Observations from "The Success Principles" with Eric and Jeff

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the Internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting, Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com. Excellent.

Well, before we hop into today's conversation that I think is a continuation from last week's. Not I think, I know, because we kind of talked about it.

What's new in your world? What's new in my world?

Yeah, are you getting ready to call me on Friday and say anything special to me or anything like that?

Birthdays are old in my world. I had one last month. But, uh, because you had known— your world on Friday, I believe, is, uh, is a birthday. It is marking— yeah, you, uh, you look good for you.

I'm getting close. Yeah, so, uh, the, the big 4-5. So I'm, I'm not at liberty to disclose the age of my lovely wife. Although it's a little bit more than mine, but yeah, I'm not close to the five-oh myself. Can't say that that's necessarily the case for everybody that has been mentioned and/or is on the phone at this point in time. But yeah, birthday's coming up. So, but yeah, I you know they're not as much as they were when you were younger. So I think it's just nice to be able to get to another birthday once you get to a certain point.

You're like, yep, made. You're pretty far from that year, by the way, Eric.

Yeah, I am.

I am.

I am. And actually, I don't know if it's due to my immaturity or what, but I've had people surprised that I'm even 45. And again, I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Somebody said, God, I thought you were like in your mid-30s. And that was pretty flattering, but then I got to thinking, what they really meant by that. So I wasn't sure exactly how to take that. I think they meant it as a compliment, but who knows. Anywho, well, I guess let's cover some of our housekeeping items just for the sake of getting the show kicked off. Just want to remind everybody, today's show and all shows are recorded, so you'll be able to pull a replay of this and all the wonderful birthday chatter that you just heard and do a replay over at freewebinarwednesdays.com. The session last week where we got to know Jeff a little better and started a little bit of the conversation around the Success Principles and some of the other stuff is available as well as all of our other shows. And then I want to encourage everybody that's listening live, if you have any feedback, comments, or observations— maybe you read the book, or maybe there's another book along the lines of the Success Principles that maybe you'd like to also comment and share and talk about— We'd certainly love to do that. I don't want to turn this into like an Oprah Book Club type thing, but there are some really good lessons in this book and a few others that I know I relied on when I made the decision to take the leap of faith from my comfortable banking career into that of a consultant. So by all means, please feel free to share and let us know what you think. And then lastly, I told Jeff kind of in the pre-show before we get started, There's a couple of new services I want to mention. These are more on the personal side. They're not necessarily going to benefit you from a business perspective. One is certainly a time waster, but it sure is fun. The other one I think is just an example of what technology can do these days. It's really kind of an amazing thing that the folks over at Google have done. Recently Google had their I/O conference which is kind of their big shindig. And they make announcements on different Google operating systems and what's going on in Android and what they're focused on. And we've talked in the past a little bit about Google+, their social network. And that appears to be in the process of being dismantled. It didn't get the uptake that I think everybody was hoping. I think they learned some lessons out of it. But there are a couple of elements within Google+ that everybody seemed to really like. One of those was the photo service. You have the ability to install the Google Photos app on your phone. I'll be honest, I don't know if this new version of Photos has come out to iOS yet. But being an Android guy that I am, I've got accessibility to it. So it looks like maybe iOS is available. But with Photos, When you take a picture, you have the ability to sign in with Google+ and it would grab a copy of that photo, send it to your Google+ page, not share it, so it kept it private. But it gave you an archive or a backup of all of your photos, which is great because if your phone dies, you always want to make sure you've got those things handy. Dropbox has a similar feature that it rolled out and it's kind of separated that off in a platform called Carousel. So I've got both of those installed. But when they made an official announcement of Google Photos as a standalone product, there's a couple of things that I think are pretty amazing. So you can see some of the photos that I've got here. You can see this picture of Lily checking out the box turtle. You'll notice that this is one of the techniques that Google has always done is they've offered some auto-awesome or some enhancements. So if you take a look at the picture as it was originally, posted, you can get an idea. But then what Google did is it said, well, what if we maybe add a filter, put a little border around it? You know, this might be kind of a nice way of looking at the photo. It's just a suggestion, but they've gone ahead and kind of done that for you automatically. The thing that is impressing me the most, however, is when all your photos get uploaded into the system, they're now using visual recognition of the things that are in the photo To help you identify other photos that you've got. So I'm going to pull up my buddy Shane, who's a friend of mine from Ohio, and he and I race triathlons together. You can see some of our efforts down at Cedar Point, his wife Angela, but you can get an idea in what Google is doing. And to some of you, and I'll be curious, Jeff, if you really paid much attention to this, some people think this is a little bit on the creepy side. But what Google's doing is it's looking at the photos and it is doing facial recognition. You can see here is an example of an Auto Awesome that it created. I don't know if it is moving for you, but it basically created an animated GIF image with a series of photos that I took of Shane leaving the transition area holding a slice of watermelon which I thought was pretty funny. So it is doing that, but it has gone in and it has actually found all of the references of Shane based off of his picture. And some of those he's got a helmet on. Some of those he's got sunglasses. Some he doesn't even have a shirt on. But you can get an idea of what it's doing. And it's really pretty amazing. The other thing that's kind of cool, you can see it's even recognizing dogs, or if you've got photos that have bicycles in them. So you can see that this really doesn't have any bicycles in it, but Google knows that we're wearing helmets, and chances are you're probably on a bicycle. But you can see that now there's pictures of bicycles. It's got some false positives where this is pulled up. Maybe it's picking the bicycle up in the background there, but you can see it's got some scooters here. But it even looks at the images. So somebody did the Aqua Bike last year at Cedar Point, which is just basically a swimming bike, and they did not run. It even picked up a cartoon that somebody sent me as a picture with Aquaman riding his Aqua Bike. The last thing that I think is impressive, and this is probably one of the coolest things, is some cameras will automatically tag where you are with geolocation. So if you've got your GPS enabled, it'll identify where you're at. But if you're someplace and you don't have that enabled, or you're off of a data plan, if you go in and let's say I just type in Paris— I was in Paris. I didn't have my data enabled, so I wasn't really doing geotagging, but it actually went through and it found some pictures that it did a reverse search And it recognized obviously the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. It went through and off of what was in the picture where that picture was probably taken, and it went ahead and applied a geotag to it. So I just think it's really cool to see the direction that Google's headed. And, you know, obviously, and I don't know what your thoughts are if this is creepy or good or a little bit of both. But if you've not taken the time to set up a Photos account. You can do it for free. You get free storage. If you want, you can actually apply for the high-resolution option which will count against any sort of Google storage plan that you have. But I think they are really kind of changing the game as it relates to photo storage and organization. It's pretty cool. So I wanted to make sure that I shared this. Jeff, have you seen this? Have you played with it?

