What Orison Swett Marden and Success Magazine Can Teach About Perseverance | #Success - Ep. 62

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Now obviously if you want to sell stuff online, you're going to need a good funnel, but if you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is the number one funnel builder in the world, helping more first-time entrepreneurs to leave their 9 to 5 and to launch their dream than any other company on earth. ClickFunnels was built for the dreamer and the doer, and you can get a free 14-day trial by going to clickfunnels.com/podcast right now. That's clickfunnels.com/podcast. ClickFunnels, because you're one funnel away from changing the world. This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the vault. One of my favorite things I've ever found to share with you guys today. This is an issue of Success Magazine, but it's not any issue. It is the first issue ever. This is one of the most rare things I have. And in my collection, I've actually come across two. So I actually own two of these, which is kind of crazy. The very first issue ever, Success Magazine, was December 1897. Success Magazine was— you think about like personal development was not a thing prior to Success Magazine.. There were a couple people who got into personal development and success and things like that. The founder wrote this magazine, put it out there, and this became the thing that blanketed the country and was the introduction to personal development principles across America. It literally changed the landscape. It changed our country. And it all started with this inaugural issue of Success magazine. I've not read the whole thing because how expensive and rare this is. I've took it out and very carefully was trying to read all the different pieces and stuff. So I read a lot of it. Should I pull it out? You guys wanna see what it looks like inside? Because it's, it's definitely not like, like the magazines of today, although there are some really cool ads inside, which is always exciting. But this is what it looks like. You guys can see it right there. Front cover, we got Abraham Lincoln. I'll tell you guys that story here later. And again, it was 10 cents back then. For me, just the art of how they designed these is so beautiful. So if you look at this, like again, all the different ads for different products inside, but look at like how intense just the text and the copy and how much stuff there. They're talking about. So it's pretty intense to read one of these. It'd be the equivalent of reading, you know, probably 150, 200-page book. And they're publishing this every single month. In fact, the first 12 months of Success, they publish as monthly. And then after that, for the next 52 weeks, they actually publish it as a weekly. And I have been collecting every issue of Success from 1897. And right now I have all but 2 of the issues and I'm searching for them everywhere. So if you guys have one, let me know. This right here, this is the article where he goes deeper into Abraham Lincoln. He calls it Stepping Stones to the White House. And it's a really cool article. And then the back here, obviously you have more of the ads. It's just fun seeing all the ads from back in the day. Like, in fact, a lot of books I find is from looking at the ads from way back. And I'll find the ads and I'll go on eBay and try to find the thing they're selling. A lot of times I can find like the book series or the, just the different things that were being sold in the back. It's always fun to try to see if I can find original copies of what was being advertised back in 1897. I'm aware of 3 copies of this out in the wild and I have 2 of them. So I don't know exactly would be. I bought both of these as part of a lot when I was buying somebody's entire library. The first person did know this was a first edition, and so in the pricing, I spent like $2.5 million buying his entire estate. The price that was listed for this inside of the estate was $100,000 just for this one magazine. The second one though is a fascinating story because one of my friends, Dr. Joe Vitale, if you search my YouTube, you'll see him. I bought his entire library, and in his library there was a whole stack of a whole bunch of Success magazines. And when he was selling it to me, he was flipping through and I saw this. I saw the corner and I was like, wait a minute. I'm like, can you take a picture of that one right there? So he found, took a picture and sent it to me. I was like, he has no idea this is the first edition. And so I didn't tell him until after we closed the deal. He shipped it all to me and I took a picture. I'm like, did you realize you had a first edition Success magazine? He's like, I had no idea. So this one I got, the second one I got, again, part of buying an entire collection from somebody, but they didn't know the value at the time. So I could sell this right now on the market for $100,000 pretty easily and there'd be people lined up to buy it. Including me. The thing I love most about Success Magazine is actually the story of the founder. His name's Orson Swett Marden. Almost nobody knows who he is. It's been very rare since I've been talking about this. I'm like, even the person who owns Success Magazine now is having a conversation. I'm like, do you know about Orson Swett Marden? He's like, who's that? I'm like, oh, he's the guy who founded the magazine. And he didn't know the story behind him. And his story is why I love this magazine so much. It's a story about resilience, a story about success and failure. And it's something that someday should be made like a blockbuster movie. I'm here to tell you guys a story so you do not forget the legend and the story of Orson Swett Marden. He was a guy, he was a business owner, he was trying a bunch of things, he was buying hotels and trying to start a business, and somewhere along the line he found an old book in his attic. And this book— and we'll probably do a YouTube video on this book in the future because it's a very important one— but it was a book by Samuel Smiles called Self-Help. It was the first ever personal development book ever written over in Europe. Somehow this book had found its way into Orson Swett Marden's home. He found this book in the attic, he read it, and it changed his life. Like, he just