The Defining Characteristics of Trailblazing Leaders in Business

We've all read the books about trailblazers, people who changed the industry, but more often than not, those stories come from people who are running ginormous businesses and they're not the trailblazers we see in today's business. This episode, let's flip the script. Welcome to the Magnanimous Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy as he interviews Tony Rubleski, and Tony went and studied the different New Style of Trailblazers, and out of that study has crafted a unique opinion on how you can start to grow your business by focusing a little bit differently. Tony's dedicated his profession to studying head coaches, religious leaders, and more with a 21st century perspective on what is a trailblazer. And so as you listen, pay attention to these things that are a little bit different than everything else you you have heard, because these are the fundamentals. And when you get the fundamentals right, everything else is clear flying. But that said, let's go ahead and listen to Dan Kennedy and Tony Rubleski with the defining characteristics of trailblazing leaders in business.

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

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to your diamond call. We have a pretty good-sized group on this call, and I have to start— I have, as the old joke goes, I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? So the bad news is the guest you came to hear, Mr. Petty, cannot be with us. The good news is a longtime friend of mine and probably known to many of you, some of you in one context, is with us, Tony Robleski, who might be known to some of you from his Mind Capture work. He has a brand new book out which we're going to talk about, all about trailblazing leadership in business, and he has done a Herculean effort project of interviews leading up to this book. So we're going to be talking about that. Tony, thanks for making yourself available on fairly short notice, and thanks for being on the call with us.

Well, my pleasure, Dan. I want to thank the inner circle here, the Diamond members, for being on live, and those that are going to hear this. So always an honor.

All right, so I want to give them the thumbnail. Um, so, uh, Tony is formerly from the Witness Protection Program. Now, um, uh, Tony is president of Mind Capture Group and, um, the creator of the Mind Capture book series, with which you may well, uh, be familiar. Uh, he's been featured in all of the important media outlets, from Entrepreneur Magazine Radio to CNN, ABC, Fox TV, numerous business publications and newsletters, newspapers, they actually still publish those, Toastmasters Magazine, on and on and on. And has done an enormous amount of work in the area of advertising and marketing, mind capture if you will, in the crowded, cluttered, chaotic attention deficit disorder breeding business environment in which we live. And he may want to talk about that too. But his newest book, Trailblazers: Leadership Lessons from Pioneers Who Influenced Millions, it includes John Stossel, Most recently of Fox TV. If you know John, a reformed liberal. John's an interesting guy. I like him a lot. The co-founder of RE/MAX. A friend of ours here at No BS, Sally Hogshead. The sales and marketing Guru Seth Godin and others. And in the book, Tony lays out key characteristics that trailblazers all share, the Napoleon Hill commonalities approach. So we shall talk about all that. Tony, do you want to give them any more depth of background? Kind of what you're doing and how you got here?

Well, Dan, thank you. A little bit more to add to that, and I appreciate the introduction, is I've been around your world, Planet Dan, I think since '96. So we go back like 22 years now. It's longer than most of my marriages, Dan. I have to commend you for keeping me around the herd. But you've been a great influence, and the new book that that's coming out here in a couple of weeks as we tape this, you're in it. So we went back and we self-published it originally then and we went and did some revisions, tested the marketplace, then brought it to New York and we added two new people, Mr. Dan Kennedy, yours truly, and Joel Ka for social media. So very delighted to finally get you in the book. And Dan, it took me about 20, 19, 20 years for you to let me interview you. Right before InfoSummit in Denver a few years ago. So we taped that interview, I remember it very, very well, and then we edited it down and it's just really to me a collection of powerful stories with nuggets of wisdom. I know we'll talk about it more with the Diamond members, but you know, I'm always like a sponge, Dan, and learning to me is a non-negotiable. And being around Planet Dan as long as I have, I will say this, you can ask a lot of my key associates I work with or even my kids, Well, Dan Kennedy would say this, or Dan taught me that. So you have positively corrupted me, Mr. Kennedy, and I'm okay with that. So, you know, it's a joy anytime we get a chance to talk. I know we're both very busy, but to not give you some credit would be a disservice. I'm very excited to have you in the new book.

Well, thank you. So before we do specifics, do you want to sort of put a frame around the project, around defining leadership, defining trailblazing?

