ask and you shall receive," but most of us have been taught, "Don't ask and don't talk to strangers and be careful, you're asking for too much," and humma humma humma. I think just the opposite. I think most of us underqualify ourselves, under-ask, and all the person's gonna say if they say no is no, and it was no before you asked, so it didn't change very much by you asking, and you're potentially infinitely better off. Our case, first we had to ask for the stories, then we had to collate them, then we went out and asked 144 publishers, all of them said, buzz off, hit the road, Jack. And I said, it's okay if you don't like him, but I'm a nice guy. And then, you know, then we had to ask bookstore by bookstore if they'd take it. And then, you know, the New York Times wouldn't rate us because it was a multi-authored book. And I said, I called a lady and I said, look, you got the Bible on your list, that's got 66 authors. She said, touche, you're in. And then And now we've been number one New York Times 58 times in a row and just keep rocking it.

Why do you think— you hinted at it— why do you think, what real conditioned beliefs do you think stand in people's way of doing this almost compulsively, habitually, constantly as you do?

I think most people are afraid of their own success at some level, so they self-sabotage. They probably, if you want to go to a deeper psychological level, the, you know, one of the little books we wrote is on forgiveness. And there's two aspects to love: giving us and forgiving us. And most of us are deeply, penetratingly unforgiving to ourselves. In other words, we don't give ourselves a shot. I say, well, whatever. And, and so we get hung up in that. And, and as long as you're hung up in your hangups, you can't, uh, go onward, upward, and goodward and go get results. And you're afraid to ask somebody because you say, well, what will they think of me if they say no? Well, they weren't thinking about you before, so they're not going to think about you after either. They don't care about you unless you ask them to care. And there are those people that are predisposed to wanting to help other people, and that's the kind of people you want to hang out with. It seems to me like the guy I'm with now and his girlfriend Wyland is one of the all-time great givers and, you know, contributors on the planet. I mean, and he's got 30 artists that all work for him and 500 employees. And he's, you know, unequivocally the world's biggest artist right now, uh, with, uh, 48 galleries around the world. He does all the artwork for Disney and The Little Mermaid and all that stuff. So, you know, and this guy, every time he turns around, I see him contributing to some charity. And, you know, and you can say, well, he's got it and that's why he gives it. No, he keeps giving, and that's why opportunity just inundates him. And, uh, like this morning, his girlfriend wanted to go to a jewelry store and The guy never heard of them and he sold them on Wyland Jewelry, you know, which is a big line on Maui Jewelry Company. Before we walked out of the jewelry shop, I thought he went in there to buy something and ends up selling the guy because he's willing to ask. And Wyland, you know, who was born with a clubfoot, and I raised $80 million for the March of Dimes with Melanie Griffith. Then afterwards they said, who are you going to give it to? And I said, Wyland, you were born with a clubfoot. They did 13 operations on you. They made your foot straight. One of his legs is still withered. We've been swimming and, like you said, diving and all that. I never saw it before because I never saw him in shorts. I always see him in long pants. He's an amazing guy. He went out and raised $126 million a year after I raised $80 million. I'm glad that this guy is around. I'm glad that— I mean, if I had a charity, I'd ask Wyland Galleries to give a picture and they would do it. Most people listening would ask the same thing, or everybody who's ever asked me for a book you know, for any charity, I think we've signed it and given it to them. And so it opens up levels of good and opportunity that you can't get to anywhere else. And if you really, back to a question you asked 4 ago, Dan, if you really want to get with the who's who of the world, if you start being charitable and going to charitable dinners and functions and that, that's where the who's who all are. I mean, whether it's a, you know, if you need to meet a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett or anybody, they're all at those kind of, and Rupert Murdoch, you know, they're all at those kind of functions. Like the biggest one ever held was obviously Bill Clinton, which I know you're, very Republican, but he's doing that global initiative and just got everybody from Rupert Murdoch to Ted Turner there and got everybody to participate and give him $46 billion for the 3-day meeting that he called together, which is amazing. So at a former presidential level, this guy's asking to see if he can't, you know, solve some of the problems of the world. And at the level that you and I operate at, we want to solve some of the problems of the world. And in your case, you wanted to write great books and You got them distributed, I don't remember, was it Office Depot and stuff like that?