understood personal development and success and all these different principles, right? And he got so excited that he started like thinking about these things and he started writing. He wanted to write his own book. He spent 15 years writing a manuscript. When the 15 years was over, it was about 5,000 pages that he had been writing this book and he was so excited to publish it and it was inside of one of the hotels that he owned and one night the hotel burned to the ground and the entire 5,000-page manuscript was gone. You think about most people, what would happen if adversity hit you like that, like you were writing a book for 15 years on Google Docs and then Google crashed or you lost your Microsoft Word doc or whatever it is, right? You lose it, like what would most people do? They would throw their hands up and be like, I'm out. Instead they said, like the accounts of what happened, he was like literally there in the ashes of this hotel realizing that his life's work had been destroyed and what he did that night is he walked over to the convenience store or whatever, he bought a 25-cent notebook, and he tried really quickly to remember like what he had written before and started rewriting this book from memory because he wanted to bring what they call his dream book out to the world. So he spent the next however long rewriting this book and he published it and the book was called Pushing to the Front and he launched it out to the world and it became the number one best-selling personal development book of all time up to that point. And it's credited like, you look at all the presidents of the United States back then, they all read it, they quoted it. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all these guys like, like all the people back then read this book. Like, it wasn't just like some random guy. Like, it was literally the first personal development book really published here in America that had a big impact. That was kind of the first success. And then after that, shortly after, is when he had this idea, like, how do I get these principles out to the world? And that's when he came up for the idea was for Success Magazine. And so a couple years later is when he put this whole thing together and he printed the very first issue on December 1897. That's when the very first issue went out. And that's when this Success thing wasn't just a book that some people bought, but it became a magazine across the entire country that everybody could actually read and it changed the landscape of America forever. When I first heard that story the first time, I look at so many people in my world and in my life, myself a lot of times as well, where it's like you hit an obstacle and the obstacle stops us, right? I mean, I just think about like, I know how much work it was for me to write my books on Google Docs, right? Where it was like, it's not that difficult. I can cut and paste. Like back then in the early 1900s, or sorry, late 1800s, to write a book, like it's typewriters, it's manual, it's cutting and pasting, it's handwritten stuff. Like the amount of work going into some of that and then to have it gone and just lost. Like most people would just, walk away, right? But there's something about when someone's got a vision or a dream that's so much bigger than themselves, like it doesn't matter what the obstacle, it doesn't matter how big it is, like you would push through that. And again, that's where most people fail. I think about that a lot of times. Like I've seen so many people who've come into my world as an entrepreneur or someone who wanted to be an entrepreneur, and they're going, going, they hit a trial and they fail, hit a trial and they fail. And the ones who are successful realize that there's going to be trials along the way. So many thing after thing after thing after thing, right? And so I see where what happened to him before he ever had any success and just, it hit and it was such a, I mean, 15 years he spent writing this manuscript and it was gone overnight. And instead of doing what most people do, people stop, he's just like, alright, let's just keep going, let's just start over from scratch. What's fascinating about this is this pattern followed him throughout the rest of his life, right? They always say that people that win, winners win, right? You know how to win, you continue to win. And so he's just a good example of a winner. So after he launches this magazine, think about this, he launches this magazine, it's hugely successful, starts growing around the world. Again, 1897 it launches. By 1908, this thing is huge. There's literally millions of people around the country reading it. They moved their offices to downtown New York. They were in a 12-story building. The building's still there. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm gonna go next time I'm in New York, I'm gonna go find the building. But it's a big building, 12-story building, and that's where Success Magazine was being published from, shipped out. They had the publishing, the printing, everything happening here, and they've shipped this magazine out through the entire world. And it was having a ton of success in 1908. And then by 1911, he had brought in some investors and things had happened, and investors had changed the magazine from being personal development to trying to like make it more businessy, and all these ups and downs. And by 1911, the magazine actually failed. And by 1912, it was gone, like completely finished. And think about it, he spent the last 12, 13 years of his life publishing his magazine, putting it out there, just to have it fail. And on top of that, even though there wasn't social media back then, there were newspapers and there were all sorts of stuff. And so people, like, I don't know, there's a time when like people love the hero story of a hero building up and trying to create something, but then people love watching a hero fail. Like you see it all the time. You know, the same people that were cheering you as you were growing are the same ones that when you fail are like, wanna laugh at you. So he, this magazine fails. What happens is all the publishers, all the writers around the country, they all start publishing. Literally headlines were, Success Fails. And they were so excited to announce to the world that Success Magazine, he's