Brian Tracy Interview: Rules That Make You Rich & Life Easier!

I remember, as I said just offline, is that I was there at the beginning of the Genius Network. The very first day. The very first day where we got together and swapped ideas at your apartment in Tempe, Arizona. And I still remember that. I'm so happy with your success and what you've accomplished and with so many other people. It's just wonderful. You know, we talked. I believe at that time, we talked about the Mastermind concept, and that's why. And you said, well, why don't we get together and Mastermind? And so I flew over to Phoenix and taxied out to your house for the first time. And that's something that's so important in the Genius Network is when Napoleon Hill did his work. He said that every single person, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and so on, every one of them began to be successful and they began to mastermind with other intelligent people and just share ideas. And I have had the same experience. Because one idea in combination with your other ideas can change your life forever. I am, I'm happy to say, some years ago, but about a decade ago, a publisher said, have you got any books or anything that we could publish? And I said, well, I've got a book on time management. So I sent them a manuscript, and it was called Double youe Income, Double youe Time Off. And he said, great publisher, Barry Kohler. And he said, well, it's kind of a boring title. He said, but the chapter 15 is 21 Great Ways to stop procrastinating and get more things done faster. That's the title of the book. And he said, well, chapter 15 is entitled Eat that Frog. And this is a story from Mark Twain. And Mark Twain was the most successful speaker, writer, author in America for three or four decades. And he wrote this. He said. He said, if the first thing you do in the morning is you eat a live frog, then you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing that can happen to you all day long. And your live frog is your biggest, ugliest task. And so just get up in the morning and just get it done. He said, and if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. So if you have two big tasks to do, eat the. Do the most important. And then the other corollary is that if you do have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. In other words, get on with it. Well, so he said, let's make this the title. Eat that frog and 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and then run the theme through setting the table, organizing the plates, and so on. And so I did. I sent it back to him and they published it. And he just told me this week, Steve Persani, my publisher is that we just hit 2,500,000 sales in 50 languages. Wow. Which is. Which makes me the best selling time management author in history. And it has one basic concept for us with the Genius network is pick your most important task each morning and start on that task. And discipline yourself to work on that task nonstop until it's done. And don't do anything else. If you can do this, which takes tremendous character, takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous mental strength if you can do this. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. It will be so distracted. And you want to check your emails and make a call and get some coffee and so on. And what you have to do is you have to discipline yourself to stay at that, wherever you are and do that task until it's done. Then I say give yourself a reward. The time management author Julie Morgenstein says, don't check your email in the morning. And I love that as a concept. So you get up in the morning, start on your most important task, and discipline yourself to stay at it till it's complete. Then your reward is to check your email. But unfortunately, what do most people do is they check their email in the morning and in the afternoon, and in the evening they get up at night. They just always check in their email. And each time you check your email, they estimate it takes 17 minutes for you to get back to work, takes 17 minutes for you to get settled down and back to work and so on. And then somebody sends you an email and it goes bing, ding, bing, and you stop and you check your email again. And the email, it's one of the most wonderful communications devices in the world, but it'll kill you if you just keep checking it. So what you do is you turn it off. I always say, leave it off, leave it off. Start your task and discipline yourself. And your big reward when you finish your most important task. Because now you can check your email. And if you can do that, what happens is you start to become so productive. So many people have told me they became millionaires with the eat that frog concept. Just start and complete your most important task. But if you can't do that, by the way, you'll always have to work for someone else who can discipline you to do it, someone who will supervise you Someone who will check on you. What will happen is you'll always be in the bottom 80% and never be a big success. And remember this 8020 rule, it bites you in the bum all the time. And 20% of people make all the the 80% of people. Why do you think we're having riots today? Who do you think is rioting? Certainly not the top 20%. They're busy making money. It's the people in the bottom 80% who are frustrated and angry and upset and so on because they have too many bills and they say too much month. At the end of the money, they don't know how to get out of it. The answer is, make a list of what you have to do. Pick the most important tasks and work at it till it's done. Your whole life will change.

So, Craig, I've really crafted some questions here to really get into some good stuff. So you're the discipline and productivity guy, but surprisingly, before you even start scheduling your day, you say there are much more important things to think about. So tell us about the three V's every entrepreneur needs to know before moving on with their day.

Yeah, absolutely. So you need to start with your values first. So imagine like you have a time pyramid, and so at the top is where you would have actually what you're going to do in the day. But at the bottom, you're going to put in your values because your values are going to drive every single thing that you do. If your values are family first, it's going to drive how you start your day, what you do over the course of the day, how much you work. So you had that example yesterday, Joe, of the guy who was thinking about opening his 57th hardware store and he was overweight and not spending any time with his family. Listen, you can make him super productive at opening hardware stores, but it's the wrong thing. And a lot of people in entrepreneurship become super productive at the wrong thing. And so I ask one question of all the coaching clients that I work with, which is in the next 20 years, what do you want to accomplish in the four top values in your life? Your family, your. Your health, your wealth and experiences. That's where everything has to start. So once you know that I want to raise great kids. Okay, good. That means no 13 hour days for you. It's very simple to start planning your day that way. So it's values first on the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid. That's the strongest rock that you start with. Then on top of that is something that Dean was talking about yesterday, which is your vision. That's where you get to next. Values drive your vision, and then you have to know your value of your time. So if you take a look at all the people in here, an income level at the bottom line would be $500,000 a year, probably. So that means every single hour of your working day is worth $250. Now, who here is willing to admit that they're still doing stuff like running errands, going to the UPS store, cutting the lawn, making meals, all this stuff, even writing a book. And I know that a lot of female entrepreneurs, you are guilted into it by mother in law or by mother, right? You are still making all the meals, you're still doing all the cooking. And it's killing you because you're trying to run this business at the same time. I remember back in 2009 watching an Evan Pagan video. And Evan said in the video, entrepreneurs can't be doing their laundry. And when I first saw that, I'm like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? I'm doing my laundry. I'm wasting all this time that all this stuff is below my value. So if Your value is $250 or more per hour, that's a lot of money you can put into having people do everything for you. And that's the mindset you have to have as you go and schedule in your day. Even if you want to write a book, think about writing a book. How long is it going to take you if you're not a writer but you know you have a great book in you, right? It's going to take you over 100 hours. Now, if your time is worth $250 and it's going to take you more than 100 hours to write a book, just pay Tucker 25 grand and get the book done so much faster. That's who I've used for both of my books. And it saves me a ton of time. So you have to have that type of thinking starts with your vision or your values. Your vision and the value that you put on yourself. And it's gonna make you a whole bunch of time to then focus on what matters. So what Tony said yesterday, the one problem in his life is time. I bet you if I spend a full day with Tony, I could save him or make him 30 minutes of time. And if the guy's running $6 billion worth of revenue in companies, that's gonna be worth a lot to him.

