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

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. We're so excited to have you here today. We get to speak with Dan Kennedy and Lee Meltier as we talk more about this idea of the phenomenon. This is part 2 of a 2-part series. So if you missed last week's episode, make sure that you catch up because there we talk about the different beliefs and thoughts and behaviors that need to be a part of your life in order to make the phenomenon, this moment of exponential speed, occur in your life. In your business. And today we're gonna be talking about the things that are gonna be holding that back. What are the things that even if you get all the things aligned right, are still going to put on the brakes while you're trying to tear down the runway and make a difference and really launch your business into the stratosphere? What are those things that will act like a parachute while you are trying to accelerate? 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 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.

Okay, one of the problems I think many business owners have is one, they don't understand or know how to value their hourly time, and two, they don't value themselves for their time. So share with us how to deal with these problems.

Well, in concert with what we've just said about the virtue of work, there is the issue of leverage. And you will not accomplish more in 12 months than in the previous 12 years purely by working harder, longer, faster. That multiple is generally not achievable purely through that. So leverage is required. So then you have to think about what do you have that is leverageable. Now that's important because what most people spend their time thinking about is what they lack. What they don't have. But you have to think about what you have that is leverageable. So for example, at this point in my life I have money, so money is leverageable. There was a time in my life when I did not have money. That doesn't mean that I wait until I have money in order to do anything. You have to think about leveraging what you got. So generally though, the things that are leverageable in business are capital, money, intellectual capital, knowledge, know-how, expertise, marketplace capital, which means reputation, brand image, being known to a certain constituency and known for something. Relationships are leverageable. And so for the sake of time, we'll stop there, but we could build a longer list. Now here's what is common about everything that's on the list of what you might leverage. It all gets leveraged by the application of time. So the common chemical in any formula that you are going to make with any of those ingredients from the list of things that you might have that you could leverage, the common chemical that's going to wind up in the formula is your time and the time of others. And so if you are not extremely adept and extremely disciplined at leveraging time, then the whole thing falls apart. And the two most important things about time are safeguarding it from waste by others as well as by yourself. And as you said, attaching appropriate and proper value to it based on, again, being congruent with what it is that you are setting out to accomplish. So on a very primitive and simplistic level, if you are setting out to have a 7-figure income, meaning earning $1 million a year or more, thus placing you in the top 1% of the American economic pyramid, if that's what you intend to do, then you cannot be doing the work of somebody who makes $42,800 a year. You can't, and you must not. And you must not let anybody get you to do that work even for 1 hour, because it doesn't take too many of those hours to get you so hopelessly behind in time versus value that you cannot catch up within the 12-month term.

That's great advice. My next question, Dan, is what paralyzes and holds most people back from pursuing whatever goals they'd really like to achieve?