Yeah, we're in Kinko's.

Kinko's, sorry.

FedEx stores actually, which is better than being in both of them.

FedEx just bought UPS and now the new company is called Fed Up.

Don't quit your day job. It leads to a question I wasn't planning to ask. Go ahead. You know, Wyland and probably next maybe Kincaid are probably the most criticized people amongst all the starving artists for selling out and being too commercial and running art factories and, you know, all of that. I suspect probably in our world world of speakers, that you run maybe only second to me.

If I sold out, I sure helped a lot of people get contributing my money and make more billionaire writers than anybody.

I mean, I would think that, you know, in that world, you run only second to me for being criticized and, you know, for all sorts of things from arrogance to, you know, too much emphasis on making money and not enough emphasis on the art of performing, you know, etc. The issue of being criticized for aggressiveness, assertiveness, pushiness, I mean, we have it with the kind of marketing that we teach to people, it usually causes them to be criticized by peers, you know, by people that don't get it. And I mean, you've certainly had your share. I mean, laugh if you wish, but you know, I've seen some of it. You've certainly had your share.

Yeah, I love my critics. I'm very thankful. Zig, who unfortunately has had a little health health issues right now, says they never make a statue to a critic. And I know Wyland's critics too, and they say he's not a fine artist, but I watched this guy do, you know, I've been to all 12 of his houses at different times because we've been great friends for a long time and were dive buddies with everybody from the Christos to anybody but Pierce Brosnan. Anyhow, the bridges. Anyhow, the point is that anytime you do anything, you're going to have people jealous of you. And if you do something really well, you get what they call in Australia the tall poppy syndrome where they try to whack out your legs or make sure you don't get an award. And as for my critics saying I don't prepare my talks, I am up, I mean even now, usually at 4 o'clock in the morning. Like this week I've done, I talked to 8,000 teachers and I was up at 4 o'clock in the morning after working on the presentation the whole day before flying out to Minnesota to talk to the 8,000 teachers with the Teacher of the Year. And my mind is on delivering the people more value than anybody. And the fact is that I'm getting paid $60,000 to talk now. And I have to assume that somebody thinks I'm getting value because they're not hiring me because I'm famous because Chicken Soup is famous, but Mark Victor Hansen is pretty much invisible before I show up somewhere. And I can walk in anywhere and like even today, a guy at the restaurant I said, man, I expect you to be little. And I go, yeah, no, no, I'm not James Michener. I did the last interview with Mr. Michener, but I'm not. So I am thankful for my critics. I saw Weiland do an interview yesterday while I've been driving around and answer the Top Art Magazine on being too commercial. And he said the other guy, his answer was exactly the way you'd answer it, is that the other guys aren't commercial enough and that's why they're starving and they're underserving the market because the spiritual law says the greatest amongst you is servant of all. What you want to do is be a massively good server. I love doing what I'm doing, and the people that are critical of my bodaciousness and aggressiveness— I never thought of myself as arrogant, but if that's what I am, I sure love being in my body, and my goal is to have the most diversified portfolio of experiences at the end of my life that exists. Can I go one step further? Yeah. Yeah, I was in Singapore recently working on these books with a giant audience, because we dictated the books so we had them on video too, so people could buy them, download them. But it was interesting that while I was there, the head of the UN came up and said, look, Mark, the guy you want to meet that started the Grameen Bank for microcredit is in town talking, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who just got a Nobel Prize and lent money to 3,600,000 women. And I said, God, I want to meet him. I've given his group a lot of money and I just think that he's the Mahatma Gandhi or, you know, the Martin Luther King of our time. And turns out, I go back to the Ritz-Carlton where I was staying and it's 11:30 at night and he's coming out of the elevator when I'm going in. The guy had white light coming out of his eyes, two bodyguards. We met, we immediately befriended each other. He called and said last Friday, is that you got to come to have dinner with me because I want to talk to you. And I said, I want to see if I can't get a million people to give me $100 each a month. That's $100 million a month. That's $1.2 billion a year. In 5 years, we can end poverty in the world with the 5 billion people. Because out of 3,600,000 women that he's lent money to, he's affected the residual of 100 million people he's ended poverty for around the world, most heavily in Bangladesh and Pakistan and India and some other Asian countries. But I said, where are we having dinner? He said, at James Cameron's house. And back to what you said about being a person of influence, When you decide to be a person of influence, you get to meet all the other people of influence. So I called my Susie Cameron in the morning. She said, I'm sorry, but we got kicked out of our house at 5 o'clock with the Malibu fires. And we're going to go to Jim's office. And that's where he edits Titanic and Terminator and his new movie called Avatar, which comes out shortly. I got to be there with the who's who of the whole movie industry. I befriended every one of them, got pictures with every one of them, just had a wonderful time. But it comes back to the triangle I teach is you've got to create a lot of money or a lot of product or source a lot of books or tapes or talks. Then you've got to connect with all the people that you can. Then the last part is you've got to contribute back at the highest, most outstanding level you can and then try to inspire all your friends to do the same. Does that make sense?