What's the service called?

Google Photos. So you just go to photos.google.com, and if you don't have an account, it will prompt you to go ahead and sign up for one.

So a lot of the features you are describing are things that Facebook already does and other services like that. Creepy or not, it's what the world's like today. Yeah, that's true, that's true.

And even like on a really old version of iPhoto on my MacBook, I know there was the option to tag faces and have it go through any of the photos that you put into iPhoto on your Mac. So, you know, maybe it's not as unique, but I just think For a free service, for something to do, for them to be able to do that plus the Auto Awesome and some of the other things, I think it's pretty sweet. So anyway, check out Photos. And there were a lot of other announcements that Google made at I/O. So it might be kind of fun to do a show just talking about that. Because I know Apple gets a little bit of attention, particularly when we get Mr. McPherson on the show. But there's some cool stuff going on. The other app that I wanted to just mention Again, this is more of a time waste/fun, but if you have not heard of it, it is an app called Dubsmash. The whole concept around it is there are literally hundreds of thousands of audio clips that have been added into the system that you can go ahead and play and then record yourself lip-syncing to it. I'm a big South Park fan and Beavis and Butt-Head. And so my brother and I are sending some pretty interesting funny Dubsmashes back and forth. So if you're looking for a chuckle or want to get an excuse to maybe surprise somebody with something that you know that is going to instill a little bit of laughter, download Dubsmash and play around with it. It's kind of a fun little app. So I'll I'll have to send you a dub smash, Jeff, and see if I get a chuckle out of you. So now let's let's get into the meat of what we wanted to talk about today. Maybe for folks that are joining us that weren't part of last week's conversation, you know, maybe you can help frame a little bit around the book Success Principles, how it came up in conversation last week, and. kind of why this is something that we felt that it was important to maybe revisit on a dedicated show.

So last week we spent some time getting to know me and some of the things that I do work-related better. And Eric asked in his interview of me some of the tools that I've used in developing my business, reaching a balance between work and regular life and things like that. And a tool that I've used that I introduced Eric to is a book by Jack Canfield called The Success Principles, actually Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer. And they just released, I think in— it says right on the screen, I bet. I don't see it. I think it was in January. The 10th anniversary edition was released. So what we decided to do today is play a little Jeff and Eric ping pong match where we talk about some of our favorite principles within the Success Principles. Yeah, I can't wait to hear that. I do not have— Do you happen to have the Kindle version of the book, Eric?