It's a great question. My best thought process to answer that is simply this: leadership is in short supply. And what you see on the mass-produced television shows and the internet broadcasting, you know, from YouTube across to Hulu to Netflix, is it seems like we're focusing on the idiots. I call them the bad apples in the apple cart. And there's a lot of great leaders out there disrupting positively many industries that you don't hear about. It's not as sexy. It's not as marketable per se on the mass media circuit. But I like to find those that are doing trailblazing work that's very unique, that magically arrive on, you know, the Oprah Show or Ellen, or they get on CNN or Fox or the big network and people go, where did they come from? And typically, as we'll hit on today with your— the herd, is they've struggled for years and years, Dan.. And it's not been an easy road. Everyone thinks they magically arrived 12 years later, but it's been 11.5 years of chaos oftentimes. So I'm trying to find the story behind the story. These trailblazers can teach us so many lessons in a 9-second attention span world. So for me, I want to focus on those not just from business, Stan. We have obviously tilted more towards business and sales in the book. You've seen some of the other trailblazers. But I'm not afraid to talk about people from the religious world that are authors in that space, to head coaches of championship teams. What are they doing differently? Even though it might be a separate industry, which most of our audience is today's business, they're entrepreneurs, what can we glean from their journeys outside the business mold? So you nailed it. Dr. Napoleon Hill was great at taking in organized information, organized content, and repackaging it. So this is nothing new. It's just a 21st century perspective of these interviews I've done over, I think, 125+ now, and I'm still taping. So it's to me, not only fires me up, but it also is a way that I can get out challenges that I've had in my own life, Dan. You and I have talked privately. We all go through things, and sometimes when I do these interviews, it's like a private confession for me through these other trailblazers' lives.

If that makes sense. [Speaker] So you narrowed it down to what, there are 12 in the book interviews. And from that, while everybody has their differences, but you've winnowed to 7 key trailblazer characteristics. How about a couple examples?

Well, I'll give you a couple of them right off the gate out of the 7. Number 2 is persistence. And it sounds really cliché because now there's a million YouTube videos about persistence and rah-rah. And I know having been around your influence for over 2 decades, Dan, I've become more pragmatic. And I know you've always been a big believer in positive motivation, affirmation. But you bring more of a pragmatic approach. And I didn't quite understand it when I got around you. In my 20s, but now that I'm in my 40s, I get it more because you had the experience of wisdom, Dan. And you had, in your own stories, a lot of persistence. And I think that trait— everyone on this call is probably shaking their head going, "Yeah, yeah, I know that." But if they're doing well right now, which I'm going to imagine most of the inner circle that are part of Planet Dan are doing very well because they know one core thing that most people don't: how to market. And if you can market, you can make a living. And you can make a fortune if you get good at it. So they're on the right call and in the right circle with you and your team. But persistence is really tested when things fall down or when you are served, hey, you've got cancer. Or hey, you're served, I'm filing for divorce. Or hey, you know what, I just found out my business partner embezzled $600,000. Now these aren't actual examples that I'm saying in my own life, but I hear about them, Dan, when I interview these trailblazers. Or they share these things with me over a cup of coffee, then I finally get them to let me interview them. But if you're sitting good right now, I want to throw out some real kind of like 2x4 advice to the mind out of the gate. Please do not get complacent. And this current economy, as we tape this, Dan, it's frustrating as hell to watch people making money that are just clueless about marketing and don't care about their customers.. And it's easy to do it now when the economy is good, but when things turn and businesses and economies run in cycles as you and I know, that's where persistence comes into play. And if you haven't had an A-type event yet in your life, if you're younger maybe on the call or you've just had this— you've dodged the bullets, be prepared that at some point something's going to happen whether you like it or not or when you least expect it, you're going to have to dig really, really deep.. And these trailblazers, including you, Dan, have shown us by their own stories how they did it. And some of them have odds that are stacked so far against them, I don't know if I could have even tried to do it, to be honest with you.