I can definitely what we should do, I'll take the Video of this. And I'll. And I'll take that clip and send it to Tommy.

Good.

And see if he does that.

Yeah.

And I mean, this guy's done all that stuff better than anybody.

Well, yeah. So that's my next question. So Bedros, you and Craig, you guys have been working together for about a decade, I think.

Yeah, about a decade.

And you've created a whole winning system by watching pretty much what this guy does. Cause he's very much that guy. And by the way, let me mention this because I didn't do this. I've gone through Craig's whole process, spent a day and a half with him. Amazing. And really just such a great thinker. So tell us how having clarity of path and becoming a disciplined entrepreneur allowed you to, you know, go from anxiety attacks to. And tremors, which you were having, to a $25 million business, I think it is, approximately. And one of the fastest growing fitness franchises on the planet.

Well, I've had the good fortune of before he ever wrote the book the Perfect A Formula, and before he ever had the Perfect life workshops that I've gone through as well, I've had the good fortune of having environmental exposure to this guy. And if you haven't had a chance to have environmental exposure to Craig, it's a unique experience. Your gift, his gift is outside eyes. And so at first I would laugh. Like, why is it that you want to have dinner at 5:30? That's kind of like a late lunch for me.

Me.

Right. Why aren't we partying? Because, you know, we run masterminds together. Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tennessee. We're having good time. We're in great, great cities, man. Let's like party till midnight. What do you mean you're going to bed by 9 o'? Clock? What gives? But I soon started realizing that as I was laughing, I was having anxiety attacks when I'd go home and essential tremors. I would just lock up and freeze. And my wife would just like, look at me like, what's going on? And I very quickly realized that his life structure is what I need if I plan on taking this franchise that was just puttering along and really making it reach his fullest potential. And I'm far from that. Our goal is 2,500 locations by the year 2020. We've got 614 locations as of yesterday that are actually open and more in development. But the life structure and discipline that I've been able to witness from him, never mind reading the book and, and experiencing it firsthand from the workshop has been a game changer for me and for most leaders, most of us in here. And I know you can. You've experienced this where you feel like you're overwhelmed with opportunity. You truly have more opportunities than you have time left on the calendar. That's the reality of it. You try and put so many irons in the fire. And that's what I was doing. And at the end of the day, I realized what is my biggest purpose on this planet. I'm still a personal trainer. It's just now I'm going to touch millions of lives through our Fit Body Bootcamp franchise. And I'll touch lives of people who'll never know me, but I'll be a bigger trainer than Tony Little and Jillian Michaels through our franchise. So why am I striking up a deal with this guy? Why can't I? Why am I doing another event here when my purpose is to be the world's biggest trainer, making an impact in people's health, fitness, lifestyle, self esteem, self image. And so I went narrow and deep on my focus, a fit body boot camp. And it went from failing in 2012, 13 and anxiety attacks. And I was in a very dark, negative place, taking Vicodin and Nyquil every night to go to sleep, to now a $25 million company and growing where I have two VPs running the organization and a leadership team. And then, of course, implementers who execute our vision. And that's really, if you're in this room, you're a visionary. You just come up with a vision, the path, and you execute to your high performance team.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Okay, so then, so from what I'm getting from you, you're in this place. You then learn how to structure. And so that pretty much is designing your day. So how does one go about doing that and starting that?

Okay, so I speak to a lot of fitness gym owners and stuff like that. And so I use this phrase, the champion mindset, in that all these fitness gym owners, they've at one point in their life, they've either been a champion athlete in college or they've been a bodybuilder or something like that. And so they're very successful in one area of their life, but then they struggle with sales or they struggle with their time management. And I say to them, listen, you've already been really, really, really successful here. You've put the systems in place. And so all you have to do is transfer that champion mindset over to this other area in life where you're struggling. So that is just thinking, like, okay, well, it was planning and preparation. It was having a coach, it was having a deadline. It was getting the accountability. It was having all those things. And so whatever it is that you guys are good at, wherever you have had great success in life, you just have to transfer that over to having the systems in your own productivity. So can I tell you a very embarrassing story about how I almost fought Sean Stephenson?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

That was wonderful.

So I hired Sean. I hired Sean for his breakthrough day earlier this year. And it's a heck of a day. And I was going to him because I have all the productivity and stuff in place, but I wasn't getting into deep emotional relationships. And so Sean was helping me through that. And he showed me by the end of the day of our 12 hours together that I had basically been built myself a system to stop myself from getting into deep emotional relationships with women. So I was building myself a prison, essentially. And Sean pointed that out to me. And I was very angry at Sean for pointing it out to me because I didn't like to be shown that I'm not perfect. And so. Right.

Right.

Sean said, money up front if you could.

Money up front. I love that.

So Sean was actually. Were you terrified?

Were you worried maybe we could grab him a mic?

Sean was concerned because we were both standing there and staring at this whiteboard where he had pointed out that I had built this prison for myself. And so it sucked. I didn't want to admit it.

There was shame.

Like, it was like, how the hell did I create this very problem that I claim that I don't want?

And that's the hardest part about it.

