Wealth Attraction Dos & Don'ts

There's a lot of misunderstanding out there when it comes to the law of attraction, especially when it comes to the category of wealth. Today on the Magnetic Marketing Podcast, we're going to listen to Leigh Miltier as she interviews Dan Kennedy, and we talk about wealth attraction, which is entirely separate from making money or building wealth. These principles are the psychological triggers that you should be focused on in order to attract wealth to you passively. And these principles are far more concrete than the woo-woo out-there ideas that are in the marketplace. The following are foundational principles on how you can attract wealth opportunities in everything you do subliminally. They are proven steps, and I cannot wait for you to hear each one. 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 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.

Hello everybody, this is Lee Miltier. Our topic tonight is about wealth attraction. All right, Dan, are you on the call?

I am here.

All right, very good. My first question, Dan, is I wanted to talk to you about your book on wealth. And you say in your book that your book is not about making money or creating wealth, but it is about the attraction of wealth. So let's talk about that.

Well, the distinct difference is that both making and creating imply that it is directly and proportionately connected to work, and attraction delivers a very different implication. There's a philosophical component to it, there's a strategic component, and there's a behavioral component. So very quickly, the philosophical component has to do with the idea of limits versus absence of limits. And most people limit their achievement based on what I call the work-money link. And people who philosophically believe there are no limits focus on leverage rather than on work. The strategic component is putting certain attractors in place that cause money to flow to you, that cause people to wish to seek you out and do business with you. Behaviorally, there's certain behavior that works to your advantage. Something as simple as punctuality, for example, tends to draw attention. Something as simple as actually making commitments and then keeping them. And so there's philosophy behind this, there's strategy, there's behavior, but the fundamental idea is to put the things in place that attract money to you and to use leverage rather than manual labor effort and hours traded for dollars.

You know, in your book that you say that a great deal of discovery and growth and progress and success is preceded by discomfort. You know, most of the wealth books that I read are always in that feel-good category. Why do you say that discomfort is necessary?

Well, not only does discomfort precede the attraction of wealth, actually for most highly successful entrepreneurs there's a continuous and consistent level of discomfort and frustration. I think anybody that is a high achiever finds himself surrounded by low achievers. And so the natural dichotomy of trying to get slow people to move faster because you're moving faster creates a lot of frustration. But fundamentally, the discomfort for a lot of people comes from changing their philosophy, their strategy, and their behavior in order to be attractive to wealth. And so long ingrained habits of thought and behavior have to be changed. And when they really are changed, it's almost like flipping switches on the wall, in, in that the results come so fast and furious. But getting to the point that you can believe, for example, and honestly believe that there's an infinite amount of money and not a finite amount of money, that you can honestly believe that every adversity, personal or economic or societal or in your industry, actually offers greater opportunity. Getting to the point that you are totally focused on leverage rather than on work for dollars can be a real uncomfortable thing for a lot of people. It's the shedding of long-held, deeply ingrained beliefs that are really tough for people.

Well, I know in your book you certainly do challenge most people's belief systems because, I mean, in your chapters you talk about— I think it's a quote from Katharine Hepburn— get ready, we're in for a bumpy ride.

Yeah, well, I mean, see, people come to the table with, um, with a whole laundry list of beliefs about money, about how money moves around in society, what causes it to move from place to place and person to person. And so they, they come with all with all these beliefs, many of which are either completely erroneous or made sense when you were 12 but don't make sense when you're 38, and contradicting these things. So, you know, if you really have been beat up that the wealthy person is the last guy to get into heaven, and you've had that screwed into your brain for 10 or 20 years, acting in a way that contradicts that is difficult. And so really examining what your deep-seated beliefs about money are is, is an important step of the whole process. Then also, when you, when you go to challenge those beliefs, it's about really understanding, which most people don't, simply what causes money to move from place to place and person to person. And so most people, for example, think work causes money to move from place to place and person to person. And in a very limited way, they're right. I mean, a person goes to work, they dig a ditch, at the end of the week they get a paycheck. So the work caused money to move from an employer to an employee. But it's such a small part of all the money that moves for that reason, and, and only money at the very bottom of the economic pyramid moves for that reason. So money moves for all sorts of other reasons. It moves for value. It moves for influence. It moves for expertise. It moves because of sales and persuasion and marketing. It moves because of economic leverage. So it moves for a variety of reasons that really are not directly related to work. And that's just one example of a belief system somebody has about money that, you know, is just not accurate.