Well, look, I think that list is long and therefore different for different people. You know, there are emotional issues, there's psychological issues, there's practical issues. The best way to describe the practical ones Somebody gave me this the other day. They described someone we both knew as somebody who was trying to travel to Mars while remaining on railroad tracks. And I think from a practical standpoint, that's what holds most people back, is they are trying to break new ground with old shovels. They are trying to get somewhere they've never gone before at a faster pace than they've ever done before while still driving the old Rambler. And to break new ground, you need new shovels. And by that I mean everything we've been talking about. You need new thought. You need new belief system. You need new strategies, new tactics, new mechanics, new methods. In many cases, you need new tools. And you need a willingness to turn your back on and disconnect yourself from all of the old ones. And so, you know, if you want a real simplistic answer to the question, what's holding people back is their baggage, is the old stuff that they won't disconnect themselves from. Now everybody's sack of baggage is going to be different than somebody else's sack of baggage, but what's in common is the baggage is full of old stuff they need to be disconnected from in order to make full use of the new stuff. And so again, there's been all this technology come along. So my first phenomenon experience occurred, and this is horrific and frightening to 30-year-olds. I mean, my first phenomenon experience occurred before there was an internet. You know, Al Gore was still busy inventing it. And so we didn't have instant, we didn't have email. The fastest thing we had was FedEx. I mean, that was fast. And so now all of this technology has come along. That has sped up the mechanics of doing things, but has, I believe it's Stephen King made the comment that, you know, just because you have the nicest word processor in the room doesn't make you a great writer. And so the tools are of no use to the person who is still dragging around with them antiquated Edsel thoughts and beliefs and business practices, still conforming to norms and rules and premises and preconceptions that were there before the tools. So for example, there's an enormous number of people who limit themselves geographically. And so they believe they have a local business. When today local is global. The computer makes it so. And so there's a number of my clients who their phenomenon experience has been triggered predominantly by my getting them to see that their local business should be a national business or an international business or a global business. Darren Garman, commercial real estate a broker in Iowa comes to mind. The phenomenon experienced predominantly triggered by stopping selling Iowa property to Iowans and beginning to sell Iowa property to New Yorkers, Northern California residents, and residents of Tokyo. I just had a conversation with another client, some people on the call would know Ron Carruthers, and so Ron is busily switching from his business being dealing with parents in Southern California to get their kids into good US colleges to dealing with parents in Beijing in order to get their kids into US colleges. Now in the time of my first phenomenon experience, to do that was impractical if not impossible because to do business in Beijing, you had to go to Beijing. And my, my 1964 Lincoln Continental in 1978 wasn't going to get me to Beijing. But see, today those limitations don't exist anymore in reality, but they still exist in people's heads. And they still exist in the way they approach their businesses.

And you know, many people are simply terrified of failure of any kind in the entrepreneurial world. And even though we read over and over again that adversity can actually help people, so my question is, is what can we do or how can we change those thoughts about failure that will help people trigger the phenomena experience in their world?

Well, certainly something that helps the phenomenon is, you're right, is a reduction if not an absence of fear of failure. And also, the person I think who is at greatest risk in life is the person who has had nonstop ascension from their start in business life to current great success without a failure or failures along the way. They may be ill-equipped and unable to handle tough times when they cyclically occur. But I think the most important thing that you learn about failure through failure, and that you can learn to a great extent synthetically through, again, exhaustive and extensive study of models of successful people who have been failures. You know, Walt Disney said that any biography of Walt Disney should begin with the sentence, "And the first time he almost went bankrupt." You know, meaning that there were successive times as well, which there were. To some extent synthetically and to some extent perhaps only experientially. What you learn about failure is that it has most of its power from its psychological and emotional effects, not from its reality. Because the reality of failure, isolated from psychological and emotional aspects, tends to be very brief and far less severe than what you would anticipate about it before going through it. And so from, so like the first time, and I say first time because I had it happen twice, the first time that I had a car repossessed, which now the exact date escapes me, but it would have been in the early 1970s. At the time I thought, you know, life on this planet Planet would now be over. You know, you would forever for the rest of— well, we didn't— we're talking about credit scores then, but you know, forever in the rest of your life you would have a credit score of -2. You would never be able to get an automobile again. Somehow when you passed through a crowd, everyone knew you had had a car repossessed just by the smell coming off of you, um, you know, etc. Uh, and of course it turns out that it's like No big deal. In fact, 28 hours later, I leased a new car. And then if you go bankrupt, which is a commonality in a really surprising number of multimillionaires, if you go bankrupt, you have the same experience about that. And it is a much more severe failure than just losing a car. But again, you think life on this planet's over and everybody knows and you'll never recover and yada, yada, yada. And in reality, it has little if no practical impact. It has enormous emotional and psychological impact if you permit it. And so, and again, the clock will not permit me, but certainly if we wanted to wander down memory lane from first failure to most recent failure of mine, we need a lot more than 90 minutes. And I'm not all that anxious to do that. Make the entire trip, but the point of each stop along the way would be the same. That the reality of it is very short-lived. It's far less important to other people than we think it is. And it really has power only emotionally and psychologically to the degree that we permit it. And then further, the final point about it would be the Napoleon Hill, which you alluded to, "In every adversity lies opportunity," however it is that you wish to say that quote. And of course, that's much easier to say than it is to live, and it is much easier to live after you have actually found opportunity in failure one or more times, and in fact have actually experienced it as a pattern rather than discussing it as a theoretical concept, but it is nevertheless true. And in fact, a fair number of people have their phenomenon, especially their first phenomenon experience, their first in-12-months experience, Ironically, they have it triggered under the duress of enormous adversity. On the DVD you mentioned at the top of the call, now I think there's 23 people profiled, and I think 4, maybe 5, maybe 6 all have had their phenomenon experiences triggered by enormous adversity. One talks about— the near-bankrupting impact on their business of the Twin Towers attack on 9/11. Each one has a different adverse experience or adverse set of circumstances. But for many people, that actually is a major trigger of the phenomenon, is the arising of the opportunity out of the adversity. I always find it odd when people are intolerant of others who have a failure and are quick to judge them. You know, Dr. Maxwell Maltz in Psycho-Cybernetics, again something I found when I was very young, very fortunate to find it. One of Max's key statements is, you are not your mistakes. And so I always find it sort of odd when people are intolerant and quick to judge someone based upon their failure when it is almost axiomatic that every great success, every highly successful person has in their past really at the time embarrassing, humiliating, frustrating, in some cases really epic failure. So if that's axiomatic to huge success, then we ought not harshly judge somebody for it. We ought to see it as a precursor of what may come in their lives.