Yeah. And so he pointed out to me that I built this system that put me in a bad place. And then I realized, hey, I can just go and dismantle that system and build a new system that allows me to have what I want. And I've since done that. And thank you, Sean, for pointing that out. But it just goes to show you that if you've built a system, like, there's a lot of great marketers in here who might struggle with family relationships or their health, and you've built A great marketing system, you can go and do the same thing for your time management, for your health, for your family relationships. It's all just about building systems that work for you. And the five things that we use that I've used to build systems for anything that can change your life in any way is having better planning and preparation than ever before, having professional accountability, which is going to give you expert advice and someone to hold you accountable and not let you get away with anything. Third is positive social support. So that's being in a room like this. You know, you might not get breakthrough ideas from everybody in here, but they're going to pick you up when you're feeling down. For fourth is having a meaningful incentive. So we're not doing things for money or stuff. It's what matters in life is people and experiences. So a meaningful incentive has to come from your heart, not from your wallet. And then finally, the big deadline. There has to be a deadline in the behavioral change that you want to make. And if you have those five things in place, you can do anything in life. You can lose weight, you can get rich, you can find the love of your life, the home of your dreams, whatever you want if you use those five things. So just put them in place. Build the systems you want for your time, for your family, for making a million bucks.

So when you focused on this thing, I mean, I guess the way is that's the big picture thing for you, that you needed to build things around.

Absolutely.

So, like, how do you structure your day? Like, what does your day look like? And how can people in this room structure their day?

Well, the most important thing is that you get up. It doesn't matter what time you get up. So I get up early in the morning. But you don't have to get up.

Really early in the morning.

What you need to do first thing in the morning when you get up is focus on your number one priority in life for 15 minutes. And the reason why I say that is because most people don't spend 15 minutes a day without electronics thinking about their number one priority in life. It could be an opportunity to take advantage of, or it could be a problem that you're going through. If you give yourself 15 minutes a day, six days a week for 52 weeks in a year, that's 72 hours of clear, uninterrupted thinking. And you can write a book in that time. You can do anything you want. But most people don't do it. And most people does anybody in here get stressed out before 8 o' clock because of their morning routine has too much crap in it. You know, you have to do meditation, you have to do gratitude journaling, you have to do freeform journaling, you have to do exercise, you have to do yoga with JP and you have to do interpretive dance. You have to do all that before seven in the morning according to these articles that you see on the Internet. And most people are getting stressed out, so don't do any of that stuff. Instead just sit there and think. Go down to your kitchen table, think on your number one priority for 15 minutes and then the rest of your day it can go any which way you want. But you've already had that victory. That's the most important thing. If I can just give you one piece of advice, that's it.

That wasn't bad. That was not bad.

Can I share something where that's concerned too? And it's really made a big change in my life. I'm sure it'll make a big change in yours. Is every single person's morning routine needs to start the night before. And again, this is through environmental exposure through Craig. I've learned more by watching this guy than ever by asking him questions. Because sometimes when you're the problem, you don't know what questions to ask to get out of the problem problem. But when you watch, you learn. And even in the evenings now as soon as I get home after the first hour of being home, I just turn my phone on silent in airplane mode and I leave it alone. Anything that happens, work wise, I'm not going to be able to solve it. Seven, eight, nine o' clock in the evening, number one. Number two, I don't want to feel guilt the next day when I'm working that I didn't spend actual valuable time connecting with my wife and kids because we're all sucking off the screen there. I don't screen suck anymore. I mean, imagine how many people fall asleep in this very room screen sucking the very last thing you did before you fell asleep. And now that's really impacting your subconscious mind. Instead I'll still open up my notes because remember, it's in airplane mode. So there's no notifications popping up. And I've turned off all notifications, but there's no text messages popping up. Open up my phone and write down my five things I'm going to attach hacked the next morning. And so I do that brain dump the night before. I'm not screen sucking and reading bad news, bad emails. The problem's still going to be there. Tomorrow morning, when I can actually do something about it with my VPs and my team leads, et cetera, in the evening time, I'm not going to stress about it. And so if you just focus on actually setting yourself up to win the night before by eliminating screens, by not hitting the snooze button in the morning, because I'm convinced and. And someone needs to do a study on this, that if you hit the snooze button first thing in the morning, you really are telling your subconscious mind that I'll take 10 more minutes of interrupted sleep over getting out and dominating my purpose in life. And I believe over time, that stacks up against you like a stack of dominoes where you hit the I'm a loser domino, and off it goes, right? Every morning, it's like we have two stacks of dominoes to hit. If you hit the snooze button, you're hitting the I'm a loser stack. But that's been a big thing for me, man, preparing the night before for the next morning. And we all know when you win your mornings, you win your days, you win your days. They add up into a massive amount of success in your life, whether it's family, health, happiness. Like when people tell me, gee, bad rose, you know, I just have a few more pounds to lose. It's like, fuck, man, we're all millionaires in here, right? We're all doing well. You can't hire a nutrition expert. You can't hire a personal trainer. Then it's like, well, I can, but I don't have the time. How do you not have the time? And I later found out they're not working in their 5%. And we've talked about your 5%, at least in the genius network groups that I've been in. One time, this was, I don't know, almost 11, 12 years ago. I was working out of my home. We didn't have an office. Then my wife calls upstairs to the guest house, and she goes, hey, dude, sprinkler has a leak. It's like a fountain in our backyard. I said, I'll be down and fix it. And so I went down to fix it. And I'm pretty handy with that stuff, but I got mud all over my arms. And the only employee I had was one assistant. Her name was Amanda at the time, comes down and she goes, hey, people are responding to the email you just sent out. They actually want to get on the phone with you and see if the coaching is right. I said, oh, man, Amanda, I've got mud all over me. You've heard me do the clothes many a times. You got this. Now I'm asking Amanda to work outside of her 5%. I'm working outside of my 5%. What could have cost me $20 to pay someone else the first fix that sprinkler. I lost a $5,000 sale. At the time, it was 5,000. Today, it's 50,000 to coach with me. But $5,000 to me might as well have been 50,000 back then, 11 years ago. And that was the best lesson. And you all have your 5%. Most of you, it's delegate, motivate, and sell. You delegate to your team. You motivate your business partners, your clients, your team, and then you sell. That's it. Anything outside of that, if you're doing your laundry, if you're doing your grocery shopping, we've got a house manager, her name is Valentina, and she does the shopping for us and changes the light bulb. Anything that's in the five, my wife says, hey, can you take out the garbage? No, it's not on my 5%. Hey, the light bulb's out. It's not on my 5%. Hey, the sprinkler sprung a leak. It's not on my 5%. But now there's someone who can do it. You can afford to get another wife in your house or a. You know how I mean that. Some of you know how I mean that. Yeah. But you really can. And you forget this. And my challenge to you is, why don't you buy back some of your time, focus on your 5% that matters, so you could really focus on what happiness is. Which, to me, it's money, meaning health and relationships. That's it. It's a simple formula, really.