It does. And it gets us to the next thing I want to talk about.

Good.

Which you're also good at.

What's that, sir?

Well, it's speed and momentum. So, I mean, right now at Glaser Kennedy, we're in the launch and promotion of the new DVD about what I teach as the phenomenon, how to accomplish more in the next 12 months than in your prior 12 years combined.

I like that title of compression.

And, you know, your book, One Minute Millionaire, part about speed as well.

Yeah, we said leverage is speed in our book.

Yeah, okay. So, I mean, let's start— I mean, what are your best speed strategies? How does somebody go from slow and plodding to fast and big?

Well, you've got two questions there. First of all, the One Minute Millionaire.

Pick whichever one you want.

Yeah, yeah. First of all, in the One Minute Millionaire, we say you've got to have the 7 levers. Is vision. How big is your vision? And the bigger your vision is, the better people you're going to attract. A little vision— if Martin Luther King said, "Well, how often is a new gas station or a car wash?" he wouldn't get any juice. But he says, "I have a dream," you know, that was so big, so compelling, that it got everybody for it. And it was basically a personal freedom dream, and nobody could be against that. And my dream, at least at the level of One Minute Millionaire, is to create a million millionaires that have a million to give back to their church, charity, or equivalent. A million times a million is a trillion, and that gets people Jews that are interested in creating money. Then number 2 is that you've got to have a mentor because there's no one great that— My mentor, as you know, in graduate school was Dr. Buckminster Fuller, who was Einstein's best student as far as I'm concerned. 2,000 inventions, 40 books, mastered 15 disciplines and woke me up to comprehensive thinking. So, you've got to have everybody. I've never met anyone who didn't have a— Like I told you, Wyland, who's not in the car with me right now, his teachers were Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Salvador Dalí, also back to what you said, had a lot of critics, but I think was not a good artist. He was a phenomenally fine artist. And did he sell a lot of stuff and make more money in his time, as did Picasso?

Yeah.

So you got to have great mentors. Then you got to have a great team. And team I define as together everyone accomplishes miracles. And obviously Jack and I have, according to Guinness Book of Records, sold more books, nonfiction, anyone. Then, so you got to have, first of all, you got to have vision, and you got mentor, then you got to have a team, then you got to have System, and system is an acronym: Save Yourself Time, Energy, and Money. And you're either in a system that's working or you're not. If you're not getting results, you're not in a good system, obviously. And that's what, you know, you teach and I teach and what we believe. Next, you gotta have tool capability of some type, which our friend Napoleon Hill would call specialty knowledge. And then last but not least, it behooves you to invite the infinite in and be able to go inside your inner resources and connect to a higher power. If you were to believe in one, and there's 367 names for it. That's one level. The other level is, that's A. So B is, you said, how do you get to be big and big fast? Well, one of the books I just wrote, we got 3 co-authors. I came up with this idea that I could sell a billion books in a day on May 20th of this year when I was in Malaysia. The next morning I'm flying, sitting next to James Skinner, his best day this year at 44 years old. He owns a hedge fund. He took in $670 million to himself. I was exuding and said, "Man, I got this way to sell a billion books in a day." And he said, "I can sell a billion books in a day." And I went, "Oh God, I don't believe it. God's only going to download a great idea like this on one guy." But he had a brilliant idea, 180 from mine, and his partner, Royce Krueger, who now is my partner, had another way to do it. So now we got 7 ways to sell a billion books in a day. But in answer to, we said, "Well, the first 10-minute book we want to write is called The Big, and there's 8 things you got to do to get big and big fast." First of all, you have a big goal. Second of all, you start big, because if you start big, it's easy, meaning you've got to go for big capital. When you go to borrow $10,000, they check your underwear. If you go for $100 million, they don't check your credit statement. They don't care if you went bankrupt yesterday, and it's between you and the head of the bank or you and the head of the private equity fund or you and the head of the stock market, somebody at SEC, which is— and right now, ladies and gentlemen listening, The marketplace is flooded with liquidity for a lot of reasons. First of all, we are in the first $50 trillion gross domestic world product in history. First time we've ever known what the domestic product of the world was, and it's $50 trillion, so everybody ought to be up $10 million, but a lot of you are not because you haven't thought about this in the right way. So, first of all, you've got to have a big goal. Then you have a big idea. Then you build a big team.