You know, there's an old book on entrepreneurship, title escapes me now, but the author was a guy by the name of Carter Henderson. He said that success as an entrepreneur is the solving of a relentless parade of problems. Mm-hmm. And perfect. So, you know, the 3 A events, the A-type events that you just named, um, within the past 10 days, um, I have a client, 3 different ones of course, um, each of whom has some version of that event that you just named. So, you know, this stuff happens. Maybe more significantly or more constantly, what happens, to your point about complacency, is that what I call drift occurs in a business. And so policies, procedures, practices, systems from small to large, simple to complex, that the business owner put in place and believes are being adhered to and implemented, but an eye off of them for very long at all allows what I call drift. So some people now are not compliant. Some people are not 100% compliant. Some are outright resistant. Some are merrily rewriting the way things should be done by their own invention and imagination and opinion. And a little bit of drift becomes a lot of drift, and pretty soon the whole damn thing is adrift. And I mean, I had a— today's my phone day, so in addition to this call, I've got private client calls all morning and well afterwards into the evening. And one very successful fellow running a very successful business had enumerated to me the 14 different leaks he had found since the first of the year and plugged them and was just about getting to the point where he thought he'd found every one of them when yesterday Another one happened, um, to which is, you know, his mantra is, you've got to be kidding me. But of course, this stuff is only comedic after it's fixed. It's not comedic beforehand. So I think the, the opposite of complacency is eternal vigilance. And alertness to what I would call drift. And people that— I mean, you're right, the economy, of course, is on fire, and optimism with it is on fire. And to some people, money does start running uphill in an environment like this. And it's kind of easy to become complacent. So maybe this will tie in, maybe it won't, but one of the people, individuals in your book that I wanted to have you talk a little bit about because either he or his company will be familiar to everybody on the call. And that would be Paul Lineker, who co-founded RE/MAX. What, like, did you come away from your time with Dave most interested in, surprised by, impressed by, that really is relevant to every entrepreneur?

I would have to say, Dan, that Dave Liniger, who co-founded RE/MAX with his wife Gail, had so much adversity I almost couldn't believe. I've interviewed him live a couple times in front of RE/MAX groups and 3 times on the phone. And it's just one of those situations that when I met him, there was a resonance. He was a farm kid from Marion, Indiana, joined the Air Force, started doing homes and flips in the late '60s, and then started RE/MAX in the '70s. But a couple things I want to share with your tribe, or the herd, stand out clearly. This guy had to have thick skin, which is one of the traits as well, the seventh trait, beyond most people's ability to weather it. In the '70s, he told me that at one real estate conference in Denver, in the Colorado area, they had a trade booth for RE/MAX, and they thought they were doing such illegal practices because they were violating industry norms. Gee, I wonder where I learned that from, Dan. And they were just ticking off the old school, the old guard in real estate. They literally handcuffed him at his ankles and his wrists and hauled him out of the trade show in handcuffs in front of all his peers. About 2 or 3 years later, they end up winning Real Estate Company of the Year in Colorado, and he had to give a keynote. I can't imagine the amount of grace and patience to get up there a few years later and not want to just chew everybody out for what they did to him. That's one story of many. A couple other really quick that are just imperatively huge for our group here. The guy is still learning like a rookie. A couple of his high-level lieutenants, one who just became the president of RE/MAX, Adam Contos, came up to me a couple years ago before we went on. I was going to interview Dave in Scottsdale. He goes, "Tony, I don't know what you did a week ago with him in Denver when you interviewed him, but he had us listening to Les Brown on the airplane and Tony Robbins." telling us about Think and Grow Rich, he was like a little kid on the private jet. And I thought, you know what, that's how I hope, Dan, when I'm in my 70s, I'm treating this thing called knowledge like a kid. He's still hungry. He's told me in many interviews he's read Think and Grow Rich probably 50, 60 times. Now that to me is a serious student that's committed and not complacent. That's instructive for everybody listening. That this guy owns golf courses, he owns banks, Dan. He's loaded. He's probably the wealthiest trailblazer by dollar in the entire book, but he still treats it like a relentless rookie that's hungry, like Les Brown taught me. He just never stops learning. And I guess the final thing, and I think it's imperative, is I interviewed him the first time at an event I did in California. I talked to him live on stage. He had come out about a year earlier from a coma. He was basically in a 4-month coma, Dan, woke up and he was quadriplegic from the neck down. He couldn't move. And literally, you know, over the next 12 to 18 months, he got to a point where he could walk. He walked on our stage with a cane. And I saw him a couple years later in Denver, and he was walking with a service dog. And this is a guy that just never says die, Dan. And he told me in an interview that in the hospital, he was listening to Think and Grow Rich. He had people read him positive stories. He was watching YouTube videos. So you look at someone like Dave Liniger that has had all these things thrown at him. The guy is someone that if you had to place a bet who would win an entrepreneur like on Shark Tank, I'd throw all my money at Dave Liniger all day long.