I do not, not yet. Actually, I was going to buy it last week and then I got sidetracked and I was going to go back. There was the other one with How to Win Friends and Influence People and a couple of others. And I was going to hop in and buy it and Amazon, I don't know what happened, but they— not that it's a lot of money, But the price jumped, I'd say significantly, because it was really on a discount. So I did not download the newest version. I don't know if you have the newest version, but I was scrolling through the actual table of contents and I saw that there was the last section primarily, when you look at section 6, that had some changes to it. So they get into talking about social media. The version that I have doesn't even touch on social media. They talk about crowdfunding. And then the connecting with people, which I suspect is likely through things like networking services. LinkedIn, I suspect, is probably mentioned. So I don't know if you've got the updated version of this or not, but it was cool to see that they actually put some—

I do.

So I don't know if you've got commentary on that from a digital perspective that you want to— I'd be very interested in that, and I'd be even happy to Rather than ping-pong, I'd let you do a couple of them in a row if you'd like. Because I've not seen the updated version yet.

Why don't you send the presentation over to me, and I'll see if I can show the Kindle version of the book.

It is on its way.

Okay. Can you see it now?

It is coming up.

There you go. Okay. Let me drag this up. I'm not used to being the person who is showing my screen on GoToWebinar.

Particularly, I'm trying to think at what point on Free Webinar Wednesdays that I've actually made you Usually it's me doing the kickoff and then we pass the microphone/screen over to our guest. But you've got it now.

Yeah, and I'm not— there we go. All right, so the section of the book you're talking about that was added to the 10th anniversary edition is Part 6, Success in the Digital Age. So as Eric pointed out, I'm going to just go through these. Master the technology you need is a new principle. Brand yourself with an online persona, Principle 64. Principle 65, use social media in a way that enhances your reputation.

There's a novel idea. Yeah, I mean, I shouldn't be putting all the topless photos of me at spring break drinking beer out of a hard hat with a hose coming off of it. Is that a bad thing?

Well, you know, Eric, I think in your case you can get by with it. But even though people think you look 30-some, you're not a young guy who's out looking for a job. So anything that you're going to share with your clients, I think You're good.

But yeah, I just probably would not make that my LinkedIn profile picture despite how cool it might look. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, I actually have met some folks, uh, over the years that, uh, have assumed names on Facebook so that employers can't find them on— or potential employers and employers can't find them on Facebook.

Nice.

And then 66, use the exponential power of crowdfunding. And 67, connect with people who can expand your vision. And that's the digital section. So you can see in the 10 years since the book was released that they really have Have done a good job of bringing things up to speed, of saying, hey, this is where the world's come in the last 10 years. So what Eric and I talked about doing is ping-ponging and going through our favorite principles. And I am actually going to start. So Eric, you can be figuring out which one you want to do first. I'm going to start with number 28. So I actually, since we talked a few days ago about doing this show, I actually reread the book. And it's been pretty cool just being reminded of some of the stuff that I knew, but I forgot I knew because it had been in storage in the back of my mind. Cleaning up your messes and incompletes. In this principle, Jack and Janet talk about how the cycle of completion really just starts with deciding to do something. Make a plan to do it, start it, continue doing it, finish it, and then mark it complete. One of the things that I was reminded of in this section is that how so many people— and by the way, businesses that I work with, I see fall into this trap on a really, really regular basis as well— is they do lots of deciding. Okay, we're going to do this, this, this, and this. And they decide a whole bunch of things they're going to do, and they get really zealous about it and jump in and start doing 20 things at one time. Well, one of the things that this principle reminded me of is get into completion consciousness. So it is often better to have 3 things going on at once and finish 3 things before you start 3 more, as opposed to having 20 things going on and not completing 20 things. It is really, really pretty often, actually most clients that I start working with, that one of the first things that we'll do is we'll look at a list of all of the things that they consider open projects. The next thing I'll ask them to do is prioritize. Look at these open projects, figure out what is it that's really important. What do you, what do you need to finish sooner than later? And I'll ask them to pull back, put some projects on hold while they actually complete some of the more critical projects. Eric, your comments on that? I know you, your business is very project related as well.

