How To Create And Recreate "The Phenomenon" In Your Business (1 of 2)

In your life, have you ever wondered why the nitro just hasn't hit the engine yet? You haven't sped off at a million miles per hour. You're just waiting for that moment to hit. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. This is a podcast that you're going to want to hear today. Dan Kennedy and Lee Miltz here are going to talk about the ways that you engineer that moment, which is called the phenomenon. They're going to explain what that is and explain to you the different beliefs, thoughts, behaviors that need to be occurring in order for the phenomenon to occur in your life and take you from 0 to 60 far faster than you've ever dreamed. So let's listen in and see how we can make the phenomenon a reality in your life faster.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Hello everybody, this is Lee Miltier and Dan Kennedy, who is already with us. Dan and I are going to discuss the topic of the phenomenon, and how to move your business up to a new level in 12 months. So, hello, Dan. Hi there. Dan, one of the things that you're most famous for, and I think most people know this, is helping people become millionaires in everyday businesses. You help people in almost every conceivable type of business move their incomes up. You create new marketing plans. You help people with ways to leverage their existing businesses that affords them more financial freedom, more time off, easier systems for running their business. I don't mind saying that you are known as the Napoleon Hill of our generation. A couple of years ago when I was interviewing you for the Renegade Millionaire System, you talked about people that you work with who had had the phenomena experience. So my first question is, exactly what do you mean by the phenomena experience, and what was your inspiration for the term phenomena?

The inspiration for the term, I don't actually, to be honest with you, I don't actually know where it came from. But the concept, the first time that I really heard about the concept behind it, I was still in my teens and it was on a recording by what is now an early pioneer of self-improvement success education in this country, Earl Nightingale, and it's in his program called Lead the Field. And Earl talked about the fact that there was a time that occurred in every entrepreneur's life when everything would go right, the planets would align, the clouds would clear, the sun would shine, etc. You attract more of everything you need, more opportunity, more cooperation from important and influential people, more resources. You would accomplish more and create more income and more wealth in a 12-month period than you had in the previous 12 years combined. At the time that I heard it, it was extremely encouraging to hear that concept presented in Earl's gravelly and authoritative voice as a fact of life. But I listened pretty closely and I didn't hear him explain how to make it happen. And it turns out now with some 30-plus years of perspective that what he said is absolutely true if you hang around entrepreneurs, if you study them, if you devour their autobiographies and biographies, you'll find that it's pretty consistently true that just about any and every entrepreneur with some longevity does have this in just 12 months' experience, at least once during their career, sometimes more than once. What's really interesting is that for most, it occurs organically, and by that I mean a convergence of forces that cause it, but when it's over, they don't really know what caused it. They didn't do it deliberately, intentionally, consciously, strategically, and therefore they don't know how to repeat it. And so I painstakingly worked to figure out if in fact it could be triggered at will rather than merely waited for and sort of earned over a period of time, and work to discover the common causes, the secrets behind it when it occurred in people's lives, and how those could be put together and used pretty much at will so that you can have this occur for you sooner, not later. You can have it occur for you when you want it and need it. You can extend its brief window into a longer period of time, and you can repeat it. And in fact, you can do those things, and there are specific causative factors that can be manufactured rather than allowed to occur organically.

So Dan, why do you think accomplishing more in just 12 months than in the previous 12 years, that message is resonating appealing with so many business owners and entrepreneurs right now?

Well, for a lot of people, of course, the previous 12 years may not have been so fantastic. So getting more done in 12 months is just generally appealing. I think also we increasingly live in a society that is speed-oriented in many ways. Instant communication, instant food, you know, the specter of standing in front of the microwave and stamping your foot because it took 7 minutes to cook dinner instead of 6.

7, that's way a long time.

