And Then It Exploded [Progress Mode Podcast Episode #5]

At some point, your conviction just gets tested. Imagine you're an artist and you spend two, three years working on the most important project, right? Whether you're a painter or a musician, or you're a writer, or you're doing that artistic sculpture or project that you really care about, you pour yourself into it two, three years, and you're just about to release it to the public in your gallery, or you're about to launch it, or you're about to finally show people it's your pride and joy. And someone comes along says, hey, I don't like that. I'll give you a million dollars to change that, to do it in this style versus the style that you've just worked on. I'll give you a million dollars. Would you take it? Would you change? Hey, my friend. It's Ben Burchard, host of Progress Mode. Thank you for joining me. We are on episode five, working through different areas of progress in your life. Remember, progress has a direction to it. Are you heading the right direction in your life? Do you feel like as you are moving towards where you want to go in your life, that you have some sense of, like, freedom in that, like, you have the freedom of self expression, you have the freedom to do what you want without other people, like, creating all this resistance and frustration. Do you feel that sense of personal freedom? This is an episode about that feeling and a story that's probably one of the wildest stories in publishing and, I don't know, the last 10, 15 years that maybe you've never heard of before. And when you hear this, it's going to remind you that as you go to do great things in your life, people are not going to like it. There's going to be a lot of defiance. There's going to be internal defiance, which is that self limitation. We've been talking about that idea that maybe you don't believe in yourself or you shoot yourself down or you shame yourself or you shut yourself down. But other people also jump on the bandwagon, say what you're doing, I don't like it where you're going. I don't believe in it. What you're trying to do seems stupid. That will never change when you are on Progress Mode, that internal doubt and the external doubt does not stop. And so at some point you realize that when you switch your brain into Progress Mode, it's a little bit of requirement to have conviction, to have belief beyond what would even seem normal, to have conviction in a sense of urgency and a sense of personal power, to do what is important to you. Otherwise you end up with some type of abandoned life. A sense of an inner world that says, I didn't do my thing, I'm not living authentically. And that is a great challenge in all of our lives. In the last episode, I talked about my journey and experience in writing the Millionaire messenger and kind of like ultimately riding a rocket in my career as we ended up with millions of fans and, you know, number one New York Times selling book and everybody in the industry now trying to figure out how to do what I was trying to do. And, and I just like, everything went to a whole other level. It was unbelievable. So if you missed that episode, please listen to it. But as all of that is going on, I also shared with you lost my dad. I had a brain injury. And sometimes when your health or your family isn't right and you're trying to make something happen in your life, you really have to have the discipline to take time to listen to your internal world. It's the hardest time when you're in crisis mode, when you're in challenge mode or you're in growth mode, and when everything is going crazy to make sure you withdraw a little bit and you really find your center, you teach yourself to release some of that tension and you drop back into your body and into your breath and into longer term thinking. You realign to what is most important to you. That's hard to do, right? In those years where everything's like, it's like the go go years where you're just like cranking, you're busy, you know, you're having a family, you're trying to achieve your dreams. Those are the time. It's very easy to take your eye off yourself, your center, what's really important over the long term, who you are, how you're living your life. And I was certainly experiencing that. I'm trying to overcome the brain injury I told you about. I'm trying to like get my, my feet underneath me as this rocket ship of this new part of my life and business is taking off because while I was always the personal development guy, I was always the high performance guy. All of a sudden people want to know how I'm doing marketing and sales because I'm selling courses and I'm selling coaching, I'm selling out events in, you know, tens of millions of dollars. People are like, how are you doing this? Because the industry was so young back then. Not that tens of million dollars isn't a lot now, but back then it was like, what is this new World we. There was no phrase of creator economy yet. So as people are finding out how I'm doing that in my own journey of psychology, personal development, neuroscience, high performance research and sharing that they're like, wait, can I do that from my topic over here? And they want the playbooks, they want the answers, they want the strategies. And so the millionaire messenger takes off my seminars, teaching, marketing takes off, you know, and all of a sudden it's just a lot to handle. And I wasn't equipped to do that. How do you go from, you know, zero to, you know, tens of millions of dollars? Or how do you go from zero to, you know, millions of fans or followers and now you have a voice. I didn't. That wasn't like a conversation back then. It was weird. And I knew I was not on the right path. Have you ever felt that way? Even when things are going good, you might not be on the right path. Even when you feel like, you know, I'm making a