gonna be successful, it actually failed. And I look at that, I'm like, can I imagine like, you've been teaching people success principles for 15 years of your life, you're so proud of it and it fails, and instead of like just having this thing you kind of walk away from, You don't want anyone to notice, like everybody's watching this failure across the country. It's in every magazine, it's on the radio, it's like, and everyone's so excited to talk about the fact that his magazine failed, right? Now again, most people, what would they have done in that spot? Like you would have like, you would have walked away, you would have hid, you would have like changed the industry, you would have done anything. But instead, like he's there, he's like, I still believe in these principles. Like yes, we failed, but it doesn't mean we're failures, which is where most people end up failing, right? It's like they say, I'm a failure. He said, this failed, but I'm not a failure. And so for the next few years, Orson went back and he kept a couple people from the staff from the magazine printing company and he started writing books. And if you look at the number of books he's written, probably, I don't know exactly, 30 to 40 other personal development books that are amazing. Some of my favorite books Orson wrote during this window of time while he was trying to figure out how do I get the magazine back? So he's trying different things, he's trying to figure stuff out. And fast forward to, so between 1912 and 1917, nothing was published. For 5 years he's trying to figure this out. And then in 1918, During World War I, he finds an investor who's willing to invest some money to bring Success Magazine back. So he gets this investor, he goes back and he buys the magazine out of bankruptcy and he relaunches it 5 years later, right? And then what's crazy is over the next time, basically from 1918 to 1924, so for the next 6 years of his life, he starts publishing this magazine, he brings it back, and in the next 6 years, he gets the subscriptions to this magazine. More people are subscribed to the magazine when he died in 1924 than at the peak prior. I look at that, it's just like one of those like comeback stories that you're just like, This guy who lost everything in the public eye and everyone was talking about him, instead of like doing what most of us would do and hide and shut down, he came back and like, all right, I'm gonna mount a battle plan. How am I gonna win? I'm gonna figure out a win 'cause I'm a winner and winners win, right? Came back, mounted this battle plan, comes back, and over the next 6 years builds it bigger than when he had it originally. That's the story of Orson Swett Marden. Like one of my favorite characters in history, but specifically history of like the personal development world, right? During his life, he published over 200 magazines before he passed away. And such a testament of resilience in entrepreneurs, those who really believe in their mission and what they're doing to keep coming out there. I think for me specifically, I've had ups and downs in my business. I've had the hero story where I'm rising, everyone's cheering for me like, yeah, and it just feels really, really good and you get to the top and then you're top, then everyone wants to tear you down. I felt that part of it as well, right? I felt remounting the new comeback story. And so for me, it just gives me a blueprint of a human who's gone through that in the public eye and successfully done it throughout his life and gives me excitement and motivation as I'm working back through my comeback stories as well. I think for me, one of the main reasons why like I fall in love with Orson Swett Marden and his story is because it's literally a story I've been going through. A decade ago is when we launched the company ClickFunnels and we were the underdogs. We were fighting against all the companies that all this VC funding and had money and we were like the scrappy young guys who were bootstrapping. We came out and out the gate we started having success and started growing, right?, and it was awesome. Like everyone was cheering for us. Like we were the heroes. Like it was crazy. Everyone was talking about us. We got PR, we were on TV. Like every podcast was like fighting to have me on. Like it was this huge thing. And again, people love the hero's journey, right? And they love cheering you on during that part. And for me, like it felt amazing. Like, you know, like this is the greatest ride of my life, right? And I look at ClickFunnels and our story, like the first 7 years, that's where we're at. Like everything was going perfectly and it was really fun, right? Same thing with Success Magazine. He goes downtown New York, He had this huge 12-story building, right? And everyone's cheering for him, he's successful. And I felt like that was the same spot I was in for the first 7 years of ClickFunnels. It's funny 'cause like at that point for us, like we wanted to make a change and it was not, this is the hardest thing is it wasn't for me personally. Like we had an offer for someone to buy our company. I would've been like insanely rich for the rest of my life. And we decided to turn the money down because we wanted to create something different and better for our audience. Like that's the part I think was so hard for me. So we spent the next 3 years, 2 or 3 years of our lives like tens of millions of dollars, every penny we'd earned dumping back into rebuilding the ClickFunnels platform to give this as a gift to our community, to everyone, right? 