You know, you were saying earlier that, you know, people have to go through discomfort. Well, you and I talk all the time about, well, if success and gaining wealth was easy, everybody would have it.

Well, yeah, the, you know, the— there was a survey done, I don't know, I saw 2 or 3 weeks ago about, I don't know, they surveyed some 3,000, 4,000 people in their 30s and 40s about retirement, and 67% of them, their, you know, retirement plan was the lottery. Right.

I think I saw that.

Which probably, you know, it's not going to work out too well. I mean, you know, that's That ad campaign for the Easy Button.

Right, yes.

And then they actually found that people want them for their desks, so you can walk into whatever chain that is and you can actually buy an Easy Button. And I'm sure it's a big disappointment to people, to a lot of people when they get it home and start hitting it and find out that nothing happens. And so if you look at just about anybody who is consistently attracting wealth and consistently experiencing growth in their both business and personal finances, you will find to a great degree that it is they're willing to do things that, you know, other people aren't willing to do. The vast majority of people choose very temporary and transitory satisfactions rather than enduring some difficulty or some discomfort or some sacrifice for a bigger and better gain. I mean, our United States companies are run by the calendar quarter. Our investment community demands relatively instant gratification. The Asian companies, their their game plans are crafted for generations while ours are crafted for calendar quarters. And theirs is a saner and more mature approach.

Well, you know, most of the people who are going to be listening to our call are people who are part of coaching programs, people who are investing in themselves, who are lifetime learners, or other people might be, in the bar or watching television. So there is always this energy that people who are improving themselves have a better chance of wealth. My next question actually was about, in your No BS Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs book, you talk about wealth magnets, and you say that having guilt about having money pushes money away. So let's talk about that.

Well, it's one of the emotional barriers to wealth because money goes where it's welcomed and wanted. And there's a sort of, in many people's lives, a childhood upbringing and a societal conspiracy of sorts played out in the media, amongst other places, that attempts to make people feel guilty about extreme and extraordinary success. And so you just told me a story before the call which I won't repeat, but which is very representative of it. And so you find people actually hitting a certain point, different levels for different people, but where they begin to feel like they're doing too well. And really it's just an extension of, if you're of a certain age, you heard the, you know, children are starving in China story, right?

Every time you sat down to the supper table, eat all your food because there are people starving in China.

Yeah, which of course one thing has absolutely nothing to do, you know, with the other, whether you have a lot of food or you have a little food. Wealthy people really come to grips with the honesty of self-interest. And how their, their accomplishments and their prosperity take nothing away from anyone else, that it is not a zero-sum game. And in fact, wealth contributes, it doesn't take away. You will be hard-pressed to find a university or a hospital, or a library, or a museum, a cultural institution, a medical institution, anything along these lines that has not been built and is supported by exceptionally wealthy people. And if you took their wealth away and redistributed it evenly amongst all of the quote-unquote disadvantaged people. You would have no impact on the disadvantaged people. The redistribution of the wealth would be so small, and their behavior and their habits and their understanding of money would be unchanged by the gift. Therefore, the money would be spent, it would dissipate, it would go away. Ultimately, it would find its way back into the hands of the wealthy people. But in the interim, what would happen is you would have no hospitals and you would have no universities and you would have no scholarships and you would have no museums. And so you would take that away, but you wouldn't have any compensating benefit. So really, the most noble of all motives is self-interest. The old joke, the best thing that you can do for the poor people is not be one of them, is actually quite true. But many people have, they may or may not enunciate it, but they have a variety of guilt sensations, if you will, that start to occur as they start to do better and better and better and better.. And they can come at them in many different ways. I mean, I've had numerous clients, you know, tell me their own versions of this story privately over the years, from the one member of the family who did not go to college and went directly into business and went broke once, but ultimately now has a 7-figure income and out-earns his brother, uh, who has 3 college degrees and is a doctor, and both he and his family feel that there's something out of whack, that he's making more money than his brother the doctor, right? And this begins to kind of like eat at him, and in a variety of unconscious ways, he begins to sabotage himself. And some variation of that story plays itself out in all sorts of people's lives and leads to these guilt sensations, you know, about doing well.