So when you then look at the others, both in the book and others, and you— and you think about this, I call it being a serious student, the processing constantly of a lot of information to find the gems and so forth. Why do you think— so I think it's relatively— well, I know in the population it's rare. I mean, the one place you can always find an empty seat to sit down in is the library. You know, you may not be able to get an empty seat at Starbucks, and you may not be able to find a place to take a load off at a sports arena, but by God, you can always find an empty chair in a library. Why do you think this is such a rare commodity?, and not just amongst the general population, but I encounter it all the time even in our world, you know, where people are ready, fire, aiming. They are in a mad rush to do something, and they haven't even really gathered a basket of information and knowledge about it. Kind of talk about how these— these people you've interviewed go about the next thing they're going to do, the next thing they're going to do, the improving of the businesses they are in by gathering information?

Well, it's a powerful question, Dan, and one of the 7 traits again that addresses it head-on is that they're excellent problem solvers. So if you're listening to this and you're at your desk or you're driving or in an airplane or an airport, This is what I want everyone to really hone in on. Those in the market space that succeed for the long haul, not the Johnny-come-lately, the flash-in-the-pan, solve problems and then they listen to their best clients or constituents to uncover more problems to save them time and money. If you look at what I've been saying for 15 years now with my whole Mind Capture message is simply this. We're in a war of attention, Dan. And it's getting worse. And people expect everything like right now, damn it. And if it's not here by tomorrow with Amazon Prime or whatever, they get like it's the end of times. And I think there's some things that we have to be aware of. We're very spoiled in North America in particular that we have far too much choice, not enough time to sort through it, and we have all the creature comforts provided of an established Western democracy here in the US and Canada in particular, okay? And that creates complacency because we get comfortable. And if you're born into it, you don't even know any different unless you travel outside and you see other countries. But there was something that's a bigger, deeper problem. It's easy for people at Starbucks to write all their books, to write all these business plans, to come up with these million-dollar ideas, the next Uber, the next Airbnb, the next partner with Amazon. When they leave Starbucks, The hard reality sets in. It's going to take one word called work, and that seems to be in short supply, Dan. Now, this is a very biased audience that works their tail off. If you're on this call or you're getting this CD, you are that 1% that actually says, you know what, I gotta raise my game. I need to keep learning. And you know what, it's too competitive out there to just sit there and float with the herd and drift. As Napoleon Hill would call them, drifters, in his great work. So I did something, you talk about the attention problem, I did a keynote 2 weeks ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma for about 100 gas and oil executives. And I got to a point where I was teaching about referral marketing. I said, you know what people really want? They want you to pay attention to them and focus on them and shut your damn phone off and look at them. I took my cell phone, I've never done this, Dan Kennedy, and I threw it across the room from the stage. And the room got really quiet. And I said, you know what? That's what they really want. They want you to shut it off, look at them, ask them good questions, get in their head, get in their heart, get in the conversation of the mind as John Caples would say, and write down specifically how you can solve their problems. And I said, "You know what, can someone hand me my phone back?" A guy gets up that brought me to the meeting and he took my phone, he slid it to the back of the room and goes, "No, no, keep going." And I've never been that spontaneous to throw my phone, but it got a reaction that I didn't even anticipate. 'cause it struck a chord. It seems like no one's paying attention today, Dan. And if you look at these trailblazers, they pay attention to what they're really into, their drive. They solve huge problems and they lock in like a laser and really like a missile that keeps zigzagging sometimes for years and years and years, and eventually it hits the target. But they already knew they were going to hit it, they just didn't see all the zigzags that would occur 3, 5, 7, 10 years into the process to finally solve the problem?