contribution, I'm trying to do good things, but just something feels off. That was the beginning of what became the motivation manifesto. I'm going to read the opening line to you and tell you, like I said, one of the craziest stories in all of, I think, publishing in a long time. The book starts with the declaration of personal power. There comes a time in the lives of those destined for greatness when we must stand before the mirror of meaning and ask why, having been endowed by the courageous heart of a lion, do we live as mice? And I opened the book with two quotes that might resonate with you today as we go into the story of your life and your passion and your careers, and finding conviction for what's most important. The first quote is from Albert Einstein. All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. John F. Kennedy said, conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. And these two ideas captured what I was feeling at the time. Because, you know, as this book came out on marketing and the industry now wants me to teach marketing and sales, I'm like, that's not. That's not me. The publishers are pitching these ideas of do a marketing and sales book. And I'm like, I'm the personal development guy. Like, I'm the kid who had this car accident who had a second chance at life and started reading books. I'm this geek that loves books on psychology, loves Books on biography, loves books on philosophy. And I'm not one of those people who, like, lightly reads. I'm like, I devour shelves on the topics that I'm passionate about. And so I, I didn't want to do what people were telling me I should do, even though I was having some success at it. And it all came to a massive head because, remember, I shared, you have to kind of pull away. I decided to pull away a little bit and I retreated to this place to write my next book. And I was always doing something I want to tell you about in your journey of progress mode. When I was going to write my next book, I already had had this pattern in my life where every book that I was going to do, I was going to learn and teach myself a new style of writing. I want you to listen really closely, even if you're not a writer, when you have a passion in your life, when you have a career, when you want to do something over the long term and make progress mode towards it for a long time. Consistency, discipline, endurance, persistence. If there's a long path in front of you that you know is right for you, you must continually shake yourself up. You need to challenge yourself to develop new skills. You need to ask, how could I do this in a new way so that you stay fresh at it? Not because you need, you know, to innovate all the time, but internally, you need that refresh of new skill, you need that refresh of new angles. So if you didn't know this, for me, every single book I've written has been in a completely different voice, right? You don't read my books and go, oh, there's Brendan sharing stories. My books are frameworks about topics in motivation, personal development, high performance, and psychology. And so they're more about the framework, more about the teaching than my story. But they don't sound. Each of them don't sound like me because I said, I want to be a great writer. And I don't think I am, by the way. I just had to say I have to learn different styles of writing. I want to learn to write fiction. I want to learn to write, you know, more academically. I want to learn to write like pop literature. I want to learn to write philosophy. And so I decided to write a book on motivation because I had been losing mine because that brain injury I shared with you in the last episode. So I said, okay, I'm going to write a new book. I'm going to write on motivation. What's the new style? I want to figure Out. And I started thinking about what happens for people that prevents them from living into their greatness. Well, I thought they play small. And then because they play small, they compromise and they compromise and they compromise and they compromise. And suddenly they're not even living their own life anymore. They're living in accordance to other people's expectations. They lost their sense of personal freedom, that sense of authenticity and expression that is uniquely them, and the guts and the courage to pursue what is right for them unencumbered by other people's demands. Remember self limitation, social oppression. So I thought, I'm going to take that on philosophically. I thought, how is it that in times in the past that great leaders were able to convince people to kind of revolt and like, join a revolution and seek more freedom? So I did what I usually do. I'm a bookish kid. So I started going to all these history books and times of revolution all around the world and started reading the speeches of leaders or the writing of leaders during times of revolution or war or like government building. And I started saying, how did they speak to people who had all the reason in the world not to come, you know, not to change? But they revolted against compliance. They revolted and said, I. I want. We want something better. How do you get people on a path to freedom? So I started studying that. I spent two years studying what I referred later to as revolutionist rhetoric. Like what. What is the. What's the words that leaders are using, the phrases, what's literally the rhythm and the pentameter of how they speak and how they write to rise people up and really shake them into a revolutionist mindset. If that sounds very dorky, yes. See, if you want great progress in your life, I need you to get obsessed about something. I need you to become a little bit maniacal about something. I need you to look into the greater details of something. So many people in their life, they're always skimming at surface levels. And because they're skimming at surface