Well, our whole society punishes people who are very successful.

Well, there's a— you know, I literally call it a media conspiracy to support people's ideas that success is a matter of luck rather than successful exchange of value in a marketplace. You have to remember that the media relies on the support of the majority. So the closest thing you can get to a television station that lives off of the 5% rather than the 95% might be CNBC. The closest thing you could get to a publication might be the Wall Street Journal.. But the vast majority of the media, its audience that supports it, is the mediocre majority and those even lower on the economic scale. So the best thing that the media can do to continually appeal to those people is to vilify, demonize, and discredit the exceptionally successful. And pander to the idea that success is a matter of luck, that there's enormous inequity, that much of the wealth they see around them is undeserved. This is the equivalent of when you sell weight loss to fat people. You have to tell them that being fat is not their fault, that that the food industry has conspired to make them fat, that it's McDonald's fault, that it's genetic. You can't say to them, you know, a big part of the reason why you're fat might just be 2 Big Macs for lunch and a pizza for dinner. And the only exercise being lifting the lid of the box. See, you can't say that because you offend the very people from whom you are trying to take money. So when you understand that the entire media— broadcast, print, even internet— all of the columnists, all of the authors, all of the personalities, they get their money from unsuccessful and unwelthy people, and they must therefore say things to them that please them. They can't say things to them that irritate and annoy them. And the most annoying thing you can ever do to somebody is hold a mirror up in front of them and tell them, your fault, your choices. So, uh, if you see any economic truth, you see it, you know, in a little crawl across the bottom of the screen, or in Newsweek you see it on page 412. But so if you pay attention to, to the media message, you are always going to get fundamentally an anti-wealth, anti-achievement, the game is rigged against you, um, a kind of story because that's the story they must deliver to the people who support them. And paying any attention to it is of course dangerous and harmful.

Well, that's the next question I was going to have is, okay, it's primarily business owners and entrepreneurs on my call and they need a solution. So the solution would be of course my, you know, limit your media?

Well, yeah, it's not that— I mean, I happen to be a news junkie, but it— but, but I have an understanding of what it is that I'm watching and what I'm reading, and I'm careful to balance it because if you don't understand the agenda behind what is being presented to you and you take it at its face value, then it's toxic. And if you don't balance it, then it's dangerous. And so, you know, if you look at the flat screen and you watch the pictures and listen to the words without critical thought, without analytical thought, without not just what does this mean, but where is it coming from. I mean, everybody has an agenda.

But see, most people don't really think that, Dan. They, they really do take things at face value in a very naive way.

Yeah, well, again, if you, you know, if you want to, if you want to attract wealth, you have to, you have to improve 4 fundamental things. You have to improve the quality of your personal philosophy. You have to improve the quality of your thinking. You have to improve the quality of your behavior. And last, then, you have to create quality in whatever value you exchange for wealth with the world. And so quality of thought means that you're a critical, analytical, intelligent thinker who doesn't isolate themselves from, from what's going on around them, but instead runs it through their own set of filters and really spends their time looking for where the profit is, where the opportunity is. More so than anything else.

All right, switching gears here a little bit. One of the questions I had for you tonight was, in your book you say that the queasiness about price, about someone's ability to pay and what you think they can afford to pay is deadly. So you tell a story about Glen Turner. Do you want to share that with us?