Well, so it's very hard to predict if you're not into history generally or specifically, right? So one of the things that always interests me about a client or a member, anybody I'm dealing with, is signs of depth or lack of depth of knowledge about the field they're in and the activities that they're involved in. And so many people have know-how at a very superficial level, but they don't have real knowledge to support it. In my world, that— in one of my businesses, that would be the copywriter who stitches everything together from swipe files, but he has no real depth of knowledge about where the stuff he's swiping came from or why it is done the way that it is done. And so often you know, the choices made to stitch together in the order in which they are stitched together are not quite right. Walt Disney had this great quote that when we decide to do something, we really, really, really, really, really study it, and then we have the confidence to go all in on it. And I imagine you found with every one of these people a disdious approach to that, that they are not all in until they have depth of understanding reasons to be all in. And maybe you have somebody who's like an example of that you can talk about for a couple minutes.

Yeah. Um, before I answer, I want to say something. I think that's a tie into what you just said. And I agree is I think that my philosophy, I say this to a lot of clients, is we live in a world, especially with everyone having a cell phone and being constantly interrupted, that everybody wants a 60-second answer to a 10-year marketing problem. And usually like there's dead silence because what I'm trying to telegraph is we're in a YouTube world. Amazon world, way too much information, especially those under 40, the millennial set. Demographically, they expect to like look at one little thing on the screen and go, I've got it solved. I watched a 10-minute YouTube video. I know it all. And remember, Dan, let's backtrack a few minutes. People pay you for the depth of your knowledge, how deep you go down versus the surface level. And that's where the real money is made, is when you establish the marketing, the track record, the history. As a trailblazer is they're paying for those 30, 40 years of all that accumulated knowledge in what Malcolm Gladwell calls the blink factor. The blink factor is, Dan, you can look at something right away. I can imagine like a direct mail piece or something on screen copy and go, "That's wrong right there, right there, right there." A rookie has no perception of your copywriting skill to get it because they haven't done the thousands of repetitions like you have. They're paying you for not only your expertise, Dan, but your depth of all those repetitions. So, you know, you go into what you were saying, the devil is in the details. And I want to give you one trailblazer in particular that, you know, studied the game. His name is Dan Bylsma, and he was— when I interviewed him, just won the Stanley Cup with Pittsburgh. Now, since that interview, he's had a very interesting career path because I recorded almost 9, 10 years ago. But he was at the top of the world as a Stanley Cup head coach with Pittsburgh, and he won the Stanley Cup. A couple years go by, I think 3 to 4 years later, he gets fired as the head coach, and the whole front office gets canned in Pittsburgh. This happens a lot in pro sports. That's a brutal business. And then he gets hired by the Buffalo Sabres. He signs a 5-year contract. 2 years in, guess what? He gets fired again along with the front office. They still owe him 3 years on contract. So I think he's got this thing figured out pretty well, Dan. That's a pretty good deal. Work 2, get paid for 3 more. You know what I mean? So this summer, I see on the news here in Michigan, former Buffalo Sabres head coach Dan Byles is named assistant head coach of the Detroit Red Wings, one of my favorite teams. So if you looked at 10 years ago and you said, hey, Dan, here's what's going to happen from 2009 when you win the Stanley Cup to now going fast forward, I bet even he would be surprised because he won his Stanley Cup as a rookie head coach against the Detroit Red Wings. Now he's an assistant with the team he beat to win the Stanley Cup. So you look at those details. All Trailblazers are very persistent. They know that you have to really know your craft. You have to study the mentors, like you said, the history, Dan. And if you wing it, especially in the age of Google, You're roadkill on the digital highway. You have to have that, the repetitions, the experience, and to be able to draw from people that have already been out in the field of combat in front of you, that have scouted, and then you draw your own discernment after you've done your homework. So Dan Bylsa definitely is one of the trailblazers that's very tactical and keeps adapting to a very, very tough industry, an NHL head coach. Who's the deepest thinker you've encountered? Boy, I've never been asked that, Dan. Oh, I'm going to say W.M. Paul Young, and he wrote The Shack, which is a more of a religious type of book. It became a major motion picture last year. That's a huge amount of work to turn a book into a motion picture, especially when you're talking about God. And that to me is easier because the guy is very, very humble, very non-assuming. Literally wrote this book for his family and friends, and the story was so good that it went viral and family and friends started buying copies of it. He self-published it, and the guy in the interview, he still acted as if he's like surprised that it all took off the way it did. So from a being grounded, humble, deep interview, W.M. Paul Young, the writer of The Shack— I call him the spiritual trailblazer— definitely wins that one. And the stories he's gotten from readers that have read his book and seen the film are just stunning. Again, he's in the fiction space, he's not a business writer, but I'm a fan of his work. And that interview really floored me, how deeply calm he was, not full of himself, and there was no sense of arrogance with him. He sold 20 million books, Dan.