Right?

And then you— and the big team I show on the screen now is I got every Sunday night, uh, uh, once a month, sorry, uh, George Lucas gets with Steven Spielberg and, and Scorsese and, and Frank, uh, uh, Coppola, and they all look at each other's movies and say, this is how to make it better, which is like cool. And every one of you starts where you are with the team you got, and then you go higher and higher until you got the best of the best, which is what they did and what you can do and what I've done and what Dan and I are doing with you. Okay, so You have a big goal, a big idea, a big team. You've got to get big capital, and I'm saying the world's flooded with capital because in the old days when Dan and I were kids, you know, an automobile business would take billions of dollars to start. You had to print out 175,000 cars if you're going to do one, whether you're Toyota or GM, it didn't matter. And nowadays, you've got one little kid who comes up with a thing like PayPal. He's 23 years old, sells it a year later. It's a little on his electronic computer. Computer, sells it as an invisible intellectual patent, and he gets $1.5 billion from the smartest woman, businesswoman I know, and that's— I've worked for her a bunch of times— Meg Whitman at eBay. I mean, she is brighter than light. I've never seen anyone like her. And just a quick aside on her, when I watched— before I talked, she talked, and it sounded to me like the audience was an angry and hostile crowd, and I told her at lunch, I said, I've never seen anything like that. She said, Mark, you missed it. I said, what do you mean? I was sitting there. Animas, they're animated and angry, it seemed to me, and hostile towards you. You said, Mark, they're passionate because they want to make eBay work better. Anyhow, so you've got to have a big goal, a big idea, a big capital, a big team. Then you've got to have big distribution, and big distribution means that you connect with what, like, Simplot did. Simplot had potatoes and they figured out what Ray Kroc couldn't, and that was how not to burn the potatoes, how to make them always look exactly the same. And so he became Mr. Potato Head. He's the richest potato guy in all history and owns a bunch of other companies out in Boise, Idaho, and has the biggest house in Hamahama. But he connected with big distribution, and every one of us can do that. Every one of us today can go online and connect with somebody. Like, I own a publishing house now called Hanson House, and we connected with Hay House, which is the world's most profitable marketing book company. They got Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Suzy Orman, Doreen Virtue.

On and on.

John Edmond, on and on. And they are selling more books more profitably from seminars than anyone else on the planet. But every marketplace has somebody that's got to be big at distribution. And then last but not least, you've got to have a big charity. And if you put those things together, which is a level of thinking before doing, because you said be strategic before you be tactical, and that is the correct way to do it. And strategic means You go inside back to that first model I gave you of your vision. The size of your vision determines the size of your result. I mean, in Horatio Alger, which you mentioned and alluded to, we just— 10 new people matriculate every year that came from rags to riches and they're charitable. And this year we got Howard Schultz in there, the guy who started and really made Starbucks go, and he's got 12,000 stores. And he announced to the audience, which I thought was pretty bold because he's a public company, but he said the next 5 years we're going to have 40,000 stores. I don't know where he's going to put them because at least where I am in Florida, there's one on every corner.