Well, there's a Glen Turner story. Zig Ziglar's got a story. Pretty much everybody who's ever been in direct sales has some version of the story because they've all made the same mistake. The mistake comes out of, by the way, what I call wealth inhibition, which is the sum total of everything we've been talking about. It basically causes you to pull your punches.. And so it's like a boxer in a ring with somebody he really likes. He's going to soften his blows, pull his punches, and he's probably going to get clobbered by the other guy. The sales story has to do with a very particular type of wealth inhibition, which is projecting your own attitudes about price and your own values on the customer and pulling the punches when it comes to setting price, asking for price, closing sales, making presentations. So professionals have this affect them— dentists, chiropractors, cosmetic surgeons, etc. have this affect them when they do case presentations and quote a fee to somebody. A salesperson has it when they are in face-to-face selling. Or a speaker might have it when they are determining the prices for what they are going to offer from the front of the room. A consultant might have it about fees, etc., etc., etc. The best of the stories that is even better than the Zig story, which if people want to see it, it is in Zig Ziglar's book. Book Secrets of Closing the Sale. The best of these stories, which is a true story, comes out of the fire alarm business. And so the salesperson is in the home making the fire alarm presentation, and the fire alarm sale is about a $6,000 sale for this particular house. And he's in kind of a ratty house, and there's 3 kind of unkempt kempt kids. And he was there at dinner hour, and it was obvious that, you know, the meal was not, shall we say, sumptuous. And it became known that the breadwinner of the house was out of work. And so the salesman basically didn't close. He backed off, really didn't ask for the order. Because it was clear to him that these people really couldn't afford to buy $6,000 worth of alarms at the moment, that there were more pressing matters that they should be taking care of. And so he left. Two nights later, the house burns to the ground. Oh my. Um, fortunately, the spouse Uh, the wife and the kids get out alive. However, the husband does not and dies. Um, and it becomes known in the news when there goes to be a charity thing to get money for these people that actually, uh, they had inherited some money from their family only months before and had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. That they weren't doing anything with. So they could, of course, quite easily have paid $6,000 for a set of alarms. And had they, perhaps the guy would be alive. And so everybody in sales has one of these stories, at least one, and it reflects the projection onto the prospect or the customer or the client of your set of values of how they should be spending their money instead of their set of values, which you have no right to dictate to anybody. And assumptions and presumptions made that, you know, are not the case at all. And sort of the bigger issue about price, this overall queasiness about price, it can be deeply rooted in someone's own attitudes, about, oh, I would never pay that for that, or that's a ridiculous price for that. And it doesn't matter now whether what product, commodity, or service, you know, that we are talking about. I saw two articles, I clipped them from my marketing to the affluent pile. They're from two different sources, but they're both describing the same type of business, which is a business now that's kind of proliferating. It's a business of doing a documentary film for you about your life. Um, and so both of these companies are run by ex— by TV people, you know, like local television production people. That's actually brilliant. Yeah, it's a very— yeah, it's a smart business. Brilliant. And so they'll go around and they interview, you know, your friends and your family and on camera. And they, and they make it, and they go videotape the school you went to and whatever and take stills and stuff you've got, and they piece together and they make a true documentary film. One of these companies in the one article is charging $7,500 to do this. The other company in the other article is charging $75,000 to do this. As near as I can tell from the two articles, there's no difference whatsoever in the end product, but there's an extra zero on the price tag. So why can one get $75,000 while one is only getting $7,500? Well, it really has nothing to do with the service. It has to do with their own attitude about price and who they are offering the service to, which is even more important, and those people's attitude. Attitude about price and value. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a price level for everything. That's why there's a Walmart and a Neiman Marcus. That's why there's private jets and there's JetBlue. That's why there's luxury cars and there's Kias. On and on and on. And often, as we move up the price ladder, our own emotions, our own our own preconceptions about price start to literally create a queasiness in the pit of the stomach and cause us not to be able to price as aggressively and profitably as we could.