That's all, I mean, that's, you know, sort of all part of our daily lives. And so just generally speaking, I think we're, We're eager for speed and entrepreneurs are particularly frustrated by moving slowly. I think, however, there are also practical reasons why entrepreneurs come to understand the necessity, the importance of speed. I mean, if you've been at business of your own very long, then you've had the experience of Having potentially good, even great ideas, good intentions destroyed before you can follow through on them. Sort of picked to death by skeptics and doubters and critics around you and people getting in the way. Losing control of them under the pressure of day-to-day responsibilities consumed by business routine, and ultimately people backburner a lot of stuff, and it just— until they have time to get more serious about them, and then of course the time is never found. I sort of have this view that those of us with grand ambitions and great intentions get up every morning to face this giant world conspiracy designed to get in our way and slow us down. And I think most entrepreneurs have that experience. Some talk about it, some don't. But they have sort of this me against the world, me trying to make things happen, the world trying to slow me down experience. And we come to understand that patience and persistence are vastly overrated virtues. I have a cartoon, I no longer know where I got it from, but I have a cartoon in my office that shows two kind of pretty ugly-looking vultures sitting up on a perch and they're both pretty skinny and scrawny and one vulture says to the other, screw it with all this waiting for something to die, let's go kill something. And I think, you know, I think sort of that, you know, is the entrepreneurial mindset and ultimately the entrepreneurial experience that we come to realize that patience and persistence are maybe nice virtues for some people, but they really don't work in the entrepreneurial environment. That somehow you need to trigger fast forward movement So things don't die stillborn purely because of slow movement. There's a thing, some people call it momentum, I usually use the word velocity, that when you get something up to a certain speed, it begins to take on a life of its own and move even faster. But until you get it up to that speed, it can't yield its benefits.. And so, like, I was with a client today and we were both talking about someone we know well who has a very similar business to the client's, and the client has done extremely well in the last 12 months, and the person that we both know as a mutual friend has exited the business during the last 12 months, and really there's no specific difference in anything that they have been doing except the one who has exited the business moved very, very, very slowly and the one who has done very well moved very, very, very quickly. So I think the fascination with speed, sort of the natural desire for it in the entrepreneur is actually well placed and extremely practical even if it is contrarian to most conditioning and most things that we've been taught.

I'm sure everybody is really listening hard right now, wanting to know exactly what some of the strategies are that can dramatically speed up success for all of us. So in our limited time, I know we can only cover a few, but the one I wanted to start with, Dan, is about our past programming. For example, we have been programmed to believe that success comes in certain ways and rules set by society. So let's talk about the mindset and the different types of thinking strategies that you have to be able to create to have the phenomena experience.