You know, in 1997, I hired Gary Halbert for. Well, I think you both have maybe heard the Triple X Halbert tapes. I recorded it just on, you know, a little cassette player. And I, for myself, we ended up distributing it as a product. And it was me and Pamela Yellen and Gary Halbert, John Carlton. We were all sitting around in this hotel room because I was up there doing consulting with Bill Phillips at the time, Body for Life author. And basically, we're all making a list of, if we were all millionaires, what are the things that we would have in our lives? And one thing that every person wrote down is a personal trainer. And then I think it was John Carlton that said, you don't need to be a millionaire to hire a personal trainer. You don't need to be a Millionaire to hire a lot of these things. And as a matter of fact, by not doing it, it's one of the best ways to not become a millionaire. Because you spend all of your time doing what you just explained, and you.

Start to feel like an imposter in your industry. You really do. Because the content you're going to deliver on that video, you're not delivering at 100% because you don't feel comfortable in your own skin. How you're going to pitch from the stage, you don't feel a hundred percent. Let me tell you. I'm in the fitness industry, and it's been 15 years since I've trained a client. But when I was in that stressful period of my life seven to eight years ago, as we were growing Fit Body bootcamp, I was £25 fatter. And when I would get up on stage, a fitness business summit to sell, there's no surprise I was selling. 5, 6, 7 mastermind coaching clients today, 90 to 100. 110 people come on board at a time. The difference is not my pitch. The difference is not anything else other than the fact that I feel authentic. And that transfers to the audience. And I don't care what you think through transfers, through video, through your email, through your every. Your mannerisms, your eye contact, every single thing. Your stage presence. So work on you, man. Work on you first. So valuable.

Love it.

Want to ask you both about how do you deal, I mean, with what you're doing with the franchises? I mean, how. How do you deal with the information overload? I mean, you've touched on a lot of it with just, even the, you know, what you do in the morning, what you do the night before. But how do you deal with the sheer volume of stuff? And I mean, everyone here has their own version of that.

Yeah. And we're all leaders. And so you can. You can definitely. I know you've experienced this before before, where you become the human bottleneck in your business. Right. How often are you the one with the buck in your hands and you don't know what to do with it because you got 10 other bucks that you gotta do something with. You're the human bottleneck. And so I quickly learned that I can't be the boss that runs it. I forget who was up here yesterday. I think it was Tony who said, you still have a job, you're a millionaire, but you still have a job. And so I'm a big believer in decentralized command. And all that simply means is I have two leaders. Two VPs, VP of operations, VP, VP of new business. Because as we bring on new franchises that I take equity in, you know, the VP of New Business will make sure that they are running like Fit Body Bootcamp is running so that we have congruency and KPIs in place. But the VP of Operations and VP of New Business are the ones I meet with them 35, 40 minutes every day after my workout. They go and delegate to the team leads, team leads delegate to their implementers, their department, and then they execute. And the simple formula is this. What is it that we're doing? How's it gonna look when it's done? And what is the deadline? That's it. So I just have to talk to my two VPs and they go and delegate. And then when it's done, we'll have a meeting on it. And I might say, well, I don't like how that works, or what if we did it this way? But again, I'm no longer the bottleneck in my business. And when you're the bottleneck now, you start doing time theft from yourself. I'm gonna cheat my. Who was it? Todd Durkin. Todd Durkin, are you in here? Todd Durkin? Remember you were saying that at some point I'm just gonna eat a protein bar and skip lunch. Eating engineered food is not food. I don't care if it's a protein bar, it's not food. And you start stealing time from yourself, from your family, from your sanity, from your workouts, from your sleep. Before long, you're having an anxiety attack and the central tremor because the human body can't deal with that. So decentralized command. Find leaders, as Tony said, let them fail. Create the systems and delegate to them.

Anything you'd like to add?

I just don't know how to do anything, mostly with tech stuff. So. I mean, he makes fun of me all the time. But, you know, on my phone I have two apps and that's all I have.

You still have a BlackBerry?

I still have a seven and a half year old BlackBerry that I use, and you can't do anything on that thing. So I just avoid getting myself in trouble. I build a lot of systems because I'm a very weak person like anybody else. I get really tempted by things and so I just keep myself out of harm's way. Just like, you know, I tell if somebody comes to me for weight loss, you tell them to keep the crap.

Out of the house.

It's the simplest thing to do. So keep yourself out of trouble. How can you keep yourself out of trouble. Just do like, go through your day and figure out what are the things that are causing me the most problems, what are the things that are getting me in the most trouble? And then figure out a way to keep them out of your life. So a lot of not to do's is a good place to start. Most people's most important list is their not to do list, not their to do list.

No, what you just said is. It's interesting. I'm a very weak person. We all have areas where I've always like. And you'll hear me talk about it. I'll ask different people, you know, what's your kryptonite? You know, what is the sort of thing that gets you in the way? Because the best way to get out of a hole is to quit digging it. And people dig a lot of their own holes. And I see that with addiction. You know, a lot of people here that are workaholics. From my conversation with Gabor Mate, there's an understanding of where a lot of this stems from. It's just the things that a person becomes conditioned to that continues to build these dopamine hits. And so like phones is an example if you have a workaholic problem or tendency or whatever you want to call it, but you're also doing all these other things that you are not strong with that are these temptations. You know, if you're an alcoholic, you can. You can't keep booze around the house. You know, if you're a food addict, you can't keep a bunch of frickin snicker bars and shit everywhere. So you.