This kind of loops into the next question I had for you, which was, you know, you and I often discuss the topic of fairness. And you say that you don't get what you deserve, but that you get what you negotiate. And in your book, you say that you have to break free of thinking that if you do good work, you'll deserve to be wealthy, and that wealth should occur for you.

So talk about that. Well, again, this is sort of the misunderstandings of what causes money to move. And so this idea that, you know, I'm a more moral person than you are, or I'm in a more worthy business than you are, it has all sorts of fallacies. It takes the determination of value away from the marketplace and it makes it arbitrary and subjective. And so one man's pornography is another man's religion. And the marketplace makes all these determinations. You don't get to make these determinations. So, your— whatever you decide is your, is your moral high road, um, hopefully that serves you well in the afterlife, um, and allows you to sleep well. But it doesn't have anything to do with the way money moves about. Money moves about for a variety of very pragmatic and practical reasons that have to do with value exchange, with value determined by the person paying the money, not by any other means. And interestingly, if you look at, for example, a company like AT&T that everybody on its surface would think of as a quote-unquote reputable, well-established company, if you really analyze AT&T, you'll find that a very significant percentage of its bottom-line profits come from internet usage, the overwhelming majority of which is used to go to adult entertainment websites and buy adult entertainment product. You know, people are shocked by that, which a lot of people might have a problem with. And I could give you a thousand other examples that even integrate religious institutions' pension fund investments into companies that are involved in various and sundry sin products and services. I mean, the, the success of the entire gambling industry tells you that money is moving about for reasons other than a lot of people's precepts about what's good, what's bad, what's sinful, what's not. Then the issue of this deserving thing. You deserve all the wealth you attract based upon value exchange. You don't deserve wealth just because you're a nice guy. That's not how this works. You know, there's a number of great speaker stories about this. Earl Nightingale told the story of the minister stopping at the farmer's farm. And calling him over from his tractor and complimenting him on his beautiful farm and the great crop of corn that was obviously ready to harvest and so forth, and saying to the farmer that he had obviously been greatly blessed by God. And the farmer responding and saying, well, yeah, I suppose I have been, But you should have seen this place when God had it all to himself. I can relate to that. And, you know, therein is the, you know, is the difference between viewing being, being a good person. Has it in and of itself supposed to, to put wealth in your lap? Versus the real forces of, if you will, cutting timber, planting seeds, fertilizing the land, and doing the things that are necessary in order to have a great harvest. So it's just an extension of people's fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a wealth to be attracted and what causes money to move.

You're really saying that money doesn't have a moral consciousness?

Well, it doesn't. Money, any more than the law of gravity, has a moral conscience. So, you know, if there's a plane crash and there's 110 people on the plane and 32 of them are really evil and 22 of them are really good, the 22 of them don't float up through the ceiling of the plane and drift gently down to earth and not crash. If the plane goes into a mountain, they all go with it, be they good or evil, because that had to do with the law of gravity. And the laws that govern the movement of money are much the same. They are about cause and effect. They're really very physical. They're measurable. They're extremely pragmatic. And so, you know, cause and effect, I mean, two people take a— decide— we have this happen in my neighborhood every year at Thanksgiving. You know, some moron decides to deep fry the turkey. Inside his garage or on his backyard deck and blows the thing up and sets fire to his house. Well, so let's say two people do that, and one of them's an extremely moral, spiritual do-gooder person, and the other guy's a complete slimeball. I got news for you, they're both— if they both put the turkey in the wrong way and they both set fire to the thing and they both cause it to blow up, they're both going to have explosions. It's, it's physical cause and effect, and that doesn't give any consideration to how nice a person you are. I'm not suggesting you go around being, you know, a criminal or, or, or an a-hole, but, but what I am saying is, is that The movement of money and the attraction of wealth is all about causes and effects, not about morality, and certainly not about deserving it purely based upon you being a good person. There are a lot of very good people who are very poor and stay poor their entire lives because they don't understand money and they don't understand wealth and, and they don't understand business and they don't take the time to educate themselves. And in some cases, they spend their whole lives walking around wondering, you know, why me? Why not me? Gee, why aren't I doing better because I'm such a nice guy? And one has nothing one has nothing to do with the other.