Well, you used the word rules in, in sometimes in business, in an industry, the terminology maybe is industry norms. Or professional standards. But if you stick them all under the umbrella of rules, then I think that the main mindset, if you will, that is required for speed is a mindset that rules, that speed limits are for other people, but they don't apply to me. And some, of course, would describe that as a very arrogant approach to life, but nonetheless it really does seem to distinguish the highly successful entrepreneurs who are able to create success at great speed and have these kinds of phenomenon experiences from the rest of the people. Most people are sort of— not only are they inhibited by the traditional rules and norms that are told to them and that are the standards of the industry to which they belong. But then they sort of wait around for somebody to give them permission even to act. You know, the client that I just spoke about that's very fresh in my mind because we were together all day today, he started a company in the franchise industry. Barely 16 months ago and is written up in the current issue or the next issue, I forget which, of Entrepreneur Magazine. This is the largest and fastest growth company in his particular industry. He's gone from 0 to 147 franchises and sort of comparable companies in his industry new ones who would have started, say, in their first year, they might have 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. So the difference is not marginal, the difference is enormous and dramatic. Of 57 possible master franchise territories in the country, he has filled 51 of them in 12 months, and again, a comparable company would be jumping up and down in the street having done 4 or 5. Well, there's, there's, there's strategy differences, there's tactics, tactical differences, there's marketing differences, but the biggest difference is the decision to ignore all of the norms of franchising and of his industry within franchising and ignore all of the rules that all of the experts would tell you about what can be done and how it can be done and how it needs to be done, decide what the target number is, and then act on that. In that same industry, I have another client who just very recently told me on the phone of hiring this complete team of experts who have come in and told him that what I just said, what I just described to you that has happened, for this client is impossible, that you can't do it, and that there are rules that prohibit doing it. And so he's listening to the experts and will probably do 3 or 4 or 5, and this client has done 147. Not too long ago, I have a restaurant owner who I talk to from time to time, and he, opened a brand new restaurant roughly 2 months ago and with a strategy that he and I had talked about, on its grand opening weekend booked 182 future dinner reservations, each one with a $50 deposit to guarantee them as non-cancelable reservations. And so in his first 2 days of business, he put 180 dinner reservations on the books. With prepaid deposits. Now, pretty much if you sat around with anybody in the restaurant industry or in his category of restaurant in the industry with a great deal of celebrated expertise and experience, they would all tell you the 2,102 reasons why such a thing is impossible. And so there are, in every case, there are obviously, as I say, strategic, tactical, mechanical actions that make these kind of fast successes possible. But your question is, is the most telling one because none of the tactics or strategies or mechanics or methods really have any value without the precursor of the mindset of ignoring all of the traditions and the norms and the rules of how we do things around here in this business. And essentially starting with a clean slate with no preconditions, no enforced premises, no limits about what can be done or about how we're going to go about and do them. One of my favorite stories about this is, and now it's been long enough that people sort of take it for granted, but it really hasn't been that long since all long-distance telephone activity in the United States was owned and controlled by one company, AT&T. And they had a monopoly on long-distance telephone. You did not have a choice. Your carrier was AT&T because they were the only carrier that provided long-distance distant service. And that went on for a long, long, long, long, long period of time. AT&T had and benefited from that monopoly for, I believe, decades. And so there were what were called the Baby Bell companies that governed local service, and then there was AT&T. And a guy by the name of Bill McGowan, literally asked one day, well, who says they got a monopoly? Where is it written that they got a monopoly? And maybe if it is written down somewhere, times have changed and they can't enforce that monopoly anyway, so let's get in the long-distance phone business and see what happens. And his company MCI, which has since been absorbed and bought and merged and became something else, But his company MCI was created in an environment where everybody believed you couldn't even create that kind of a company, let alone have the growth that they did and the impact that they did and literally changed the entire telephone industry. And today we're seeing people start to try and kind of figure that out with telephone service by internet rather than telephone service by wire. So I think that the biggest starting point here is the willingness to defy all of the industry norms, rules, premises, preconditions, and sort of start from scratch with a clean slate about what it is that you want to do, and then figure out how to do it.

Well, you just answered about the mindset. My next question was going to be about peak performer beliefs, Because I have noticed that the most successful peak performers have a very unique set of beliefs about themselves that make them very prolific and successful. So the distinction between mindset and peak performance beliefs, do you want to talk about that?

Well, first of all, I think that you will find that superachievers have A very well-defined personal philosophy that they can, although they do not make a habit of enunciating. And so there are certain things that are public pronouncements and certain things that are not, but that they have a well-thought-out personal philosophy, whereas most people don't. I think probably the biggest thing is Andrew Carnegie. So you mentioned Hill earlier. Andrew Carnegie, depending on whose numbers you use, either America's first or second billionaire at a time when a billion dollars actually meant something. Today you could, you could blow it in a women's shoe store and not quite knock it out the doors. But Carnegie made the statement that unadmitted in every great achiever's secret reveries, they believe that they were born to rule and are superior to all others. And he didn't say that a lot, but he said it enough that somebody wrote it down. And he got quoted for it. And again, I think that it's sort of a fine line between damaging disdain for the marketplace, your customers, clients, the people around you, but a positive productive awareness that that there's something special about you. You know, that you're smarter, sharper, faster, quicker, a quicker study, that your thinking processes are better, that you're like more with it than everybody you see around you. And that belief system gets us to Having the in-the-next-12-months experience because you believe you're supposed to have the in-the-next-12-months experience. And so it's not really so much about what stacks up on the way to it. It's about a change or a development of a particular belief system that says, hey, this is what's supposed to happen. This is how things are supposed to work. And so, like to start a brand new enterprise as one of my clients, Dr. Charlie Martin, and I just recently did and do $600,000, I forget the exact number, I think it's $624,000 and change in business in its first 3 days, the biggest thing about that is actually thinking that that's supposed to happen, that, that, that, that, that plan— old fans of, fans of an old TV show, The A-Team, that had the now deceased George Peppard in it, and Mr. T, he of jewelry upon jewelry upon jewelry. George Peppard's character's line was, you know, I love it when a plan comes together. And there's an expectation, not born of Pollyanna positive thinking, but of planning, of actual superiority of thought, action, discipline, implementation. So there's an expectation. That these phenomenon events are supposed to happen. And that's, I think, a relatively unique belief system. I find actually that, that most people, even when they, when they have some kind of a success, they're sort of, you know, surprised about it more than they are seeing it as a déjà vu experience from what they had clearly planned and visualized and strategized prior to it. And those people who have these phenomenon experiences again and again are to the point where they expect them to happen, and for good reason.