levels, they never have great leaps of progress. There's no innovation, there's no bold move. There's no deep understanding of excellence or skill set. So they advance so slow because they didn't master something. What is something you know already. You need to master a skill or a topic you need to dive way deeper on, if you're honest. Maybe you got to figure out some type of technology, some topic you need to read more books on. You know, the great leaders, the people who really break through, they are ferocious in how much they read. Go Read anything about the great leaders in history and you'll see one thing. They were ferocious in reading and studying. And they were self starters in their study. They went to the libraries and got the books, they did their research, they sought out the experts. Like they went deep. What do you need to go deep on at this stage of your life? Because in depth you will find a different level of mastery and freedom flying superficially, you'll live in reaction mode. Your art will be, you know, soft, simple. It will be something that just does not ever break through. And I really want you to hear me. It's important for you to go deep. It's important for you to allow yourself to geek out on something. Some people, someone's going to say to you, why are you spending so much time doing this? What do you, what are you doing? This thing's so silly. I don't get it. I don't like it. And with that, let me share where I went into crisis mode with this book. I spent two, two and a half years of studying revolutionist rhetoric and I realized that, you know, that, that, that 1700s to mid, like 1800s, there was this, there's this rhythm of writing and speaking that was so unique and so much change in the world that you started seeing happening in even before the, you know, early 19th century. I was like, okay, I love this way of writing. And it kind of was in. As I was reading, you know, things like the Declaration of Independence from the United States of America, I was, I was reading that, I was like, oh, it's so interesting how they're framing this problem and how they're speaking here. I decided to open the book of the motivation manifesto in that style. Now I knew it was kind of weird because who wants to read a book on motivation that sounds like the Declaration of Independence in the modern era. Seems weird, right? But I was like, no, there's some magic there. I might be able to like, like shift someone's perspective because they're not used to reading something like that. I don't want it to be written for sixth graders, you know, because what I was being pressured to, and this is important, and I was being pressured in all areas of my life. Like, hey, some of your stuff, Brendan, it's a little, it's a little advanced, it's a little technical. You know, you're in your frameworks, you're in your research, you know, dumb it down. They would say, I'm like my audience, not dumb. They're like, yeah, but it's over the head sometimes. I'M like, good. That's, that's learning, that's coaching, that's challenging. Like of course I want, when I learn, I want it to be over my head. That's the challenge of growth and competency. I don't want it to be simple. That's entertainment. I want to grow. That's challenge. And so I started writing this and literally the project took about three years total. And now let me give you the context where the crisis after the Millionaire messenger hit number one in New York Times. As I shared a lot of the publishing companies, they wanted to, you know, they wanted me to do marketing and I, we turned down huge deals to do that. And, and one publisher called Simon Schuster believed in my vision for personal development for what became the Charge. This is my last episode. I talked about the charge, activating the 10 human drives that make you feel alive. And so they believed in that book and we did a two book deal with them without even knowing exactly what it was going to be. And that two book deals deal was a $2 million book deal, that level. So this is huge, right? This is a huge deal. So the charge comes out. I disappear to work on Motivation Manifesto. Sometimes you have to disappear. You got to work those late night hours where nobody sees you doing it. You got to take a weekend and go away to that cafe and work on your manifesto, your dream, your project. Sometimes you got to go do something that no one anticipated. And I mean, you really need to disappear. I want you to work on something in your life that maybe nobody knows about that will energize you, that will motivate you, that will bring you back again. And I was disappearing from the road, you know, from traveling, from seminars, from a lot of work that I was doing. People didn't know where I was going. I was literally going to this place to write what became the Motivation Manifesto. And here's why I'm telling you this. I went so deep into the philosophy of personal freedom. How can you express who you really are and pursue the dreams that you really feel like pursuing in your life and do that without the fear or the compliance of what other people are asking or demanding of you? It was a big like philosophical time in my life. I was like, I felt like I was coming back to life working on this huge art project, right? And I was so excited about it because this company, you know, Simon Schuster, was like offering this huge advance and I'm away working on this book. But listen to what happens. I go into a level of detail in this book. Irresponsibly geeky. Right? I'm going to show you the book and I'll work backwards. What happened when the publisher hated it. So if you look at this book, it looks like a Moleskine journal on purpose. I wanted it to this beautiful black feeling cover, this gold foil. When you open it up, it's a specific font. Like the headline font is like Benjamin Franklin's first headline