Well, I use this analogy, like if you have young kids, young kids bring home this, you know, they draw something, you can't figure out what it is, but they bring it home to you, right? And you give them their approval and it's like giving them a gold star, right? And so as entrepreneurs, we're getting gold stars from things. And so like, the next time you watch a video that says hustle and grind, you know, 16 hours a day, you're like, oh, I'm gonna go and do that. Because you know, I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna get a gold star from some guy on the Internet because he's, he sees me hustling and grinding. But that's totally misaligned with your values. And that's where you get in trouble. But you keep on doing that next thing. Oh, man, you're really working hard. You know, you. I see you hustling grinding, that's awesome. And you're getting positive reinforcement from the wrong thing. And so your actions are misaligned from your goals. And that's what causes what I call the first world problem, which is the biggest stress, is when we're not aligned in what we're doing. And so if you keep on, you say you want this in your life, but your actions are taking you down here. There's always going to be that stress inside you until you align your actions with your goals, which is starting with your, your values and your vision. And so what I've seen Bedros do now, Bedros is even better with his time than I am now. He gets done work at 4 o', clock, so he plays with his kids before dinner, has dinner with his family, plays with his kids after dinner, has time to watch one television show and hang out in the hot tub with his wife and run a business with 600 franchises. I mean, that's pretty good.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

So you've had the experience of meeting.

I'm sure, just thousands of entrepreneurs over.

Time and also helping to create them.

Is there any consistent mistake that you.

See entrepreneurs make in business that they could possibly avoid?

I think, I think that if you don't protect the downside and you sort of treat your business a bit like going into a gambling, gambling, gambling could casino and you know, sort of keeping on doubling up to, you know, hoping that you're going to get out of a problem, you know, then, then you're asking for trouble. And eight out of 10 businesses do go bust and quite often it's because people haven't thought of the, you know, the downside consequences of what they're doing. So without being too conservative, it is important, I think, to always think, you know, if I do this, what's the worst that can happen? Can I afford the worst? You know, for instance, right now, you know, some of our airlines have protected against oil. Oil going up. Now, a lot of, a lot of people within our airlines said, well, look, it can't possibly go any higher. We've got a recession on, you know, so do we really have to protect the wiser people at. At. Virgin said, yes, you know, we should protect against the worst happening, you know, so it was, it was good and sensible that they protected against the downside. I see that too, Richard.

I mean, just as a great example.

Is like Virgin Mobile, as we'd say in the uk, but Virgin Mobile and like, just instead of buying like building all the communication, all the, all the infrastructure, it would take you literally leased, I think, Sprints lines. And so there's very little downside and very big upside if it worked for you.

We have a strong brand, and therefore we're able to avoid the enormous infrastructure costs of, of sometimes of building new businesses. We can piggyback on other people's infrastructure using, using, using our brand. And, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll put in the brand, we get 50% of the company, we use our marketing skills and other people put in the infrastructure. And that in itself also, as you say, protects the downside.

You know, with all the decisions that you have coming across your desk wherever you're at your beach, I guess it could be. Yeah, exactly. How do you, how do you make really tough decisions on a daily basis? Because you're just, You've got to be. You've got so many requests and demands of your time and people that want your attention in the world. And like, what's the Richard Branson methodology of, I guess, time management, priority management, really thinking it through. I mean, how do you do all of this?

Well, we spoke about delegation, and I think the first thing is to make sure that everything is running without you. So when I'm swimming around the island every day, a shark comes and decides that I look tasty and I disappear. Everything will continue to run, and it may not run in exactly the same way, but it will continue to run and Virgin will continue to grow. The fact that everything is running, we've got fantastic team of people on a global basis. It means that literally I can, you know, work, work out how I want to spend my day. And I think, I think it's absolutely essential for all of us that we, that we stay fit and healthy. Because, you know, if. If we're not fit and healthy, we're not going to achieve anything. So, you know, so, you know, I will swim around the island every day or I'll, you know, go kite surfing or I'll play tennis, or I'll, you know, I'll do something to make sure that the body is healthy and the endorphins are running and, and then I can throw myself into work. And I suspect at least 50% of my time is sort of setting up not for profit organizations in the world to tackle, you know, some, some of the big, bigger problems of the world. And, you know, the other 50%, I suspect, is diving in and out on, you know, some of our businesses around the world, you know, maybe doing a bit of firefighting when things are going wrong or, you know, giving them A push, you know, when things are going right.

So I have a question that's a.

Little more personal in nature. I'm wondering, when you first started.

Yes.

When you first started and you were getting everything going, did you find it challenging at all to have any kind of balance?

Because I know you love your kids.

So much and you love your wife so much. When you're getting something going, you invest a lot of time in the ramp up stage. Did you ever deal with that sense of guilt of like, oh man, I have to put the phone down or.

Oh God, I have to just shut.

It off, you know what I mean, and spend time with my family?

Well, I've done something which is slightly unusual and I think possibly it's the advantage of owning your own company. And that is. I've always worked from home, so I've never worked from an office. When I say never, not pretty well never. I mean, you know, right in the early days, you know, I'd pop in a lot to our record company and so I originally worked in a, in a houseboat. You know, the kids would, you know, be crawling around on the floor. I'd be having, you know, meetings with people, might even be changing a nappy. You know, so the kids literally, you know, grew up, you know, grew up with me as we were building the Virgin, the Virgin empire. And, and then when the kids holiday time came, you know, we would pack the bags and I would just move my office to Necker island and you know, so I would always be around my family and I suspect, you know, we're closer than, you know, closer than a lot of families because of that. And you know, yes, I would be, you know, spend quite a lot of time on the phone and you know, I'd be busy but we were around each other. Now I think the, if there's any lessons to be learned from that for other people, I mean I, you know, I do think that with modern communication one shouldn't have to get stuck in an office. You know, the more one can get out and about, the better. If you've got companies, go and you know, go and live. Live your companies, live, you know, spend a lot of time with your people and spend as much time with your family as you can. And I think getting that, getting, getting that balance is absolutely critical and making sure that you bring up great kids who are happy and loving and you found that time for them is critical because they are going to be the next generation.

What is your unique ability? What makes you Richard Branson? People consider you charismatic Friendly, funny looking? I don't want to say good looking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that pretty much sums it up, yeah. No, I mean, what makes you effective? I mean, so, you know, people look up to you as one of the most recognized, successful fun entrepreneurs on the planet. I mean, what makes you. You.