That's a monstrous amount of books. Yeah, unless it's, unless it's at the moment, you know, a pro-Trump or anti-Trump book.

Or Omarosa with her 12 minutes of fame now, 10 minutes.

Yeah. So there's been since the election, I think there's been 84 books that have got to number one on the New York Times list. And, and it's either 78 or 79 of them are Trump books. Yep. So, um, uh, $20 million maybe there, but a religious book, a regular novel, a business book, um, that's a— that, that, that's a very big accomplishment. Um, uh, one of the things people don't understand if they've never kick books out into the marketplace like you have and like I have is that they are an enormous risk of being stillborn if they don't take on a sales life very quickly. Correct. And, and there is not a publisher on the planet that knows anything about how to sell books, so It's up to you, me, him, etc., uh, when we're in this game to make that happen.

Well, Dan, I want to say something that you taught me, if it's okay. Yeah, you look at a book, um, we're going to be— when the book comes out in September, as this hits the Diamond Mailbox members, the CD and the interview— is that we're going on a 50-city US tour to support Trailblazers. I'm going to tell you where I came up with this. I borrowed it from the rock and roll music business, Dan, which I'm a huge rock and roll guy. Is go out, if you have the gumption and can handle it, and support the book. So I've already done a lot of media. I'm grateful to be on today. I know I'm the backup interview guest, but I've backed up governors on stages that cancel and they're like, "The governor can't make it. Get on a plane." So this is kind of built for me. But you taught me to always think, "What's next?" And most people don't get this. So how do you think, all right, you've got a book coming out, what's next you can do from that? Okay. On it, do a lot of pre-launch media during the month of September, do lots of interviews. But we're going to take the book and its message and really milk it for about 15 months, Dan. Most authors give it a month or two and they quit. We're like, no, we're going on a US tour. We've got marketing posters, social media. We want the message to live for a year, year and a half. Not because the publisher asked me, I learned it from you, is you've got to be thinking you have something that you can take and how do you leverage it. And we're going to leverage it for a long period of time in publishing and go on the road, every city, do local media, television, internet, radio, podcasts. But we want to sustain momentum because most authors and publishers have no clue after the first 2 or 3 weeks. They just let the book die. So we've, by design, 4 or 5 months ago, laid out the attack plan, the marketing plan. In January of this year, we came up with a publication date with the publisher, which is September 4th. Take a guess why we're going the day after a major US holiday to launch a book. Any thoughts, Dan? Hardly anybody else is. Correct. There's a great quote. I'm going to pull it up here on my phone. It is from Sun Tzu, The Art of War. And it says, let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night. And when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. Guess what's going to happen on the day after Labor Day when everyone's still in a cognitive summer haze? We launch, and we launch large. Not like we're doing billboards and paid ads and, you know, online, offline, but we've assembled an army of about 80 joint venture partners that are being staged, that we've got ready. We're doing pre-marketing like I've learned from Jeff Walker, his style. Then when we show up on 9/4, people are going to go, where'd this guy come from? Oh, it was planned 9 months earlier. And we followed the steps in the marketing plan and the strategy and we execute. So I give you a ton of credit for that, Dan, because you always taught me as a young marketer, think of an opportunity, what's next? How do you piggyback? I did an interview a week ago for ABC affiliate here in Michigan. I took a direct shot at Omarosa.

Why did I do it on television? Your thoughts. Well, I mean, look, you tie to whatever is the news of the moment.

Yep.

The flavor of the month. And it's the most likely way that that one interview spreads to other ABC affiliates.

Correct. And I've thought about the idea of saying, hey, some of our press releases, we start to test them when we launch in September, is saying, look, on the headline, If you can't book Omarosa, you can book Tony to talk about real leadership. There's my headline. And I know if we put that on PR Newswire, we're going to get some interesting reaction if we have the gumption to test it. I'm very tempted. However, the shelf life of her story might be dead in 2 weeks.