font of his first publishing company in the United States of America. Remember I was reading about revolutionists. I went in like, who knows, Benjamin Franklin's first, first headline font from his first print shop. That's how deep I went into revolutionary leaders lives. Like that level of dorky detail. Like I studied like how to put together a book like this to make it look like this. We had to go find a specialty printer, you know, across the world to do all of this beautiful. Like no one ever had printed a book like this before. And so I was geeking into the text, into the layout, into the headlines, into the fonts, into literally the glue, into the picture of myself in the back of the book that I found a illustrator who illustrated people's faces from the Wall Street Journal. Like I mean every level of detail into this book. Way deep. I get the first draft done of the motivation manifesto. I'm like, oh my gosh, this, this, no one's ever written like this. This is not this pop culture, you know, books on self help or self improvement. This is not too academic and psychology or neuroscience. This is like, this is different. This is like the first modern book on human motivation from a place of real philosophy. And I was really excited. I turn it in to the editor, I just mail it into them. Like you print it out. Like I, I, I, I mailed it in and this person, the editor at this publishing house gets it, edits it, you know, writing on the margins in big red letters and a red pen sends it back. And there are pages after pages where the person just crosses out the page in red ink. Like page after page. There are notes in the side of the pages saying this makes no sense. Are you on drugs? You know, this is, you know, wacky. Like it was like, it was not a nice, it was like, you know, 100. Imagine you, you get your art back. There's hundreds of pages basically saying really, like literally questioning your sanity. Like this sounds like it's, you know, out in this, you know, I can't remember. The insults were so good. I think I blocked them out of my brains. This person hated the book, hated it. So I, I Get freaked out. I, I tell my agent, like, I think this person really hates this book. And you know, when you are an author and you spent a lot of time on something, there is a very part of, a true part of you that wonders if you're crazy. Have you been working on something, on your dreams? And you honestly, you're like, is this going to work out? Do people like this? Am I just in my head? See, the more you have that desire to go deep in life, to explore the artistic side of your life, to develop real expertise or skill, the more you tend to be actually humble. You recognize, like, this might be a little geeky. This might be too much. I might, I might lose resonance with the normal persons. You know, you're like, I. You know, regular people might not get this. And you know that about yourself, right? If you're making a great painting, you might see the vision of it. But you know there's gonna be a lot of people walking by in that gallery and they're like, what the hell is that? It looks like just a square and red paint to me. Like, you have to have a vision that is uniquely your own. And you know, a lot of people walking by are going to go, that painting sucks. You have to know that. And because you know that about yourself, you can also be very sensitive about it. Many of you have never entered real progress mode in your life because you're so sensitive about your creations and your art that you hold them back. You never shipped the thing, you never put it out there, you never put it up on the wall. You never got in the gallery because it does scare you that people might hate it, they might not understand it. For an author like me, you know, I've got best selling books at that point, you know, I'm making, you know, headway in the industry in ways nobody had done yet. It was like, it was very innovative back then. I was going live online coaching and teaching and doing group coaching. I was doing that since 2009 when they first invented that technology that literally could be done at a mass level where it didn't like the video didn't always stop every 10 seconds it was like, this is. I was again, I was early. Which doesn't mean anything to be listening now. But if, if you are of that time, you know, you remember how bad video was from 2005 to 2010 especially. You remember what like live experiences were or how long it took to load something. So I was so early. Hey guys, it's Brendan. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmode.com, click on Private Group to apply to. See, you can get into Ultra and we can take it to the next level by getting in person and meeting up virtually once a month online as well. Just go to progressmode.com I was used to getting a little flack for being early and being different because I was young, too. People were just judging me and people don't know now, but I. I'm. I'm a. I mean, you know, but general public who sees my social media or my life or reads, you know, these magazine covers about me that they're like, oh, well, he, you know, he's got it all together. They don't know I'm a geek. I am first and foremost a writer, which means I'm first and foremost a reader. I'm ferocious in reading and. And it's easy to take your writing when you really geek about something, you really care about something, when people hate can really cut it, really. It could shut you down. You can get discouraged. You can also feel like you're wasting time. It's hard to stay in progress mode, the more difficult or awful or mean feedback you get. But that's exactly why I'm doing this podcast for you. Progress mode. As I've said over and over, you have to switch yourself into progress mode. No one else is going to do it. You got to slide that green little thing over and you got to, like, go. You