2 years later, we come out and we launch it. It's different, like launching software the very first time when you have zero customers and you get 10 and 20 and you're fixing bugs along the way is one thing. The second time we launched this, we had 18,000 people sign up the very first week. And so the software was working for us. We've been using it for a year before we let anybody else use it, but we added 18,000 people overnight and it was like, it stress-tested everything, right? And things started falling apart, and it was crazy because during this time when we created this gift that we were trying to give our audience, and we told them this is beta, you still get access to the original ClickFunnels, this is the other thing, like we were so excited, but what happened is like there was this gap, and it was like all of a sudden everyone was so excited to like, oh, the new ClickFunnels sucks, da da, like all these different things coming out. We had a lot of competitors who were literally paying people, like I've seen the contracts, they're literally paying people like say these things about ClickFunnels. And they're paying off all these people who had been affiliates of ours, had been partners with us in the past, literally writing them checks. We're like, we'll pay you $10,000 a month contractually and you have to do, like, it's insane when you see the actual contracts. But that's what was happening, right? So we have all these people attacking us and I felt probably a little bit what Orson felt where you open up any magazine, any radio station and the headlines are success failed and everyone's so excited. They wanna see the hero crash. And for the next 3 or 4 years, that's what I dealt with. And it was hard and it was brutal. And during that time, I mean, there are a lot of personal battles. We had family drama. We had, my business partner and best friend passed away. It was just like this series of getting beaten down. And it was like the time when all the people who were cheering my name, I was like, where'd these people all go? Now they're on the other side. And I think for me it was, I don't know, just, I mean, a dark period and dark time. Man, probably a little less than a year ago. 'Cause part of me was just like, I just wanna tap out. I was creating this for the same people who are now attacking me. And I was just like, I don't know how to deal with this. And there was a time where I just wanted to walk away and just be like, this is not worth it. Like, I'm fine. I don't need to do this. I'm not doing this for myself. I was doing it to serve you. And you're the same people now who are doing this. And so about a year ago is when I decided it's like, no, like I believe in this. I believe in the mission. I believe in what we're actually doing. And so we've been remounting our comeback story and there's a lot of stuff happened behind the scenes. I'm sure our community has seen it. Funnel Hacking Live this year, we did our last big Funnel Hacking Live and I did a presentation at the end walking through the last 10 years of ClickFunnels and talking about the trajectory. And since we've done a rebrand, you can see the new logo on our shirts, but we did a rebrand, kind of like refresh everything. It's interesting 'cause Orson also rebranded. There was times when this was called Success, and then when he came back, it was called The New Success, and that tagline ran for 4 or 5 years before it switched back to Success. But it was like rebranding, coming back out. A lot of the campaigns, initiatives that we are doing right now are insane, and we're getting market share back. Like, things are growing, things are happening. And it's cool, so I feel like I'm in the middle of this, right? Like, 1918 is when Orson took this back over and started republishing. I feel like I'm in 1918, maybe 1919 right now, where it's like we're coming back and we're swinging and we're getting market share back and it's fun and it's exciting. And again, maybe it's gonna take me 5 or 6 years like it took Orson, but there will be a time in the near future where what we will accomplish with ClickFunnels will be bigger than we ever had before. And so for me, it's a blueprint. It's a blueprint entrepreneur who went through this, just like me, in a different time period, different era, but the same struggles, the same hero's journey. And now I have a chance to kind of live my version of it. So it's always nice when you've had somebody go ahead of you just to give you inspiration and a belief that you can do what you're trying to do. For me, I'm a big fan of modeling, and if I can't find someone to model in a situation or circumstance, it's hard to persevere sometimes through the pain. But when you can find someone, you're like, okay, that person did it, I can do it. And so that's why the Orson Swett Marden story so important to me. I hope this helps you as you're going through things, right? My guess is you listening right now, you're probably a couple different phases. Maybe you are at the beginning of your hero's journey and you're trying to get the initial inertia and momentum to get out there and you're living out your hero's journey right now, right? You heard the call to adventure and you're going on this journey. And so I hope this gives you inspiration for the first part of excitement of creating something new, like launching the very first version of your magazine or your funnel or your course, whatever the thing is for you, right? And then number 2, for those guys who have gone that journey, right, and you're at the top, and now you got people who want to see you as a hero fall. I hope it gives you some inspiration and motivation and just like the belief that's like what you're doing is worth it and you can succeed. You might have to do what Orson did, take, take a step back for a couple years, like regroup, figure things out, and then come back again. And that's okay. Like, that's what I've had to do. I took time to like figure out like what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, what I needed to become, like how we have to change things differently to be able to be successful. And so I hope you got the value from this video. I went through this magazine and there's again so many really cool articles. I pulled out some of my favorite notes, including this, this, this article with Lincoln. Again, Lincoln was on the COVID here. There's a lot of cool stories about Lincoln. Like, literally, it's telling the step-by-step how he got to the White House, what he did, and how he did it. And so in my notes, I'll have— I'll republish the full article of the Lincoln one because that one's so cool. And again, it's the COVID shot here. And then some of my notes from some of the other articles you guys can read. All you got to do, down in the description, we'll put a link to there for free. You can go get the notes to the first ever issue of Success Magazine. With that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I cannot wait to see you on the next Been out here all morning.

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