There's still room in China.

Oh, by the way, I was just in China and man, they look like they're everywhere there too. We're going to have a caffeinated world.

Well, you know, you know the Starbucks joke is that they're going to be opening Starbucks in the men's rooms of Starbucks.

No, I'd never heard that. I like it though. I wonder if Howard has heard that. That's good. He's a gutsy guy with really big goals that wants to make stuff happen, so good for him.

Well, God forbid we should tout a public company, but a couple of years ago we had Jim McCann speak from 1-800-Flowers at our Superconference. Yeah. And I don't know if anybody else did, but I heard him say one thing that sent me running to my browser. I'm going to go to my broker and buy some of that stock, and I've done very well.

And what did he say?

He talked about how everybody thought they were in the flower business, but they weren't in the flower business. And then he named 5 businesses they were working on expanding into, one of which was really controlling family events and providing everything needed for it. Wow. In our conversation here about Starbucks, guess what I'm doing when I hang up the phone?

Um, buying some, I suspect.

Uh, $12,000 or $40,000. You know, you don't have to hit me in the head with a brick.

Yeah, well, it's that, you know, just the guy has hit all his numbers so far. So, and right now it's depressed because the market's having— was having a little hiccup when I looked at it last.

So maybe you should caveat, neither you or I are giving market advice.

Correct, correct.

Um, Jumping around, can I go to another topic?

Yes, please pick the next topic.

Because you're doing a great job of covering them in a hurry. I want to talk about selling.

I love selling.

You and I are salespeople at heart and by function. Both sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of our products in a few hours, millions from the stage, all different kinds of distribution. We sell ourselves, sell our projects, sell our ideas. You, although probably you don't do it much anymore, but you've logged a lot of time training salespeople in different industries.

Oh, I still do it a lot.

Insurance, network marketing. Yep. And convincing people who don't think they are salespeople to be salespeople.

That's correct. When I was with Muhammad Yunus, this is the guy who is the banker to the poor, he says everybody is an entrepreneur, everybody is a salesperson. An entrepreneur takes something from low value and makes it high value. He's taken 10,000 beggars off the street of Bangladesh and turned them into salespeople, some of them who now have 60 or 70 employees. I'm just, I'm absolutely astounded with what this guy's been able to do.

Well, actually, it might be easier to take a beggar off the street of Bangladesh than take a chiropractor out of his office in Anaheim and turn him into a salesperson.

That's true.

Which brings me to my question.

One of the chiropractors that I did help train a little bit is not— before he started, he heard me talk and he said, go out and build the practice first. And in Atherton, California, which is basically Silicon Valley, a good Italian boy, Ignatius Piazza, Dr. Piazza, knocked on 12,000 doors, wore out 3 pair of shoes, and asked essentially 7 questions. Do you have a doctor? Do you have a dentist? Do you have a pediatrician? Do you have an OB-GYN? And last but not least, do you have a DC, a doctor of chiropractic, a doctor of cause? And if they didn't, he says, well, if you don't, let me give you a shot. And by the way, I'm opening up my practice. And the first year he did, uh, first month he did $72,000. He opened up 3 months after he knocked on all the doors. And the first year he did over $1 million net to himself. So, uh, you know, a doctor, if he'll get out of his own way or her own way and go knock doors in a neighborhood, can really clean up.

Well, that gets to my question, you know. So all of that— actually, I'll give you two questions again. What do you think are the really most important, critical ways people get in their own way about this and stop themselves from prospering and selling?