I think the sort of fun side is. Is perhaps natural. I mean, I think, you know, I've always enjoyed having fun and making sure other people have fun around me. You know, whether it's, you know, building a UFO and flying it over London on April Fool's Day. You know, many, you know, I was. I was quite, quite young when I did that and caused that absolute panic with the. The police force and the army coming out and so on, you know, But I think it's sort of, it's natural. I think other people can, you know, who are maybe not naturally that way inclined. I think they can train themselves to enjoy life more than they perhaps are, and they may be taking themselves too seriously. I think they can, if they made it, make a real effort. They can also find a fun side in them. And I think you can train yourself out of. I mean, I was an awful public speaker when I was young, and, you know, and the amount of ERs and UMS, I mean, I can now feel them coming back again. You know, somebody once didn't. Did an interview with me and they cut out all my ers and ums. My ers and ums were longer than the actual words that were there. And that's. So I think you can. I think you can train yourself. Yourself, train yourself out of difficulties. Somebody said to me, the way to, you know, the way to overcome fear of public speaking is just think of yourself. You're in a living room having a chat with some friends. And that helped me a lot. So I just, from then on, I just have a chat with friends and it seems to seem to manage all right. But. But let's move on to another question I can't remember.

Well, no, no, I want to go a little deeper with that one, just for a minute, though, because, I mean, you do some things that other human beings don't do, and it makes you really effective. And I've often wondered, have you ever identified that or do you really not know? I mean, do you know what makes you powerful and influential and persuasive and causes people to want to surround themselves with you and get behind your causes and. And become a client of your businesses? I mean, what's the Richard Branson secret sauce? I mean, do you really know.

Well, look, I think you are only as good as the reputation you've built over many years. And I hope that I've managed to build a good reputation and therefore, hopefully, people can, you know, can trust. Trust me. So, you know, if you. If you look back over Richard Branson's life, there's the exciting side. You know, they're trying to, you know, be the first to fly around the world in a balloon or, you know, the fastest across the Atlantic and boats and so on. And I think that that sort of slightly sort of sexier side of my life, you know, the fun, adventurous side, has also helped the brand and helped make the brand a bit more interesting than say, you know, British Airways, where the chairman, you know, hasn't put his life on the line too often. And then. And then there's the actual companies themselves. The fact that I think we have made it made quite a big difference to people's lives in, you know, whether it's, you know, if you fly on a plane or travel on a train or, you know, or listen to music, etc. You know, I think in a lot of different areas, we've made different differences to people's lives. And so I think there is some substance there, you know, hopefully then, you know, it's down to personality, whether you. Whether you're good at dealing with people, whether people want to actually spend time with you and, you know, whether you genuinely care about people. And I'm just extremely lucky. I love people, love spending time with people, love learning from people. Hopefully I'm as good a listener, which I think as a good leader has got to be a great listener. Not wanting to listen to themselves all the time.

Well, let's talk about energy management. And I don't just mean from a physical sense, but just like a mental sense, because you've done a lot of programs on one of your programs, wake Up Productive, and you've done a lot of ways to accelerate, advanced your ability to get things done, gain clarity, be more persuasive. So you've delved a lot into that world. And if anyone, what are the things that you have found that for the most part, an entrepreneur that has ambition and drive. I mean, as stupid as that sounds, let's use that as the caveat. If you don't have any ambition and drive, you know, you must gain that if you're going to like. Because if I give a strategy to someone that is driven to build their business, and that strategy would work if it was used. If I give that to someone that has Ambition, they can do something with it. If I give that tool to somebody that does not, they in many cases will blame the tool versus blaming themselves because they're like, well, this didn't work. Well, it does work when it's used, and if it's not used, it does not work. So with that being said, I'm going to just assume, which is always dangerous, but I'm going to assume that the person listening or watching us right now is doing that, because there's enough in them to say, yeah, I want to learn something that I can then use to gain perspective, get a result, that sort of stuff. So what could you share? That if the person listening or watching that does have ambition, if they did, would improve their life in anything you want to talk about, from their sleep to their income to their marketing to their relationships, whatever, because you've studied a lot.

Great.

So I'll talk to that person that has what you're saying, ambition and kind of drive. Also, if someone doesn't, I'll make distinctions here. I'll talk to that. I also want to make sure and include the other type of folk because I. I've been learning lately that a lot of people, some people, and it's actually kind of the minority, have this ambition drive that you're talking about. There are a lot of folks who, they need to be around one of those type of people, and then that's what activates them.

Gotcha.

And neither is better or worse. They kind of can collaborate. But you and I do work around a lot of the more drive, ambition kind of people. So I just want to say that. And then as you were talking, I was thinking about Wyatt Woodsmall, who's a mentor of mine, and he taught me the distinction between a motive and motivation. Okay, so motive is that thing that you're going for, the thing you're moving either toward or away from.

Right.

And then the motivation is the thing inside is the feeling. There's like the inner game and then the outer game. So to feel motivated, you usually need a motive.

Right?

And when you have a motive, that's what kind of helps you feel motivated. And there are a lot of models around this. David McClelland, he broke down motivation into power, affiliation, and achievement. And we either move toward or away. So we either move toward success or away from failure. We move toward love and affection and approval or away from rejection. We move toward having power and influence and. And we move away from loss of significance. And when you figure out which one of those you are, you can start Using that to motivate yourself more. So I think you need to know what your motive is. And if you don't know what your motive is, it's hard to get yourself motivated. A lot of people talk about the why, and this whole notion of if you have a big enough why, and this, I think, is a little. There's a finer distinction there of what the why is. So looking into motivation is. Is important here. You talked about energy management. So when we're talking about productivity and time management and just getting more things done, there are different strategies for this. Some people are machines. They wake up and they just get shit done. They can't stop getting lots of stuff done. Now, this is the, you know, the tiny minority of humans. And when we look at those people, we all just kind of. They make us feel bad because they're just getting, you know, they're whatever. They're the CEO of a rocket company and the coolest car company in the world. Like, each one is their spare time or something. You know, like, holy shit. Like, how does that person, you know, do all this stuff? And some people, they're just kind of that way. I remember reading an article with Elon Musk's mom, and she was saying, like, oh, yeah, my kids, this. And she's like, elon, I don't. I don't know what happened with him. Like, he's just. I don't know what happened, you know? So you get one of those once in a while.

Do you think he's an alien? No.

He could be the first instance of AI, but we don't know.

I mean, I've met him twice. He's an interesting guy.

Yeah.