Yeah. Yeah, I, as I kind of skimmed back over the book as well, it was one of those, yep, need to do that, yep, need to do that. And as I hear you talking, I think of the 20 or more projects that are, you know, flying around my head that, you know, are in various states of completion. And, you know, I've reached out over the last probably a month or so, and I've got some additional assistance, which has been great for me to be able to offload and some of the delegation responsibilities of not feeling like I have to do everything myself. And that certainly has helped with cleaning some of these things up. But I think the hard part in all of this is we recognize that, yeah, you shouldn't have 20 things going on, but Overcoming the, how do I— I don't want to say no. And that's one of the chapters, being comfortable with saying no. But one of the things is I don't want to let people down, or I don't want to drop the ball, or I want to make sure I make everybody happy. And being or getting to the point where you're okay with only— and I say only with air quotes— but only 3 things. Going on, but doing that so that you get comfortable with the fact that you can get them done and you can move on to the next item and the next item much faster and bring completion and resolution to those. And so I am by no means to the end of that change journey with myself, but I'm curious with you if there's been any other insight or other you know. Whether it's chapters in this book that have helped you or things that you've done to get to the point where you're okay with those, making that whittle down to 3, or when you talk to clients, what gets them comfortable with being okay with 3 or 4 versus 20 or 25?

That brings to mind a really important point. I have been very fortunate and invested lots of money When I first read The Success Principles back in 2004— I'm sorry, it was the beginning of 2005. I remember this as if it were yesterday. I was walking through my house. I had a copy of the book in my hand. As a matter of fact, I'm holding the exact copy that I had in my hand 10 years ago right this very moment as I speak. I was holding my hard copy of the book in my hand and a card fell out about a workshop that Jack Canfield did at the time and still does a version of once a year called Breakthrough to Success. And it was sort of like magic. This card just flew out onto the floor in front of me and I picked it up and read it and I decided, you know, I want to do that. So in the late summer of 2005, I had the opportunity to travel to— where was it that year? Lake Las Vegas, Nevada, to the Ritz-Carlton in Lake Las Vegas, Nevada, which—

I'd say that's hard to expect.

That hotel does not exist anymore. It was a casualty of the recession. But actually spent a week. Working with a group of several hundred people personally with Jack. And I remember at the beginning of that, that one-week workshop, one of the things Jack Canfield said was the success principles are something that everyone that believes in them works toward. He said, including myself. He said, there's no way that I am absolutely perfect at every one of the success principles. He said it's almost like a GPS where I use the principle as the destination that I'm going to, but I constantly have to make course corrections. So I think that's really, really important to acknowledge going into any type of transformational work like this is that the destination is what you point towards and you constantly make course corrections. If I'm working on 20 things today, and I realize, huh, I really need to get some stuff finished, so I need to whittle it down to 3 or 4 or 5, whatever a reasonable number is, there's a really good chance, and I can tell you this happens to me personally, where as time passes, I'll forget, and I'll fall into my routine and my rut, and I'll get too many irons in the fire again. It's important to circle back. Every few months, every 90 days, whatever, take a look at the number of things that you have going on. Decide what incompletes you have that you can complete, what you want to put on a back burner so that you can work on it more effectively when you have more time to dedicate to that. Eric, more thoughts on that, or do you want to take a principle forward?

I was going to say, if the master is not 100%, which I would have been surprised if that were the case, but I think that's a good perspective to have. You know, it's like anything. If you try to change your diet and eat a little bit healthier, you're not going to be able to, you know, do everything all at once. So as long as you're making steps in that direction, I guess that's probably the good thing. And be comfortable with making baby steps or, you know, mild progression as opposed to expecting to be able to be Right at the end result automatically.

Here's a comment from this principal that I really like. At a minimum, I encourage you to clean up one major incomplete every 3 months. Think about that. If every 3 months you can clean up one major incomplete, that can certainly be significant in moving forward over a period of a year. Here's another great idea. Schedule a completion weekend. Devote 2 full days to handling as many things on the list here as possible. And these are mostly home things. You can certainly schedule a completion few days at work where you take care of some old messes. Yeah. I can tell you one of the traps that I fall into. I love accounting. I've worked with banks for 25 years and loved accounting before that. I really enjoy working on the accounting for my own business. And I keep falling into this trap, and I get better. I improve over time, but I have to constantly remind myself that I'm too valuable a resource to the whole organization to be the bookkeeper of this company.

Yeah.

So that's one of the things that I constantly have to remind myself and circle back. And remind myself, hey Jeff, you need to delegate this to someone else. Yep.