Dan, I've noticed painfully that often achievement, accomplishment, and ambition are defined as greed. What is your take on this problem that entrepreneurs and business owners have?

Well, again, there's sort of a societal media-driven presentation that must be made to the mediocre majority that puts ambition and accomplishment in a negative light rather than a positive light. The specific of greed in my mind is that you cross the line into greed at the point when you are either trying to get something with no value exchange or you are intentionally and deliberately harming someone by your gain. Other than those two cases, greed really doesn't apply. So the person who's got a 48-foot yacht and decides he's going to get a 72-foot yacht, and maybe he's going to keep the 48-foot one and have both of them, a lot of people now would put the greed label on him, right? And they would, because they believe in a zero-sum game, they somehow have in their head that if he didn't have those yachts some poor person somewhere who doesn't have a mule would suddenly have a mule materialize in his backyard, when again, one has nothing whatsoever to do with the other. Well, if the guy with the yachts has attracted the wealth to pay for them through some sort of value exchange, then greed has nothing to do with it. And ambition, self-interest, that has a lot to do with it. And whatever he chooses to do with the wealth that he attracts, however he chooses to apportion it, blow it all on yachts or divide it between yachts and charity, first of all, that's his business and nobody else's. And second, no matter what he does with it, it ultimately is a benefit to society, not a detriment to society. If he chooses not to have any yachts and give it all to worthwhile charity, that's a benefit to society. If he chooses to give none of it to charity and buy yachts, by buying yachts he creates jobs. By buying yachts, he makes lumber mills work. Work. By buying yachts, he puts commissions in salespeople's and dealers' pockets. All of the money goes back into the great and grand economic pool. The person who builds himself a 15,000-square-foot house when a 5,000-square-foot house would do, that's— it doesn't matter. All of the money goes back into the system. Societal and economic pond anyway. So all of the, if you will, luxury spending is every bit as useful to society as is poor-as-a-church mouse spending, as is charitable donations, as is flying over Allentown, Pennsylvania and dumping money out of an airplane. It all actually has the same fuel effect. One is no more beneficial or admirable than the other. Some are more celebrated than others and some are more criticized than others, but they have exactly the same effect.

Well, that's a great point that most people never really have the vision or the big picture to see about that. I have a neighbor who's building a $15,000 custom-made closet, and my, my other neighbors are going, having a fit about this. It's just outrageous. And I keep saying, but the carpenter who's in there now can pay his rent and put his kids through college because he has the job.

Well, Oprah made $260 million last year.

That's a lot of money. Yeah, nobody's mad at Oprah about that.

Well, the, the only real question is how much of it is sitting dormant somewhere and how much of it is being recycled into the economy. And so it doesn't matter how it gets recycled, whether she buys herself a $15,000 pair of shoes or whether she gives $15,000 to the Red Cross. Actually, the impact act is exactly the same. Now, one is more indirect than the other, because the $15,000 pair of shoes— now the money moves to the leather company, and it moves to the fashion company, and it moves to the store she bought it from, and it moves to the salesperson who now can send their kid to college, and the kid who goes to college now becomes a doctor, and then he gives money to the Red Cross. It doesn't make any difference at all. It's all in circulation. It's all moving. And And so is making $260 million greedy when obviously $230 million would do? So shouldn't she stop at a certain point and take, I don't know, 3 months a year off or not launch another product? Or maybe she should just give the advertising in her magazine away for free in order to diminish her income to some extent. Some number that would not be quite as unseemly to people. Well, I mean, it's foolish. It's silly. The best thing that anybody can do, the best thing that anybody can do for society is to make as much money as they possibly can or as they want. And the greatest sin anybody can commit is unrealized potential.