And so basically, if you're not one of these, like, wake up and just are, you know, productive, like, all by yourself, you have to figure out how to make yourself be that way. You got to figure out how to program yourself. Or habitual. Like, put habits in place and kind of ritualize it. Anyway, so the ideas for this. I've learned a lot of this stuff from other kind of masters here. I think the first one that made a really big impact on me was Peter Drucker in the Effective Executive. And right in there, he says, work in focused blocks of uninterrupted time on single focus projects. Minimum a couple of hours, and ideally longer than that. Because if you stop and start things, it's very unproductive. You know, this idea that if you get interrupted while you're doing something, like a focus project, that takes a while to do. If you get interrupted and then you come back to that project and you start again on the project. From when you start again, it takes about 20 minutes just to get to where you were when you got interrupted because you've got to get back up to speed and get your mind back up there. So if you get, on average, if you get interrupted every 20 minutes, there's no way to get anything done. So this idea of focus blocks uninterrupted time. So that was, that was really influential to me because that's not intuitive, you know, and a lot of the stuff around multitasking, you know, a lot of people say I'm a multitasker, but that's super inefficient. I saw an article recently that said on average a human has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Did you see that one? Yes, the eight second goldfish attention span or whatever. So, you know, so we're dealing with all that kind of stuff. I was also very influenced by, by Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz and this idea of in order to manage your energy, you move from managing actions to creating habits. And so this is kind of a profound insight of we only get a little bit of willpower. And there's a lot of research that shows that we get kind of a little bit of willpower and we burn it up. And a lot of the burning up of the willpower is in internal conflict. So we're all in a lot of internal conflict for the most part. Most of us are. So we've got this cognitive dissonance and we've got these things that we're worried about. And as you grow up and become more of an adult, there are more and more things pulling on your attention in time and kind of conflicting values that you have. I mean, this idea that we were talking about earlier of like being selfish or generous and you've got to make the decision, am I going to do for other here? Am I going to do for self? So we burn a lot of our willpower in there trying to make decisions, because decisions are. Decisions are one of the biggest energy drains that we have. Making decisions is extremely draining on us. So what do you do? How do you get yourself to do another thing? Because you can't just keep trying to will yourself and do it.

That doesn't work.

And we're already creatures of habit. And so the idea is to create a ritual that is a specific set of steps that will put a new habit into your life. And then every day for 30 days do that at 30, the exact same time of day. And if you do that same thing, then you ritualize it. You actually put it into yourself as a habit. That's great energy management, I think. Focus blocks of uninterrupted time and then create rituals and use your willpower to do the ritual over and over until it's a habit.

So when it comes to habits and conditioning, it is just not an intellectual choice for people to just say, oh, I'm going to. If you're so revved up. I mean, if, if I could stand up, which I'm not going to, I could stand up, but if I was going to run across the room and as fast as I could, I couldn't just stop, you know, I mean, there's sort of like a body in motion tends to stay in motion. A frenetic person tends to stay frenetic. So there's a period where you actually have to recondition yourself, where you have to. Now certain things can just be, you know, I mean, what's that other Peter Drucker quote? You know, someone tells me what they value, I might believe them. But show me your calendar and your bank account and I'll show you what you value. So based on people saying, oh, I want this, I want that. Well, show me your calendar, show me your bank account, and we'll actually see if you really value success and making money, if it's that sort of thing. So what are your thoughts about just building rituals that work because you have studied and learned and identified, you know, and I've talked to numerous people about productivity. I mean, I can, you know, I can't imagine how many, you know, many, you know, hundreds of hours that I have spent in the study and the research of these sort of things and even how difficult it is to change, you know, getting your. You trying to be funny here? Okay, if you're going to be funny, just try to just be funny. So getting your body to do the things your mouth is saying it's going to do are two different things. So how does one do that?

I mean, in a sense, the most powerful force for a human being is their social circle, their social group.

Right.

We were all hearing this research that if you kind of average out the people that are closest to you, you're that person. You take the five people closest to you. That's your level of self esteem and health and income and all that kind of thing. In a certain way, the self sculpting or the self development game, it reaches, I think, its pinnacle when you figure out where you want to go. In a particular line or developmental kind of vector of your life, whether that be your physical health or emotionally, how you want to feel, or your relationships or your success or money or whatever it is where you want to live, how you want to live, figure out that one thing and then go and add a social influence to your life who already has that in their life. That's the formula, right? So if I'm bad at marketing, I don't know marketing. I don't know how to get customers. I could go read books and that works. I can get that knowledge. But it's nothing like coming and sitting down. Like with you, for example. We had lunch with. Remember we had lunch with that woman, what, a month ago or something in la? We were both at a conference. Oh, yes, you had lunch with your friend. We sat down with her. She said, here's this whole thing. She really didn't understand marketing kind of at all. We wound up having lunch with her for maybe an hour and a half. We gave her a bunch of feedback, and by the end of it, it's not just that she got what to do, because she did. We gave her some ideas on what to do. But we're so far to the next level in our own marketing development, our own lives, we're saying what we're communicating, what our kind of body language and the cultural little milieu that was set up there is communicating is. It is totally normal to have the kind of success that you're trying to get here. It's not that big of a deal. Just go do the things you need to do and then. Can I get some more water? And that transmission is what you need to get for yourself when you're trying to achieve something because you read it in a book and it's like, I don't know, this person could have just written that down because they wanted to, you know, whatever. It's abstract or maybe it's not taught the way that you want. But when you go watch another human being do something and you go, oh, oh, you can do this. Dan Kennedy, I heard him talking and he said this great thing. He said, I think we should have National Bring a Poor Person to Work Day. And I thought that was really a great insight. So that someone that doesn't do as well financially could come to work for a day with someone that does and watch what they do. Not to learn what they do, but to just realize, I could do this just to raise their esteem and what's possible. So the social influence is such a big deal because the ritualization so there's like focus blocks of time. There's the ritualization and the habit building, which is, which is very self empowering and so forth. But these are nothing like adding social influences to your life. If you're saying I want to go work out every day, you could do these other things. And it's great. You could focus on that block of time. You could create the ritual, you could set it up, you could start doing it. But man, make friends with two or three people who work out every day and have been doing it for 10 years and who, that's an absolute rock solid cornerstone of their life. If you don't do that, something's wrong with your life and you go make friends with them, you start hanging out with them, you figure out other ways to add value to each other's lives, but being around them, you're going to start going to the gym every day not because you ritualized it or you had willpower, but because there's freaking no choice.