And you and I have been friends for many years, and a topic of our conversations often is about how Many highly successful people actually live lives of secret frustration. So my question is, how can people break away and break free to enjoy a great career or business success without trading away their life, their family, and their peace of mind?

Well, you know, you got me. I mean, Depending on how you frame that question, you know, you get different answers to it. I mean, if you go back and frame it like 2 sentences into your question, and it's always how, you know, how can I be highly successful and not, you know, have frustration? I certainly don't know the answer to that. How can I be highly successful and not have burnout? I certainly don't know the answer to that. It's certainly my experience that, back to the conspiracy of the world to slow you down, that the more you're attempting to do and the faster pace at which you're attempting to do it in, probably the more frustration you're going to experience. And so if you really want to live a life free of frustration, and free of stress, then you probably are ill-suited to the life of a success-aspiring, success-creating entrepreneur. That doesn't mean incidentally you might not be well-suited to be a business owner because there's some distinct differences between the two, but you're probably ill-suited to be an entrepreneur. If you go back then and you reframe it then as just how do you do it without trading away your life or your family or your peace of mind, well, that's a more interesting and manageable question and objective, but with caveats. I mean, the truth is that there is trade. And I remember seeing Dave Thomas's daughter interviewed, the founder of Wendy's. And he was asked how Dave was as a father. And she said, "He was a great father." And she said several good things about him. And they said, and then the interviewer asked, "Well, did he make it to a lot of your school plays and school functions?" And she laughed and said, "I don't even think he could have found his way to my school." let alone make it to any of the functions. But that didn't mean that he didn't have great and profound influence on his children, and it didn't mean he was a good father. It just means that he couldn't be there at the school play. And so, you know, there's different ways to achieve balance, and there is trade-off. And I think there's trade-off of personal life, there's trade-off of family life, and there's even trade-off of peace of mind. Napoleon Hill, who you referenced, is somebody— a lot of people have read Think and Grow Rich, not nearly as many people have read the last book he wrote called Grow Rich with Peace of Mind. And I reread it once a year to try and keep myself working on this part of the puzzle, this part of the puzzle that we're talking about right now. You know, and Hill said that it got to the point in his life when he couldn't have a telephone because He was pursued and every call was a request for something and he could not have peace of mind if he even had a phone and let people get to him. I just read the other day that a big trend in major corporations now is email-free Fridays, which by the way, as you might imagine, I find amusing. I do. Since I've been telling people to disconnect that thing a while. So now the big companies are declaring email-free Fridays. And so on Friday, their employees cannot take, check, or send email so that there can actually be one productive day in the entire week. And it made me think of Napoleon Hill, you know, taking the phone out of his house. So most people are simply not willing to do any of that. And so they leave themselves in the control of everybody else instead of in themselves. And so I guess the short answer to this is that this is about drifting away from or enforcing boundaries. And you're in charge of that, nobody else is in charge of that. And so if you find yourself in a space or place that makes you unhappy because it is too frustrating to bear, or there is too much pressure to bear, or there is too much time trade-off or life trade-off, then it is probably because you have either not set boundaries, or you have set them but you've drifted away from them and not enforced them and let people violate them. A little bit, and then when you let them violate them a little bit, then they violate them a little bit more and a little bit more until pretty soon the boundary is invisible. And so this is about clarity about how you are going to interact with others and how others are going to interact with you, and then enforcing that.