And what do you think are the most critically important success factors inherent in those of us who do well in Well, the first one is that they get in their own way because they say, "Well, I can't go knock on a neighborhood door." And if you're a doctor, "I'm a doctor, for God's sakes. I just went to school for 28 years. I'm 31 years old and I can't afford to go do that right now." And that's making yourself too important for the business. And that's silly. So you get in your own way. And then at a sales level is the telephone gets exceedingly heavy so you can't call your list, much less your cold list. And what happens is the, the critical, most critical factor is that you decide you're going to go sell somebody each and every day. And, and back when you and I were starting in a seminar business 34 years ago, um, I read a book called The Magic of Believing by Claude Bristol, and he said give yourself a thought command before you go to sleep. Say 400 times in a row whatever you want. But I wanted— I said 400, 400, 400— I want to make $100 grand a year. Back then that was giant, giant money. Times $400 a day times 250 workdays. And at 2:58 in the morning, I woke up and Bill Widener's name came to me and I wrote it down. Next day, I'm out cold calling. I'm knocking on doors because I'm bankrupt. I'm upside down. I'm just trying to sell little seminars, insurance company to insurance company, talking to 5, 6, 7, 2 people in a room and charging $25 a talk and selling 4 talks, prospecting, closing, good work habits, time control. And I walk into this office office called State Mutual in Hopewell, Long Island, New York. I remember it like yesterday. And it said Bill Widener, and there's nobody at the front desk, so I just went back to the chairman's office. And the door was open. I knocked on the door. He welcomed me in. He wrote a check for $400. He said, man, I didn't know if you were ever going to come back again, but in 5 minutes you seemed so enthusiastic, I had to give you the money. Well, enthusiasm, you know, the old cliché is the letters are I-A-S-M. I am sold myself. I am convinced, so I'm convincing. When you're convinced that you've got a product that's going to source and serve everyone, your enthusiasm will carry the day where your knowledge, information, or expertise may not. But the more you do it, the better you get at it. You and I know that if you call on 10, maybe you'll sell 1 in the beginning, and then 2 out of 10, and then 3 out of 10. Then by the time the person gets good and sells 1 out of 2, they stop calling on people. So you've got to call on a whole lot of people, make it a short presentation, ASK and GET the business and do it with panache and make sure you stay in touch because it's prospect, present, close and then follow up so you keep generating more business in less time than you ever thought you could.

We've got members in businesses and industries right now who all around them their peers are looking for tall buildings to jump off of.

Sorry, those of you that are hanging on by your fingernails, I went bankrupt, so I understand what it's like to bite it. So, I am certainly not making fun of you, but I thought that metaphor was pretty good, Dan.

Well, you know, well, look, I mean, we've both been there, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, folks like right now in real estate or real estate investing or mortgages, you know, they're like a little befuddled about what to do in the current condition. So what specific advice do you have for people who are in an industry or a field where it is generally accepted at the moment that tough times have arrived?

First of all, let me say that the question is great and you're correct. There are a lot of people that think there are tough times, but you and I know that in the worst depression, the 1929 depression, 25% of the people were making money on a full-time basis. So, it is possible in the most obtuse economy to make money, and what you gotta do is study the people who are making money, and you must immediately take a hiatus on the people that are not making money, and not talk, listen to, think, or watch TV on it, because what happens is, whatever you focus on expands and increases, and you just don't wanna increase the downside. Like, when I went bankrupt, I was so freaked out. All I did was read the New York Times and every day it had all the bad news fit to print. Participate. Yeah, and, and, uh, Wyland says don't participate in negativity. He said because the price tag's too high, because it pollutes your brain, and your brain can't afford to get polluted, because if you pollute your brain, you, you're taking your wallet, pouring it upside down, and, uh, making sure that nothing else can come back into it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

So what am I saying? You know, you've got tapes out, I've got tapes out. You know, if you can go If the people are really upside down right now and have no money, they can go to YouTube and they can type in Mark Victor Hanson. I think I got 50 free videos on there. I can watch every one of them and broke to rich just watching that stuff and running good stuff into their head rather than bad stuff because what you think of, my cliché is what you think about comes about. What I want to have come about for each and every person listening and all the people that are going to have their friends listen is a fantastic success because the truth is the world is booming right now more than it has ever boomed if you're just awake to it. I mean, like, I'm down here in Florida right now visiting and I just can't believe the amount of money I am seeing spent. Where I live in California, thank God, the highest priced houses in history where I want to live, you know, start at $10 million and one of my neighbor's houses worth $70 million, and it just sold for $70 million. So there are a lot of people with a lot more money than they've ever had, and all you got to do is decide to go hang with the people that have money and then make part of it yours by sourcing and serving them at levels beyond the axis of competition. Because whatever the competition is doing, do something else. When I started in this business, America's interest rate was at 22%, and I was told Nobody's going to hire you to speak. And yet you know that I was doing, God, I don't know, I think 300 or 400 talks a year from the first year on and getting paid well for it. And first year I heard— oops, is this too windy out here? Is that— is the wind getting you? Yeah, we're hearing it here. Okay, um, anyhow, the first year I sold, uh, yeah, I'm gonna go inside.