No, I would agree. And similar, I love playing in Photoshop. I love digging into a website and messing around with HTML. But I know that there are people that do it way more effectively than I do that are a whole lot better at it quite honestly. And when I get in, if I get to the point sometimes I can get to an area where I think I'm doing what I need to do, and it doesn't go quite right. So it ends up taking me even longer than I originally anticipated. And you're right, it's not my highest and best use. So good stuff. The chapter I— one of the chapters I picked is principle— I guess principles— is 31, Embrace Change. And because I spend so much of my time, you know, in the world of social, and we all know that that changes pretty much on a daily basis as far as not only the sites that are available, the functionality within those sites that it makes available to its users, and then the strategy around using those sites seems to change. You know, in this section, it kind of talks about FTD, you know, the florist, and it goes and it also mentions he did some work for the Naval Strategic Naval Command. But we can all think of businesses that did not embrace change, how society or culture or customer demands have shifted. And so this one kind of rings true because I think we're— we see some of that in the banking industry. You know, I think you can probably give me an amen to this, but we've got other non-bank related services that are coming out and doing things differently, embracing the mobile a little bit more progressively, offering different ways to manage. I did a webinar on Apple Pay. You've got the Apple Watch, all these alternative payment systems. And so we kind of see how this embracing of change, accepting the fact that nothing is going to be consistent and you need to, like it says right there, grow or die. We're on a treadmill these days and the treadmill speed just continues to go faster and faster. And if you stand still, it's going to throw you right off the back. I had the privilege of being in Chicago yesterday doing some LinkedIn training for a bank there. And they've developed a pilot group of employees that are going to figure out ways that they can embrace LinkedIn as a communication tool and a customer—

Eric?

Hello?

Okay, your audio is back. We lost you for a minute. Okay, last thing we heard was embracing LinkedIn as a tool.

Yeah, so their senior management has acknowledged the fact that maybe their customers and prospects and the folks that they could do business with don't exist in the same areas that they did 3, 4, 5 years ago. And it was cool to be part of a training process and to be asked to help lead some of that change. And in this chapter, it actually references back to a concept that was part of the chapter that we talked about last week.

Eric, we lost you again.

Jeffrey.

Now you're back. Okay.

I don't know what's going on. If you go to the next page.

Okay.

You can see in that bottom paragraph it references the formula that was presented in the Take 100 Responsibility for Your Life.

Uh-huh.

And it talks about— then, and for if you haven't seen that, it basically refers to an event Plus your response is going to equal the outcome. In that first chapter, it talks about how people maybe think the event itself is causing the outcome, but it's how you respond to it. And there's a number of examples of businesses like Blockbuster Video and Borders Books and others that were presented with events that didn't have the proper response. And the outcome basically said, you are no longer going to be in business. Customers have determined that you are now irrelevant. And, and so leading organizations and helping them embrace change, which can be very difficult, particularly if senior management needs to get buy-in or needs to be the one to convince buy-in, they're going to be the ones Mostly resistant because they're used to things the way that it was for a lot longer.

Okay, Eric's having some audio problems, so we'll give him just a minute to get his audio back.

My audio is driving me nuts, so I may see if I can go to microphone and speakers. Hold on just a second.

While he's switching over to microphone and speaker, I'm going to go to the contents and bring up the Take 100% Responsibility and just show you the formula that Eric's talking about. E plus R equals O. Event plus response equals outcome. So one of the things that gets pointed out in this section is you can bring blame the event for your lack of results. You can instead simply change your responses to the event. It's a great formula that you can apply in so many different circumstances, just keeping in mind event plus your response equals the outcome.

Hey, Jeff.

Eric, I—

Yep.

Can you hear me okay? You're connected to voice over IP, and yep, we can hear you.

Alrighty, so yeah, a little bit of a transition error there on my part, but we're good to go now. So I'm gonna let you go ahead and maybe pick the next one, and I'll just listen quietly because my audio is, as you can tell, a little bit of a frustration for me right now.

Okay, so I'm gonna pick my next principle is 35, which is 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze. You're having audio trouble and my mouse is being overly sensitive. All right, so in this example, or in this principle, The real point is when you make a decision to do something, make a decision to do something. So that's the no exceptions rule. And the way this principle is illustrated is there is a person that made a decision that they wanted to really focus on health and fitness and proper nutrition. The way they decided to hold themselves accountable for focusing on better nutrition is they loved ice cream, but they had to somehow have a means for controlling the amount of ice cream they intake. And what they made the decision to do was it's only okay to eat ice cream when there was a full moon. So when a party was being held, Celebrating this person's— an advanced birthday. I don't remember exactly which one it was. It was like 75, 80, 85, something like that. There was cake and ice cream, and the folks that were holding the party decided they were aware of this decision, this 100% decision, so they created a fake full moon, and the person involved was so committed to the 100% is a breeze rule that they wouldn't eat any ice cream, even though there was a crowd of people applying peer pressure to do that. So Eric, now that you've taken a deep breath and gotten your audio working, what are your comments on the 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze principle?