You know, Dan, many people think that when they go in business as entrepreneurs that all they need is to have the best product or a unique product or provide some kind of exceptional service or have the perfect website or the perfect location and think— they think that that is the key. But I've heard you say often that when you think like that, that that's a huge— there's a huge element missing from people's toolboxes. So share with us what you think that element is and how we can get it. Well—

I love these questions. Yeah, that's a dandy. I make you think. Look, I haven't stopped to calculate it, but I imagine that I have up close and personal witnessed, been involved in, to some extent or another been of assistance with at least 1,000 of what we are calling these phenomenon, these in-12-month explosions of income, wealth, and status. Over the years, and I would venture to say, again, without sitting down and sharp penciling it, that fewer than 10 relied on, were predominantly influenced by, or triggered by having the best product, the best service, the best idea, the best website, actually the best anything. And that's sort of philosophically disturbing to people who again have been conditioned to believe that excellence in and of itself equates to success. When in fact almost nothing could be further from the truth. Now that's not meant as an endorsement of crap or of slop or of poor quality, but it again is meant to say that, you know, what we've been conditioned to believe is the essential and most important ingredient really isn't. And so I think sort of getting that out of the way and actually understanding that success is a matrix of things. I mean, one of the great ways that people handicap themselves all the time is looking for a single simple solution to complex problems. The truth of the matter is, as much as we would like such a thing in any category, health, wealth, relationship, child rearing, whatever, it does not exist. It's a grand illusion. And so success is really about a matrix of things. And so not necessarily the best product, the best product for the target market that it is intended to serve, that's useful. The best service that keeps the covenant with that particular customer that matches up with the desires, wants, and needs, and preferences of the customer who is going to give you money, that's important, but in and of itself, just as thought in and of itself, it's not going to get you to your destination. And so instead focusing on what is the matrix of things that are going to create this particular success that I want to have. And so again, I can use an author example. So one of the things that I've been good at, I haven't been very effective at, say, getting a book and keeping a book on the New York Times bestseller list, in most part because I haven't set out to do that. But I have been extremely effective at staying on bookstore shelves continuously, nonstop being available and promoted to the public since 1991. And so someone might wisely ask, depending on their own interests, how do you do that? And so you might, the simplistic answer would be, well, you know, you create in the category, you create the best book. Well, I will tell you very freely that I don't think I've written the best book in any category in which I've written a book. I've written the best book that I could write, the best book for me, the best book for my customer, but also, staying on the bookshelves for that length of time has a lot to do with going to Book Expo every year and going over to the publisher's trade show booth with a box of donuts during the mid-morning lag in order so all the sales guys can have a donut. And you say hi to them and schmooze them so that hopefully they remember you and say something kind about your book. When they're back out in the field. And there's a list of another 199 things that fit that matrix. So I think you have to figure out what the multiplicity of things are that create the kind of success you want. And when we use the language, when we talk about phenomenon triggers, a lot of people's, in 12 months' experience is significantly, predominantly, or initially triggered by one thing, but it comes to fruition through the convergence, the in concert application of a lot of triggers. Not all the triggers, if we made a list of all of them that I know of, hardly anybody has all have all of them in play simultaneously in any one situation. But virtually nobody has it happen for them by having only one thing in play in any given situation.

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