We both know that. Yeah, it may be dead by then. You're right. But you know, there's another one of those buses coming. Exactly. You know, the September 4th strategy. So first, a little story. I was on the Success Tour, and almost 2.5 of the 9 years, I followed General Schwarzkopf at the end of the day. And Norm had worked on his book, Um, he said his family said the title should be That Damn Book because every night after dinner, every night after dinner, Norm said, I'm going into the den and work on that damn book for 2 hours. So he had worked on this book for 2 years, and its release week coincided The other book released that same week, um, was— if you can remember, it was big at the time—

um, was Madonna's sex book.

I remember that, I do. And, you know, he said, could you have a worse, you know, situation than this? Um, and And of course, and even he sort of incorrectly attributed it to bad luck, which really it was more abdication of the responsibility to the publisher than it was, you know, luck. But the principle that he was victimized by and that you are attempting to manage by September 4th. We teach it now in marketing as show up alone, and which of course defies the use of online search where by definition you show up. In a crowd. Circumventing search is really where all the real money is made. Hey, keeping an eye on the clock and wanting to do Q&A and kind of jumping around, but one of the things that you spent some time on in the book and that I know you work with clients on and teach is what you call options. Options-based thinking.

And so I thought you might want to spend a couple minutes on that for everybody. Well, it's something that I think will be very near and dear to your audience is that you always have to have the oh crap moment and you have to have plan option A, B, C, D. Murphy has a tendency, as we know historically, to visit us in patterns of 3. And every entrepreneur will tell you Even when things are cooking along, you still have to sometimes work a Saturday morning quietly where no one can find you to set up, all right, who am I hiring next or who am I recruiting next to take over in case this person leaves? What is my fallback option if this goes wrong? What happens if all of a sudden our Facebook strategy, you know, like for the book launch, what happens if they don't approve my ad, Dan? Where do we go next? Do we jump over to Instagram? We have a house email list. Do we have other people try to co-market it? We've already got multiple options in place in case there is an issue. And the old joke, we've talked about politics, is what was it, the war room was created under President Clinton, Bill Clinton. And essentially it's like, uh-oh, we have a 24-hour rapid response team when Billy does something wrong, Bill Clinton, how do we come up with options to solve it? So you look at even at the highest level of politics, You look at sports, that they always have, okay, what are we going to do? You hear football coaches say this, well, we made some halftime adjustments. You always see them come out of the locker room. And my whole thing is if I watch a game, I'm like, where in the hell were you at the first quarter? Why didn't you make an adjustment then? You're already down 4 touchdowns. So you look at certain people that are always thinking, what if this goes wrong, what if this goes wrong? That's not being negative. That's being damn smart. And I think, you know, we've joked about when we're younger, like I was in my 20s, I was more idealistic. My 30s, I was, you know, kind of becoming more seasoned. Now that I'm in my 40s, I have to be very, as you would say, vigilant to have backup plans. What if something goes wrong on launch day? What if we have, you know, a major national scare or an emergency? What happens if a famous celebrity dies on September 4th? We've got to be prepared to say, how do we adjust and pivot that the news cycle is going to get hijacked for a day or two, we still have to have option B, C, D, E in play to roll the launch out a little later. So every entrepreneur, I think it's either drilled into you or you're going to learn it quickly. And Dan, let's be candid. I got her on Your World because you had shared experience. You had a lot of wisdom. I was doing door-to-door telecom sales in the '90s when I met you at a Peter Loewe event. I'm like, oh my God, there's got to be a better way. You arrived, the master was ready when the student was looking. I thought, there's a whole other world called direct response? Where has this been my whole life? So that presented a whole new set of options. I started to use your stuff. It actually worked. I was like, okay, maybe I was too young and naive, Dan, but I followed your stuff almost to the letter, adapted a little bit to my industry, but it worked. So there's options out there. There is no shortage of resources, coaches, wisdom, seminars, that you cannot not make it in America. I know you brought Gene Simmons in a few times, and Gene's phenomenal. And he's a guy that works his options, and he will pick up the phone to this day and make deals happen. He doesn't delegate the deal. He is the deal. So I've learned it from you, Dan. I've learned it from some of the people you brought in. Lee Miltier is also awesome about option-based thinking. But all these trailblazers are amazing at working their options.

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