got to wake up and switch your brain into progress mode. During the day, when somebody you know refutes you, is mean to you, makes fun of you, you still have to complete the day. You still have to make progress, even if there's judgment. That is part of personal freedom. That's the very thing I was writing about. So now I get this feedback, you know, dozens of pages crossed out, asking if I'm on drugs, saying the book, literally say, this sounds like science fiction. Like, science fiction. Like, what? I've been talking about aliens in here. Like, what are you talking about? Person hates the book. I have a conversation with this person. We have some emails back and forth, and this person just will not budge. And I want to share with you where it went, even after my agent got involved a little bit, because some of the language this person was using back to me was not professional. It was very inappropriate. And so at some point, though, this editor comes back and says, essentially, Brendan, this is a big book contract. And we don't believe that the Motivation Manifesto is something we can publish. We believe it is unpublishable and unmarketable. We want you to change this book. We want you to make Motivation Manifesto about you. You. You're this coach. People want to know your story, make it more modern. You know, put some stories in there about soccer moms or, you know, make it more readable. You know, it sounds kind of like high. It just doesn't work. So change the book or we won't publish it, and you need to give our money back. That's where it gets to. We elevate above the editor and say, hey. You know, we go to the publisher, we say, hey, this editor is giving some pretty remarkably negative feedback using language that is not appropriate for the profession. Remember, I've been in the publishing industry. I can take hard feedback. But there's also something called professionalism and collaboration. And so we go to this person's boss, really, and the boss sides with the editor and says, nope, I stand with my editors. If this editor saying, you know, you need to change the book. We need you to change the book. And this comes to a head, I just want to paint the scene. I'm at an event, one of our seminars. I think I shared before in another episode when I'm doing seminars, you know, it's usually four days, just me on stage the whole day. You know, we start at 9am we go to 7pm it's me teaching and training. It's not other speakers. It's just me. I share that because at the end of each day, I'm tired, right? I'm exhausted. I'm creatively spent. Imagine, you know, some people, they struggle to give an hour speech. You know, I regularly do eight or nine hours on stage, and I never sit. So I'm standing, I'm out in the audience. If you ever see me, I'm jumping and clapping. This is the most chill Brandon you ever get, right? This is me. This is Uncle Brendan version talking with you, right? And so I'm tired at the end of each night. So I'm at my seminar, I'm tired, and I get the note from my agent. They're not going to budge. You either change the book or the deal's dead. And I just want you to think about that. I know it sounds maybe like, yeah, yeah, Brandon, whatever. But I just want you to think for a minute. What if you spent three years on your passion project and when you shipped it, someone literally said to you, hey, I want you to change entirely what you just did for three years. I want you to change it. Otherwise no one will ever see it. But hey, I'll give you a million dollars to change who you are, how you do your art, and what matters to you. What would you. That is where you can really tell if your brain is in authentic progress mode. That can really tell whether or not you believe in your art, in who you are, in what matters to you. That will tell you whether you compromise your art and your values and your voice and who you are for other people's demands, expectations, or money. I know some people go, well, yeah, yeah, Brendan, it must be nice you had that choice because you had money. But at that time in my career, as everything's going up, I'm doing what most entrepreneurs and founders do. I'm investing all of our capital back into the business to scale, right? So it's not like sometimes some people, some people think that, like when someone achieves wealth or something, or the business grows, that all of a sudden they don't worry about money anymore. Often they worry about it more. Cause they're trying to reinvest it to scale, to reach more people, to grow more, or to build enterprise value or to have something bigger in the future. And so that's how it kind of goes. So I was reinvesting into it. We were doing events and, you know, events cost a couple hundred thousand to a couple million dollars to pull off. The seminars that we're doing, like, these are expensive shows and tours and it's like, it's like a big thing at that time. And so that was a long night. That was a long night. I was so tired and I thought maybe I, you know, maybe I'm missing it. I open, I went. I stayed up all night reading the back and forth with the editor, reading the motivation manifesto, you know, second guessing a little bit. I'm like, maybe it is a little bit philosophical. Maybe, you know, maybe it would succeed better if I did kind of like tap it down a little bit and made it easier to read or, you know, more, you know, tabloid style, like stuff. I was like, you know, maybe this is that, that arc in my, my career where I need to go more mass market and, you know, these kind of specialty Projects that I do that are so different than anyone else ever. You read any of my books and you're like, this doesn't sound like any other personal development book, self improvement book, spirituality book. It just, they're. They're so unique. And I was like, well, maybe it's this time of me, Geeky Brendan. It didn't