Yeah, I'm a little resistant Just given the title to maybe make a comment. Well, we'll just joke about it. Yeah, I, you know, I'm kind of in the middle of that right now. I've, I've, I've not been probably as committed from a workout perspective, and the ice cream example is good because While I can maybe control what it is that I eat, and I have not implemented the full moon ice cream policy, as is evident by the big ice cream cone that I had just a couple of days ago, and I know that it wasn't a full moon.

Although, it has been a full moon in the last couple days.

Yeah, maybe there was a full moon, I don't know. But, I think this chapter reinforces maybe the chapter that you suggested earlier where even when you were at the seminar with Jack that you liken this to the GPS that You know, if you think about maybe it's not even 99%, maybe it's 80%. Um, you know, I, I don't, I don't know. I mean, the 100% is a breeze, it to me, maybe that's the case. Um, but I'm a, I'm a hard person to do like a cold turkey unless it's something that I'm really, really committed to. So the The no exceptions rule, I don't know, I just got to find something that is to the point where it's the magnitude that I need to commit to that.

I'm smiling as I'm hearing you describe this because everything in the book and everything in life goes back to principle number 1, take 100% responsibility for your life. So 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze. If you decide, I'm going to do this no matter what, and you take responsibility for it, well, that's where it becomes a breeze. Now, I acknowledge, and all of us are human, we make decisions to do things and sometimes we get overzealous. And it's really important to remember You know, if you say I'm only gonna eat ice cream when it's a full moon, and you end up slipping, and you take responsibility for that decision, it doesn't mean you just say, forget it. I messed up one time. I'm never gonna— I'm— this is silly. I'm not gonna do it. Just start from there.

Yeah.

Start over and say, you know, I made that decision and I messed up. But so what?

Yep.

Doesn't mean I'm I'm never going to do it again.

Yeah, the, the principle that I had next on my list is the one right after this. It's actually 36.

Okay, perfect.

So it'll make it really easy for you to flip away. Um, but the concept of learn more to earn more, um, because I think in today's society, the intelligent The intelligence is going to win. The person that knows the most, and that's one of the reasons, you know, when we talk about social media, it's not necessarily feeling like you have to be the expert, but if you can bring as much information to you in a convenient way that helps you learn when it's easy and timely. And I know this talks about reading, but because I spend so much time, it seems lately, in the car and/or at airports, Yes. Or on a flight, I've actually been doing a lot more podcast listening. And while it's not necessarily reading, consuming information, I love to listen to music when I go out and exercise, but a lot of times I'll find a podcast that relates to something relevant to what it is that either I'm doing or that I want to do, and I'll put that in and I'll use that as a learning opportunity. And almost in every instance, I come back from a workout or I'm on a plane and I've got a little piece of paper, something that I'm listening to jogs a thought, gives me an idea, points me in the direction of a new app or something that will help with productivity. And it's amazing when that happens. I say to myself, you know, why don't I do this more often? You know, starting to get into the habit. I've got a little external Bluetooth speaker and I've got a podcast player on my phone. And, you know, I'll even play that in the morning when I'm getting around, brushing my teeth and kind of getting ready, just so that I've got, instead of the television with the local news and all the evil stuff that's going on in the world, I've got something else that's actually coming in. So this, this talks about decreasing your television time and studying people that you want to emulate. And being part of, you know, training and being in person. And a lot of times when I present at an event or a conference, I'll oftentimes go in the day before so I can participate and sit in on the sessions and listen to the other speakers that are there sharing information, because I learn just as much. And sometimes can even work some of that commentary into my presentation and tie it in, which I think makes me a better presenter. Because then I'm kind of working in big messages from the conference in general. So thoughts on learn more to earn more from your perspective, Jeff?