It's— it's—

the wind is, uh, getting a little boisterous here. We're on the Gulf of Mexico and it is spectacularly beautiful, but looks like it's going to rain. I apologize. The point is, there I was told by our dear teacher Cabot Robert, the Dean of Speakers, you know, to do a multi-author book. I did it. I got other people to put up the money for it. I sold, uh, 20,000 copies of a little book you'll remember, Stand Up, Speak Up, Win from the Platform. Made $10 a book roughly, you know, made $200,000 that year. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was a little one-man operation. There's nobody helped me. I didn't have a secretary. I had nothing but a phone phone and a beat-up $400 pitted window permanently air-conditioned Volkswagen. So I understand what it's like to be upside down. I'd go to get gas the first couple months, I'd say fill it up, mister. And I know some of you listening won't believe this, but gas when Dan and I were starting was 25 cents a gallon. Do you remember that, Dan?

I do remember that. And yeah, the good news was if you could find one quarter down in the seat, you were good to go.

Yeah, that's right. I just, I was buying a gallon at a time and my windshield wiper wasn't working, so what I had to do is wipe off my windshield with my big fat hand. You know, it's snow back in Long Island, New York. And then all of a sudden Mike Ferry came on and said, you're nuts to work out here, come out to California. And he talked me into changing my venue, and I immediately went to California and made more money than I've ever made.

All right, I'm going to ask you one more, and then we're going to get ourselves to letting people in to asking questions.

They can ask anything they want, sir.

Uh, but here's my last one.

Yeah.

And, and sort of looping all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. Yes. And looking for your best specific actionable tips so no one can accuse us of being big, broad, and theoretical.

Right.

So if you're advising somebody on rapidly making themselves more attractive to their market and more known, celebrated, and respected right now, what are the few things you would tell them to do?

Well, first of all, decide that you— I know this doesn't sound actionable, but decide that you are the person that you are going to become. That's an inner state of being. I say you've got to live in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. In other words, you've got to see yourself as you want to be. Right now I want to see myself selling a billion books, so I pulled off the COVID of Time magazine and I put my partners and I in it, myself and Royce and James Skinner, on the COVID of Time magazine. In your case, and like when we wanted to go sell the book and get the highest price ever paid for a book from somebody that's not a president or Oprah Winfrey, we put ourselves on the COVID of Publisher's Weekly because that's what everybody in the book business reads, and then we took that And we said, look, One Minute Millionaire, which you alluded to earlier, makes publishing history. It's number one fiction and nonfiction same time. And then we wrote all the copy, took their copy and wrote what our new copy would be. And it was a breakthrough idea. And that one little thing was read by 22 people in the office and they gave us $2,250,000. And it was the only thing that sold it was that piece because we hadn't written one word, not one chapter, not one idea. And what I'm saying is, you say, is that actionable? Yeah, you can have a visionary picture, be in the feeling, and then go have to deliver. Now, what we're saying here is you gotta make a big promise, but then you gotta deliver the promise. And historically, I've said, you know, I'd sell 1.5 million books in a year and a half, and we did 1.3 million, and then say 50 million, and then 100 million. So it is actionable once you've got the vision right. Doing the activity, going from strategy to tactics, the day-to-day activity, I think is fairly, easy if you write out a viable business plan, which is what I'd ask everyone to do, and say, what are you going to do? What are the 52 things you're going to do that you're going to deliver once a week to get you from where you are to where you want to be? And if that's, you know, more business, more talks, more revenue, more clients, more patients, more of whatever, more results, or if you want to get an award or an industry achievement, what is it you'd have to do to do that? Or a degree, you know, it's all the same stuff. You just break it down into little doable parts. You've got a vision of what the end result's going to look like. And then you go from here to there with enthusiasm, delight, gusto, and excitement.

Terrific.

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