work out. Maybe this person's right. I'm so tired. And I'm thinking, wow, If. If. If the editor said one thing, but the publisher, too, man, I don't know. I don't know. Got up the next morning, barely sleeping, got to deliver another, you know, eight, nine hours on stage. And you know, the pressure. This is not like where you go and you speak at someone else's seminar or on stage at a corporate event maybe you've done. When you're hosting your own seminar. There's a lot of. There's a lot, you know, at hand, especially. My seminars tend to be very, you know, expensive. And so it was like, there's so much on the line. I'm so tired. But as I'm trying to teach and be authentic and present with everybody, in the back of my head, I'm like, I don't know. And it wasn't about the money. It was. Sometimes when you have a passion project, it just you. You just unsure. Is it the right time? Will it work? Are these people giving you negative feedback? Are they right? Is there something valuable in their feedback? Because it's not about hubris. You're like, you want feedback when you're an artist, but you also want to know, is it like, am I doing it for me or am I doing it for them? I've never written a book ever for somebody else. I write the book to have impact and change in other people's lives. So I write it in a specific way. But the topic, the framework, the ideas, these are philosophies and strategies that I'm just like. I'm wowed by. I want to know. Like, I'm writing it to scratch my own itch. Because I'm so fascinated by the topic. And I believe that the topic can change people's lives. So I have to find that balance of. I believe in the topic. I want to change lives. Well, motivation manifesto. I believe in it, right? I'd have, like. If you've ever had revolution in your life, if you ever really made a change and you made a big, scary change against other people's desires, like, you broke out from your parents, or you broke out from an old relationship, or you Got divorced or you quit a job in Defiance. You know, that energy, it's big. It's scary. Even if there's courage there, there's also fear. That's why there's courage. Right? Courage requires fear. Like, fear is a foundation of a courageous act. That's why it's called courage, not just regular action. And so there's. It's big energy, and you don't know what to do with it sometimes, and it does feel scary. So I'm thinking, is this book worth the fight? Is it worth it? Because it's not just a book about them saying, change it or give our money back. It means I don't have a publisher. It means I. You know, it means this book might not come out for years because now I got to go find another publisher, and they're going to go, oh, they dumped you. So there's reputation. So I'm thinking, is this worth the fight? There's going to be a fight. I'm going to have to go through, like, legal stuff to get out of this deal. I'm going to have to figure out money stuff to get them paid back. I. I'm gonna have to spend another year or two on a project I'm already three years in. I've tried to paint this all. It may be. I know I'm not always like, this might not be a relatable story. Okay, I'm just telling you what happened. And I'm trying to urge you along the way to think differently about your own passion projects, about your own courage, about your own personal freedom. So I hope that maybe sharing the story, it opened up some gates for you. And so that moment became. Do I believe in the message of this book? It's. It's. It's. This is a. This book is about declarations to claim your personal power, despite what they say and despite your internal fears. You have to walk the talk, man. I want you to hear me. You need to walk the talk. In your life, if you have an artistic impulse and you don't, honor will eat you alive. Remember that. The Gospel of Thomas. What you. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. What that means is if you don't follow your personal freedom and your instincts and your real, true path, it will eat you alive inside. That's the truth of will eat you alive inside. There will be regret there. And you have to see that proactively and honestly. And this is one reason we switch into progress mode. Even when it's hard, we stay in progress mode to the direction that we desire in our life. What we want to do, who we want to become, even when it's difficult. That is the path of personal freedom. That is a path of progress mode. So I take the book, and I knew this great publisher of Wayne Dyer's books. It's called Hay House. I call up Reid Tracy, and I say, reid, my friend, I'm in a conundrum. I need to leave this publisher, and I don't even want to talk about a publishing deal. I just have. I have a favor. Can I send you the first chapters of my book? And would you tell me if it sucks? I just need to hear it. And he goes, I'll read it tonight. Send the motivation manifesto to read. Writes to me in the morning, goes, this is fantastic. I'll publish it. It's like, oh, my God. Okay. Okay. I shared you with you in other episodes. Sometimes one person who believes in you, that's all you need. You don't need them. You don't need the world. You don't need the audience. Sometimes you just got to check yourself with somebody you trust, somebody who has your heart in their mind. Just one person. Just one. And I had the blessing that Denise, she liked the book. She. She saw me late, two, three in the morning. I'm reading biographies after biographies on, you know, on. On. On Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. She's like, why? I'm like, I don't know. You know, I'm just geeking out on this stuff. She believed in me. My agent believed in me. But the people who were going to distribute me did not. And they wanted their money back. And so shout out to Reed for believing in the kid. And some of you know that. What happened next, Hay House