Well, I'm glad you brought this one up. I've got kind of a personal story that's unfolding even as we speak that relates to this principle. I have been complaining about how much I have been spending on Direct TV and fill in the blank. In your case, it could be Direct TV, Comcast, Time Warner, Dish Network, whatever. But I've been complaining about my Direct TV bill every month forever. And in April, I made the bold decision. I said, you know what? I'm gonna just cut the satellite. I called Direct TV and went through all of their, oh, we can cut your bill, blah blah blah blah blah stuff, and I just said disconnect it. So I know I'm in a household that my only source of television is streaming, either Netflix, Amazon, those type services. And since April 15th, I think the TV has been on Wow. And what I found is now I go home and almost every night I pick up a book and spend some time reading every single night. Now, when I was preparing for this show, I already owned the Kindle version of The Success Success Principles. And I subscribed to Audible a number of years ago. I'm not really into audiobooks. I do something called photo reading, and my reading speed and comprehension rate is really, really high. So audiobooks tend to be kind of slow for me. But what I discovered this week as I was preparing for this show is now that Amazon owns Audible, You can actually, for Kindle books that there is an Audible version, they've integrated WhisperSync. So I could be reading on my Kindle, get to a certain point, and if I don't want to stop, I can transition to the car, stream the Audible version through the Bluetooth in my car, and listen to the book. So, I mean, that To me is really, really cool and really, really exciting. Have you tried that service, Eric?

I have not, but I know that the updated 10th Anniversary Success Principles comes with the Audible version, and I know I said I was going to do that, and I think the next principle that I'll share after you share yours will reinforce my purchase of that. But that's going to be on my list, and I'm going to snag that and add the Audible option to it. so that I've got both. Because I do like to read, but I think the audio version would be able to have more available to me, and I would probably use it more than if I just had book or had it on my Kindle.

Here's just an FYI, a little tip that I learned. Amazon's doing a really good job of making available the printed version, the digital version, and the audio version. So now for books that all 3 of those versions are available for purchase from Amazon, if you purchase a copy of the book, you can buy a significantly discounted Kindle version. $2.99 looks like the average price that I've seen. Plus you can buy a discounted Audible version. It looks like a lot of the more current Audible books that you get the discounted price for owning the Kindle edition adds about $12.99 to the cost of the book. So for about $16, you can add the Kindle version and the audio version to the hardcopy version if you elect to.

Yeah, that's a great idea.

And I noticed some of my older books, for example, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. I really love the original version of that book. And I wanted to hear someone else read it. So I picked up the Audible version of that book for $3, I think.

Oh, wow.

I wanted to share one thing that relates to this learn more to earn more. And again, it ties into the decrease your television time. On the next page of this principle, he starts sharing a section called Leaders Are Readers. And I say he, it should be Jack and Janet, because Janet contributed a significant portion. I think she did a significant portion of the writing in this book. But they actually refer to, in this Learn to Read Faster to Read More, they refer to the course that I'm talking about. It's a course called Photo Reading. I've taken it a couple times. I've taken it from Paul Shealy. Paul Shealy actually is someone that I consider a friend. We actually have done some things together socially. This is an amazing, amazing way to allow yourself to really absorb a lot of printed material really, really quickly. It references their website. Well, it just refers you to the resources page, but if you go to learningstrategies.com, learningstrategies.com, you can actually get to the photo reading course from there. It's a course that I highly, highly recommend. Another thing that I'm going to tie into this Principle 36, learn more to earn more. I read this when I was rereading the Success Principles this week. I don't remember which principle it was in, but the point is the last 45 minutes before we go to sleep is really the information that we absorb in those last 45 minutes or so, 45 minutes to an hour, is what we process as we're sleeping. So if you spend the last 45 minutes that you're awake looking at the news, hearing about all the gloom and doom and rape and murder and pillaging and things like that that have gone on, that's likely what you're going to process— not likely, it is what you're going to process when you're sleeping. Paul Shealy, the guy who developed the photo reading course, I've heard him say this a number of times He says that it is absolutely one of the worst mistakes anyone can make to have a TV in the bedroom. He said absolutely a TV should not be in the bedroom. You should not sit in front of a TV for the last hour that you're awake because it really has a very detrimental effect to your success. Since I've stopped the TV, you know, I heard Paul say that for years and I guess I'm just hardheaded or a slow learner. I still was in the habit of having the TV on as I was going to sleep at night. Since I cut out TV pretty much since April 15th, the TV in the bedroom is not hooked up to anything anymore, so it hasn't been on since April 15th. I can tell you that I sleep better and I'm sleeping longer through the night, so I highly recommend that as well. So Eric, we have about 5 minutes left, and it sounds like you had another principle lined up. I'm gonna let you Finish it up.

Sure. Um, my last one, and I think you'll agree whether we talked about 1 or 10 of these, um, is principle number 63. And when you see the name of it, you'll go, no, wait a minute, they've changed it. Hold on, that's different. The, the book that I have— go back to the table of contents. We're, we're off.

I've actually got the I've got the original here, so let me look and see.

Yeah, it's called Start Now, Just Do It. Maybe that got bumped back at the, you know, in a later chapter. It's one of the last chapters.