And one of the things I've heard you say many times, actually in many ways, to business owners is that people have to not only change the way they think, but change the way they act, and that they must not fall back on traditional limits of thinking and action. So let's talk about behavior congruence to achieve the phenomena experience.

Okay, well let's talk about behavior for a second, and then we'll talk about the concept of behavioral congruence. Behavior in general is so important because so much of the literature especially the current contemporary popular stuff that makes the rounds providing success advice to people, focuses all on the thought. And it is barely one nuance away from telling people that if they go out in their backyard and sit under a tree, and think about a Porsche clearly and vividly enough that somehow the apple tree is going to suddenly dump a Porsche on their heads. Or it is barely one nuance away from a childish approach of writing a letter to Santa Claus and asking what it is that you want. And so, you know, I'm very big on telling people that thinking alone won't make it so. Now thinking is very important and there are certain types of thinking that successful entrepreneurs engage in that most other people don't. And there are certain types of thinking that most other people engage in that successful entrepreneurs don't. And it's useful to figure all that out. But even with all of that aligned properly, thinking alone won't make it so. It really is even more about what you do, the actions that you take every day, every hour, every minute, about what you implement, about what you get done, not what you get started, but what you get done, about what you are able to get other people to do, and so it is fundamental fundamentally about behavior, not just about thought. And so, you know, a person can have all sorts of thoughts about, for example, punctuality, but if they consistently show up everywhere 20 minutes late, then all of their thoughts, you know, didn't matter., and for several years— he's deceased now, but I still won't mention his name— there was a very famous author and speaker on the subject of time management who was famous for being 30 to 45 minutes late to every phone call, every appointment, even every speaking engagement. And so, you know, his thoughts, um, were presumably accurate, correct but his behavior wasn't congruent with them. And so now this gets us to this issue of behavioral congruency. So it's about what you do. And I might even add that I know some, some very wealthy and successful people who, again, by traditional definitions, would probably be viewed as negative thinkers, not positive thinkers. Yet their actions are such, what they do is so effective and productive and focused that they get extraordinary results. So I think there's actually some harm done with this sort of pseudo-metaphysical, to differentiate from legitimately metaphysical, pseudo-metaphysical happy thought popularized stuff that tells people if they just change the way they think, just change the way they think, marvelous things from their cancer going away to their bank account fattening will occur because it, that's, that's BS. It has more to do with what it is that you do. And then what you do needs to be congruent with two very important navigational points. One is it has to be congruent with the thoughts, the intentions, the ambitions, the goals, the plans, You know, I had a very frustrating conversation. I have this particular type of conversation often. I had a very frustrating conversation a few days ago with somebody who described at great length how they wanted to take their business from $3 million a year to $30 million a year in 12 months, and they had a reasonable plan to do that, and they wanted to know— they wanted advice on what needed to be inserted into the plan to really make that happen. One of the things that I recommended was more frequent meetings with their group of distributors and marketers and the people who were responsible for distribution of their products and bringing to them of customers. And so I suggested a format for 3 meetings a year and I won't bore you with the details But when it was all said and done, you know, the person wanted to go from $3 million to $30 million a year, but they didn't want to do 3 meetings a year. And actually, they didn't want to do any meetings. And there's a handful of other things that would be all classified under the headline of work that they didn't want to do either. That's hilarious. And well, yeah, it is, but it is—

I mean, just listening to it, Dan, it is hilarious.