takes the book. We rush it into publication. We rush it to get this unbelievable feel. If you ever held the motivation manifesto, it's not like a regular book. Like, the feeling of the texture of the book. Like the ribbon inside the red ribbon inside the bookmark ribbon. Like, it's of a certain style, it's of a certain length, it's cut in a certain way. The level of geek that I went on this book, I will never be able to explain until you hold it and. And you read it three times. I believe in the book. I put the book out there. Despite all of the rejection, we put the book out there. We had to invent an entire new publishing model to get the book out to Deal with that other deal to allow me to have the freedom to sell it online from my website where I could earn money from it to pay back the other people. Like, we did a whole different type of distribution deal, basically inventing my own house to be able to publish it. It was a very unique thing that we did at the time. And we put the book out there after they turned it down, after they hated it, after they took their money back. And it became an instant New York Times best selling book. And the motivation manifesto goes to spend, you know, six months on the New York Times bestseller list. Probably could have been on there for another two or three years. But honestly, I got tired of promoting it. It was going so great. I just kind of ran out of gas. Along the way, I launched an online course with the book that did millions of dollars. I did an unbelievable series of seminars and treatments on it. I mean, it was, it was a very unique thing in the world. And it wasn't again, about volume for me. The books are about art. I could care less about necessarily them, how long they're on a bestseller list. What I care about is did I grow as an artist doing my work? I want you to listen, I want you to care about you growing as a person as you're in progress mode. Because there's fundamentally two things in progress mode, right? You're moving towards goals at a direction and a speed and a clip that you are like, you're joyful and satisfied with. So it's like towards something, but also summoning something that on your path to achieve more, you are becoming more. That's what I want you to care about. So I cared about becoming more with this book. And it happened. And to give you an idea of what happened, you know, there was some celebrities posting about the book. You know, the little black book that the celebrities are all reading, ultimately got to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for her magazine. And she was just like a hero. And she was. Made books that, I mean, made books like they became something. It was like, wow. I ended up doing two courses produced by Oprah Winfrey Network because of this book. When I got to go and be interviewed by her, probably the most nervous days of my entire life, I went in and. And she was so incredible and so kind and. And there was something of seeing her holding the book with all these little notes and bookmarks on it. And she knew the book inside and out. I could tell during the interview. And I was like, oh, okay. You know, I didn't know. And she was so kind about it. And she's told me that it was one of the few nightstand books that she has. And I was like, oh, meaning it's on her nightstand. She'd gone to it. I mean, just humbling, humbling stuff. Years later, Oprah would be doing a book launch of her own at her house. And she invited, you know, 100 people to this party who were kind of in. In the book world or supportive of her. And. And it was just unbelievable thing, this backyard book launch that she did with like, you know, you know, just these unbelievable celebrities and people there. And, you know, me and Denise going, what are we doing here? Is very, very kind. And after kind of the, the promotion of the book and all these famous musical acts and all this security around all this fancy food for Montana kid, it was a very fancy book launched. And. And she came over to a group of us in the personal development space, and she came over to the group and it'd been some time since I'd seen her. And so I introduced her to my wife Denise, who was so excited to meet her. And remember, Denise was the girl in the episode I told you about earlier in one of the previous episodes about. She was the girl who believed in me and took me in when I was either going to move back to my parents or live on friends floors forever. She believed when I left a corporate job, she believed in this career and this idea that I could be a writer and a coach and a teacher. She believed in me. And so it was kind of awesome getting to be, you know, in, in the book world. Oprah's the top, you know, and her. It was just an unbelievable experience. And I said, oprah has been so, you know, so, so, so nice. I haven't seen you. And this. My wife Denise, and I said, remember, you know, we did that interview on, on Motivation Manifesto? And she says, oh, yeah. And she says to a group of people there, she goes, yeah, that's. I have that on the nightstand. And we were like, oh, my God. And I know that might not be important to many of you, but that was like. That was. That was huge. That was huge for me personally to have somebody who I respected so much respect the book and understand what I was trying to do. It's a very different book. I had another friend of mine who, who when the book came out, he read it and he sent me a note. He goes, this is too hard to read. I don't get it. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna stay in progress mode. That's what you are going to do. That's it. You are gonna have conviction for your art, for your passion projects, for your dream. You are gonna maintain a sense of personal freedom as you progress towards what you want. Let me remind you about the conditions of progress mode in your life. What is progress number one? Direction, right? There's a vector to progress. You feel like you're going in the right direction. That matters. Everything else can be activity and busy work. It might also be a distraction. You have to choose your path. I had to say my path is personal development, high performance. This book that's more like philosophical than the marketing and sales or pop literature they wanted me to write. I had to go in this different direction. Direction that's true to me, not just what they want. And as you go towards that direction, you also have in progress this concept of speed or rate. Right rate is speed and velocity. Am I moving towards this thing at the clip I want to? I didn't feel like I was. And so I had to kind of go inside and slip away on the weekends or at night to write the motivation manifesto. I was like, I had a sense of urgency about it. Do you know if you're in the right direction, you have more urgency. Do you know if you're in the right direction? You'll stay up a few nights. Do you know if you're in the right direction, you'll have a greater level of obsession toward the thing. And that's okay, even if they don't understand. As you are moving in that direction at that speed, are you staying true to you despite what other people are saying? I'll remind you, in progress mode, over and over, you only have two enemies to progress. There's a self limiting part of you, that part that doubts, that distrusts, that shuts yourself down, that shames you, that zooms in and catastrophizes your. Your thoughts keep going negative, your emotions keep going negative. And you, you allow that stuff, right? That self limitation versus self coaching, where you go, oh, that will always happen. The doubt will happen, the negative emotion will happen, the dark days will happen. But I'm going to coach myself by sliding it into progress mode. Yes, I'm scared. I'm sliding it into progress mode. This is a mindset shift for you. You're sliding your mind over and over. Your day is over and over, back into progress. The second enemy is social oppression. That is where you feel like you have to comply to other people and you have to meet their expectations. You have to be a people pleaser. You have to Compromise over and over and over again. And I want you to hear this if you missed it when I said it earlier because I just started into this book. I want you to get Motivation Manifesto. If this has been a struggle for you on that social part with the social expectations. Because what did I tell you at the very beginning, this book opens up with a quote about from Einstein and jfk and the JFK one is conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. If you're not on my weekly Deep Dive newsletter, go to progress mode.com because I have resources for you based on every single episode of the season. Number one where I'm giving you resources from the books I'm sharing about giving you reminders encouraging every single week. But you're going to get resources and tools and one of the great downloads you'll receive is something from the Motivation Manifesto. I want to make sure you're on my newsletter progressmode.com if you've never read any of my books, everyone says what book should I start with? I go this one. It's harder to read. It's about a philosophy most people will never have in their life. That the ultimate human drive is our desire to have authentic, unique expression of who we are and to pursue the things that matter most to us, unencumbered by our own limited thinking and other people's oppression. Other people pressuring you. If you struggle with other people pressuring you, read the Motivation Manifesto. Please listen to this episode. Find that passion. Allow yourself to geek about something, to have conviction and belief even when other people don't get it. If it is true to you and important to you, yes. Take feedback. If it is true to you and important to you, yes. Understand where you're playing and understand the game. Understand that other people are going to have opinions about it. But that is your painting you are hanging up in the art gallery. That is your life story that is going to be judged by you. Other people will always walk in front of your life and you will have judgment. I don't like that this is a circle or a square. I don't like that it fits in here. I don't like the colors. I don't like how you do it. The question is, did you artistically live your unique life and stay in Progress Mode to what matters? I want you to think about your passion projects. I want you to think about your career. I want you to think about where you are headed in life and I want you to stay in progress mode, baby. And for those who stayed an extra part of the story. I want to read a letter to you from the president and CEO of Simon and Schuster, the company that turned down the Motivation Manifesto and put me through a little bit of hell through that deal. This was something that meant something to me. It was a letter from the CEO to me. Dear Brendan, so and so recently brought to my attention the events that led to your book, the Motivation Manifesto, being published elsewhere. Though I want to thank you for the repayment of the advance, I also want to take this opportunity to say that we clearly made an incorrect judgment on that book's potential and did not find the right editorial reader to appreciate its quality and sellability. I certainly noticed with regret the Motivation Manifesto's perch on the bestseller lists and congratulate you on such a successful publication. This, I realize, a somewhat indirect way of saying that I hope that so and so's enthusiasm for your work and our attention to your backlist might encourage you to return to Simon Schuster in the future and give us the opportunity to correct past errors. Best wishes, Carolyn Reedy, CEO, Simon Schuster.