Success Starts Now, Section 6.

Huh, I don't see it. Well, anyway, the chapter basically is called Start Now, Just Do It. And not that they're ripping off Nike because, you know, that was the their famous tagline for a number of years. But, you know, it draws the, you know, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step. You're not going to get anywhere unless you get going somewhere kind of thing. And I think that's the, you know, last week as I sit back and I'm like, oh, we're gonna talk about Success Principles. I need to get the book, I need to get the audio. I had an opportunity to be in the car for well over— 6 or 7 hours on my way back and forth to Chicago, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't have this to listen to. I listened to other podcasts, but it could have taken a lot of that time and been able to revisit this. So, if there's something that's out there, and maybe the Success Principles isn't necessarily it, maybe there's something else, maybe you want to start the eat ice cream on a full moon diet or something else.

Along those lines.

But I think making the commitment to just start it and, you know, like it says, act now, don't wait, don't do tomorrow. So reading that chapter a couple of times just kind of walks through and it takes a look back at the 64 items that were shared previously, at least in the version that I've got. And Just says, you know, this is something that you need to start doing. So there are going to be some action items I'm going to specifically take even right after we get off of this, and I've done already, but this is kind of a good one, I think, to close on, even though it doesn't appear to be in the 10th anniversary. So I don't know why they took it out or if it's worded someplace differently.

Actually, keep talking for a minute.

I'm gonna see if you've got the old version that you can pull up.

I do have the old version. I don't know.

Yeah, I see you've got in the— on the 3rd shelf there, the book 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. He's one of the thought leaders that I'm spending some time listening to on his podcast, and he's had some amazing guests. Yeah, start now, just do it. There you go.

Tim Ferriss is a fascinating guy. Tim Ferriss, I actually became familiar with as a result of Jack Canfield. At the time, I, I've never met Tim personally. A lot of the people that are mentioned in The Success Principles, I've met them and worked with them personally. Tim is not one of them. But at the time I, I became familiar with him, he had just released The 4-Hour Workweek.

Yeah.

His first book. He's gone on to do The 4-Hour Body. I think the one he's most recently put out is something like The 4-Hour Chef or something like that. That's really become his trademark or his franchise, his 4-hour things. He's a really bright guy. Tim has actually mentioned in a good bit of detail in some of the The principles in the updated version of The Success Principles.

So, but this chapter, at least for the, the old-school printed version that I've got, was a nice one for me to kind of finish on because that kind of wraps it up and says, now you've read all of this, you've hopefully gotten some observations, what are you going to do about it? You just need to start. Pick something and go do it. You're not going to do it right maybe the first time or the second or the tenth, but unless you get started, you're never going to have the opportunity to do anything.

You're not going to get anywhere. There's a couple ways that when Jack does live presentations, and even I think in at least the original version of the book, he illustrates this point, and that is if we were making the decision to drive from California to New York, we wouldn't wait until a time when we knew all of the stoplights and traffic obstacles between California and New York were either green or there were no traffic obstacles. The point is just keep your eye on the destination. So, you know, pull out of your driveway, start. You don't have to have a perfect plan. You don't have to make sure all the lights are green. You just deal with them as they come, and as long as you know what your destination is, you adjust course, and eventually you get there as long as you stick to it.

Yep, agreed. So with the exception of a little bit of an audio burp on my part, I enjoyed the conversation. I don't think you got as much as I wanted you to out of what I was saying, and maybe in some instances a little more, but this has been really good, and I love revisiting this stuff with you because You, as I mentioned last week, you kind of were the one that led me to this and several other books, and you obviously know your way around, and I like it when you can kind of, I guess, guide me in these areas. I lean on you for those sorts of things and appreciate that.

Thank you. So, well, I'm gonna say Goodbye for this week for Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Jeff Simpkins, and Eric, I'll pass it off to you to close.

There we go. Well, I will— I'll see you next week. We've got a guest that's going to be coming on, a gentleman that I've known for a number of years, and we've not talked in a while, but he was a banker as well and is a New York Times bestselling author, and he's done some pretty interesting work In the area of right brain, left brain logic versus creative thinking and figuring out how you can train yourself to think differently and use different parts of your brain. So I think it's going to be a pretty interesting conversation, and I'm really looking forward to it. And I will be joining you next year— next year— next week, one year older. But I'm looking forward to it. So thanks everybody for joining us this week. We'll get this video archive created and up on Free Webinar Wednesdays. So you can go to freewebinarwednesdays.com and check it out. And, uh, we'll look forward to seeing everybody next week and every week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until