But it's increasingly epidemic. Because people don't want to work? Yeah, and they, you know, they think they can actually get away with getting whatever it is in the result category that they dream up and want without doing some things that may not in and of themselves provide intrinsic pleasure. And so actually that's That's the definition of childish behavior. Yes. And not multimillionaire behavior. It's the definition of childish behavior. And so sort of the first navigational point is that your behavior has to be reasonably congruent with what it is that you're trying to attempt to do with the status you want, with the income you want, with the wealth you want, and so forth. And then the second navigational point is is that it has to be congruent with people who can serve as models who have already achieved something comparable to what it is that you are setting out to achieve. So if you are— if you're setting out to have the most successful NASCAR team this year and you're going to invest umpteen billions of dollars to do that, you would be well advised to microscopically study the people who have had the most successful NASCAR teams as predecessors to you, and perhaps the people who've had the most successful NFL team and the most successful Major League Baseball team and the most successful whatever other analogy you want to draw. Not necessarily to be defined by what they have done, but to understand what they have done, to identify the commonalities in what they have all done so that you can make your behavior congruent with theirs. That's really the fastest way to speed up the achievement process is if you can find, if you can build yourself a composite made up of commonalities in behavior of people who have achieved what it is that you want to achieve, and then bring your behavior in conformance with them, then you are, you're literally instantly and automatically transported to the goal or the objective. So if they all get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and spend 2 hours doing a list of the same 5 or 6 things before they start the workday, my heartfelt recommendation to you would be start getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning, even if you don't totally understand why that's important or significant. And if you're able to invalidate it later, then modify the behavior as you wish, but at least start there. And so there's a lot of people running around whose behavior is completely incongruent with the objectives that they speak about, the objectives that they aspire to and that they think about, and any model that you might be able to find who has already achieved those objectives. If you take a simple thing like say writing a book, almost anybody who writes prolifically, fiction, nonfiction, doesn't make any difference, Stephen King, Mark Peter Hansen, Jack Canfield, pick whoever it is you want. As a starting point. But if you will do a serious investigation of highly successful authors, especially those of more than one book, you'll find all sorts of differences in the way they approach things. But the one thing you'll find that is almost a universal commonality is that they write every day and they write to a quota every day and they don't quit until they've hit the quota. So that might be a page a day for one person. It might be 10 pages a day for another. But they all have that in common. They write every day. They write to a quota every day. And they don't quit until they've hit the quota. So some days they might be zipping along and get there in half an hour. And other days they might have dreaded writer's block and be distracted by the barking dog or the dog that didn't bark. And it might take them 4 hours to get to the quota, but they don't quit until they get there. So now once you know that, if you tell me you're serious about writing and you're serious about putting together a good book or a series of books, but you tell me, 'I only want to write when I feel like it,' or, 'I only want to write when I'm inspired,' or, 'I only want to write on the third Thursday of the month,' or, 'I don't want to write on days when my kids have Little League,' games, then you're full of crap, okay, because your behavior is not congruent with what is required in order to achieve the objectives.

Yeah, I only want to spend a couple minutes on this, but you and I have this conversation all the time that somehow people have gotten the concept that they can become wealthy and massively successful and not work.

So just Speak on that briefly. Well, it's an extremely appealing concept. Yes. And so a lot of people like to sell it. And you know, there's that thing I talk about, you know, be the wizard, beware the wizard. So it's an extremely appealing concept to sell, but upon close examination, it does not hold up.

Well, I know how much you work. I work hard. All the entrepreneurs that we both work with pretty much work hard. So when people are thinking about their future and they're planning more vacations than they are workdays, it becomes very disturbing to me that they think they're entitled to this success without actually earning it.

Well, and again, she— try and find me a model. Gene Simmons, there's this famous episode in Gene's show of him recovering from cosmetic surgery all taped up like a mummy, supposed to be lying in bed, and he's got the whole house full with 5 different business meetings going on in 5 different rooms at the same time to the enormous annoyance of his wife. Now a lot of people for a variety of reasons try and make it look like they're not working. That what they do is either ridiculously easy or takes very little time. But again, upon close examination, you would find that that is not true. Our friends who are internet gurus who talk extensively about all of the money that can pop out of the printer connected to your computer, that story is true as far as it goes. But it's instructive to observe that virtually all of them are on airplanes flying across the country and even flying across the world in order to do manual labor at seminars. They're doing teleseminars. They're doing teleconferences. They're writing conventional books, getting them into bookstores and doing promotion in order to promote those books. Funny, it looks to me like they're working.

Yes, it does. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. And this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free. Just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at noBSletter.com/free. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.