You say in your book that every man's tragedy is someone else's opportunity, and that that is commerce.

So is everyone an opportunist, and why do people get so upset about that term? Well, everybody, everybody who's smart is an opportunist, and in some cases it'll happen even with them out, with them not doing anything particularly to cause it. So what, 2 days ago, was it 2 days ago we had the shooting in the shopping mall in Iowa? It wasn't yesterday, was it? It was, I don't know when it was, a couple days ago. A couple days ago. So Christmas shopping season and some nutball goes into a ball in the middle of Iowa and kills people. And it's all over the news. The— I saw the CEO of Overstock.com interviewed today on CNBC, and they, and presumably other online merchants, in the ensuing hours since that shooting have had an unexplained and noticeable significant uptick in business over and above what they normally projected for the Christmas shopping season. Why? Because I don't want to hear the people decided we're not going to go to the mall, right? We'll buy our stuff online. So the tragedy that occurred in the mall provided benefit, economic benefit, to a collection of merchants— probably Amazon.com, probably eBay, and a bunch of little merchants on eBay. Overstock.com, etc., have been the beneficiary of people's responses. Right after 9/11, when a lot of people didn't want to fly, weekend vacation destinations benefited while Disney's business was off. The gasoline companies benefited because people drove more places. Then they flew, etc., etc. So there's a natural ebb and flow, whether you do anything about it or not, that everything creates some sort of financial opportunity on the other side of its coin. Every tragedy, every adversity, every change in market, or every change in society locally, nationally, or globally causes opportunity or opportunities. So it happens whether you, like, do anything about it or not. The question is not, is it going to happen? The question is, are you going to be alert and innovative assertive in capitalizing or not. And so, see, people who are very good at attracting wealth have rid themselves of these emotional and psychological hangups that are all based on the zero-sum game idea. The idea that somehow pulling your punch helps somebody. And we rid ourselves of all of this and we act in very pragmatic ways.

Where I see most people do that the most in our world is cutting their fees, discounting things too much?

Well, I mean, look, the first, you know, the sort of the first sign that, that somebody has, um, a wealth inhibition, um, is how easily they roll over, right? Um, when confronted with any sort of a resistance. Yeah, any kind of resistance, any kind of pressure. Sometimes it takes nothing more than a question. Well, really, you know, can you do a little better? Well, I can, right? And so that telegraphs, you know, internal stuff about money and price and value and what they believe about the market that they're serving and what they believe about the value that they are delivering and so forth. And there's a— it's not original, but Foster Hibbard used to say, you know, you can go to the ocean with a a teaspoon, a bucket, or a truck, the ocean doesn't care. And the marketplace largely doesn't care. So you choose what you take out of it. It doesn't limit what you take out of it. But again, if people believe it's a zero-sum game, if they really believe that money is finite, not infinite, if they if they believe that the people that they are selling to or marketing to have limitations on what they will pay, if those beliefs are in their way, then they will very easily compromise fees, negotiate away fees, and in many cases they they don't even understand how much harm they do to themselves and how little help that they do. You know, the compromise of price, the compromise of fee tends to do two things. It tends to drive away the best customer, client, or patient, and it tends to attract the worst customer, client, or patient. Really good customers, clients, or patients tend to be smart. They tend to have pretty good attitudes about money. And so if somebody is quick and easy to discount or if somebody is grossly underpriced, we draw negative conclusions about them. So if the last instance I had with it was a painting job and so, you know, 3 or 4 people bid on the painting job and when you showed one the cheaper bid, he immediately folded and offered an even cheaper bid. Well, he's the last guy I'm taking. I want the guy actually who had the high bid and refused to negotiate it because I figure I'm getting the best painter. So people really don't understand how much harm they do when they gravitate take to the cheap price or compromised fee position.

Well, that kind of winds into my next question, which is, you know, most people speak lack, poverty, they're inadequate, doubt, fear. You know, you offer— you co-authored that great book, The New Psycho-Cybernetics, with Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Let's talk about your take on the importance of self-talk and how it relates to attracting wealth?

Well, I think that what you say, what you write, what you say internally that you don't enunciate but that you say to yourself— what you've called self-talk— all of that is governing All of it is cumulatively influential. And so it doesn't matter whether you verbally enunciate, oh, we're in a really bad market and our industry's in the dumper, or whether you say it to yourself but you don't verbally enunciate it. Is exactly the same. And we're always, we have a running inner dialogue with ourselves that doesn't really stop. And again, it's cumulatively influential. And so the attitudes, the belief systems, the fears, the inhibitions are communicated in language and in mental imagery and in pictures. And you can't outperform, you're not gonna outact whatever it is that you are telling yourself. So the person who is telling themselves that, that they're not a good negotiator, they're not going to be a good negotiator, they're not going to out-act their inner dialogue and their personal programming. And so you find at different times in different industries and in different professions and in different geographic locations, you find a general acceptance that we're in a bad market. Or we're in tough economic conditions, nobody in our area has any money, credit has dried up, these sorts of things. The week, the week of the first major tightening of all of the available credit in response to the quote, quote subprime debacle with a 30-some-odd percent drop in mortgage applications, a mortgage broker friend of mine wrote 17 loans. Why? Well, from a practical standpoint, he has a marketing system. He had prospects in the pipeline and so forth, but beyond that, his conversation with himself was not the same conversation everybody else was having who didn't write any business that week. And so I think you have to be on guard about unfiltered and unanalyzed input, sort of buying into the prevailing attitude about the market, the world around you, the business conditions in which you find yourself. You have to be on guard about the things you're saying in your own inner dialogue with yourself. You find that again these people who seem to be lightest touchy in terms of attracting wealth, if you listen to Gene Simmons who we're having speak at the Superconference, what you hear coming out of their mouths verbalized is what simplistically might be called positive and prosperity affirmations. I mean, what is coming out of their mouth are affirming statements about money and about wealth. So you'll hear Simmons say things like, "Every day is a money day.

Today is a money day." Oh, by the way, I have his quote right in your book. I just found it. I opened up to it. It says, "Be clear. Be truthful." stand there proudly, unapologizing, unabashedly, and say, I love cash. It will get me everything I want in life.

Yeah, well, and see, that's not posing. Again, if you listen to a lot of him, that is— that's always— it's consistent, which means it's consistent internally as well.

And so he's a money magnet.

Yeah. And conversely, if you listen to the language of most people, that which is spoken, which is a reflection of what is unspoken, what is internal, you will hear the exact opposite. And this sort of personal position about money today tomorrow, every day, then governs everything. I mean, when you have a set of assumptions, so if we set out to prove that, you know, pygmies learn foreign languages easier than do tall people, and that's our assumption, then the research is probably going to support our assumption. Assumption because of the way we go about doing the research. And so if you have a set of assumptions, then that's going to govern the results that you get. And the first thing to do if you're not thrilled with the results you're getting is take a look at your assumptions. And they're going on internally. They're being said externally. They're finding their way into your sales processes. They're finding their way into— I'll give you a great one of a client who works with the real estate industry. His salespeople vehemently insist, and I believe sincerely and honestly believe, that you can't do follow-up telemarketing to direct mail campaigns to real estate agents because you can never get them on the phone. And so you're going to call them 600 times and you're going to leave voice messages and they're not going to call you back, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And so as an experiment last year, we took a bunch of his leads that nobody could ever get on the phone, gave them to somebody who had no such preconceived assumptions locked her in a room where nobody could ruin her or poison her with their assumptions and had her make telephone calls. And over a 2-day period of time, she brought in about $42,000-$43,000 talking to these people on the phone that can't be reached on the phone. That's great.

Thank you very, very much, Dan. As always, you are brilliant.

Thank you.

Happy to 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. Now this free gift comes with almost 20 $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. 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.