That is a huge insight. I mean now, because thinking back at that lunch, because we talked to her. Oh yeah, yesterday she said that thing you talked to me about worked and I, you know, she talked about I got my client.

Yeah.

And it was like a game changer for me, blah, blah, blah. And that also gave me some insight as to what happens with Genius Network. You know, because I now running the highest level marketing group in the world and it's an expensive group. You know, people pay $25,000 for Genius Network. They pay $100,000 a year, year for Genius X. And it's the being around all of the. And there are people that show up there that are really successful. And I've heard this dozens of times. You know, when I came to my first meeting, I felt like, you know, in my world I'm this really, you know, successful person. I came here and I feel like this. And I always think that's a funny statement because it's like, no, you're a total badass. But. And then once they come to a few meetings, they realize, oh, you know, this is kind of like a family. I feel comfortable around these people. And so it's given me a deeper understanding of what I've actually created without even thinking about it that way. Because, you know, people be like, well, you know, I already got too many ideas or I don't have time. You know, it's not about that at all. It's about the relationships. It's about, you know, I always say that what I do in Genius Network all Of the great content, the 10 minute talks, the $250,000 ideas, all this that's structured around sell people what they want, give them what they need, they usually want more money. But when they show up there, we talk a lot about workaholism, we talk a lot about hiring amazing people, we talk about getting in much better physical shape, taking free days. All of these things that aren't as appealing initially as I want to have a lot more money. What happens though is I come there and we put on as good of a, you know, curating a amazing discussion around important issues as we can. But I always say that the speeches, the talks, those are just excuses for me to bring amazing people together so they can meet each other. Because once they meet each other, you know, all kinds of stuff happen. And so you gave me an idea because right now, you know, I do my best not to do consulting. I'm not saying that jokingly. I make more money when I do a genius network meaning than I do. So I'm an expensive consultant. I'm 25 grand for half a day. If someone wants a whole day, it's 50 grand. And that's a lot of money. And I have it that way because for one, I'm not willing to do consulting for less than that. And secondly, it's worth it if it's the right sort of person. But I try to direct people. But here's what I want to put out there as a test at least people that listen here. I love that idea of come to work and if anyone wants to come to work with me and I'm not like I'm going to spend the whole day with you, but just wants to mirror and see the environment and see what I do. I mean, I'm going to think this through, but I'm just throwing it out there because I was like, this is a great idea.

I could come and I could just be making fun of you the whole time while they're watching you.

That would be great. They would get both of us at the same time. But you would pay because I'm thinking.

About more value for you.

But here's the thing, if someone really wants to do this, it's $5,000. But I don't want the $5,000. I want it to go to either Artist for Addicts or I want it to go to Joe Volunteer, which are two things.

Get a group of people do this with like 10 people. Really have a group of 10. Maybe once a quarter come and just follow you around for a day and Just watch what you do.

Yeah.

And I'll point out things. I mean, watching. But I'm not going to do it for free because I want a person at a certain level.

But it's like, well, have them, like I said, donate or like you said, donate to the thing. But watching Joe. Joe is one of the people who, I mean, I'm not totally certain of this, but I'm pretty sure who's one of the bigger geniuses in the world who doesn't actually know what he's doing to be a genius. But if you hang out with him and you observe him doing what he does, he pulls you into it and you kind of get changed by it. Yeah, I think that would be great. It would be great for you to mentor people in a group like that.

Yeah. I mean, now that's probably not as maybe noble as to bring a poor person to work if I'm going to ask people to make a $5,000 contribution. But the point is it'll cause me to have to figure out how to set it up and at least block some time. And I think it would be a very interesting model.

You know, what you could do is, you know, maybe one out of three of them or something, you could get a group of young people and just give them scholarships. And so like maybe once a year or twice a year, just have that day be, you know, a group of 18 year olds who are just kind of getting into their career and they just come and.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So, but here, so. Yes. Well, now, see, my contribution to help people, like anyone, is this, you know, putting out knowledge. That's assuming that anything you're saying is useful to people, but assuming it is and just putting it out there. I think that in and of itself is a good contribution because like, you know, I don't need to do this. I mean, I'm doing it because it makes me feel good that it's going to help other people and stuff. If anyone likes that idea, then I would ask that you just. How would I.

You can contact me.

Yeah, contact Eben. You'll pay for this.

Send me the money. But go to his office and I'll give it to the favorite charity.

No, send an email to supportopolish.com supportopolish.com and just reference that you interview with Evan and heard this idea and you are absolutely not like you're going to talk about it, but you will cut a check for $5,000 to joevolunteer.com you could look at that. One or artistforaddicts.com you can buy art. You can buy $5,000 worth of art. We could do it that way so you can get some art for it if you prefer that one. And so you'll get something for the money and you'll get one hell of a interesting perspective in education. And I'll play around with that. I might do one or two of those in the next year, depending on if anyone responds to this.

If you got a group together like a Brainstorm Day, almost 10 or 12 folks, you can do a brainstorm as part of it with them.

Yeah.

So if you know any friends that want to do it, five grand a person. You can't do five grand and bring 10 friends. So it's like it's.

And Joe is the best, Joe's best at putting together brainstorm meetings and making meetings that you just get a tremendous amount out of it.

And that I will agree with without even being a smart ass. I am really good at that. That's one thing that I. There's a lot of things I'm not good at, but I'm really good at that one.

He's good at that one.

Let me say this though, Brian. I mean, I'm looking at your Instagram right now. So you got 756,000 followers on Instagram. You got millions of people that watch on YouTube, you've got all these books. You're the top selling audio author in the world every day, literally your ideas reach millions of people every single day. And I mean, what advice would you give for the creation of the content? Because one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is people say content is king. Well, I think content is obviously valuable, but I think context is more important than content. And communication is one thing, but comprehension is another thing. Being able to put, put content out there, not having people comprehend it, is a whole nother thing. And you have just put out so many people's lives have been impacted and changed by your ideas. And we have many people here that would love to multiply that and to share what their wisdom, their knowledge and reach people not only for the selling and promotion of their products and services, their own companies, but literally just to impact people. So what advice would you give to be productive in that area? Because I mean, you're literally one of the most productive people on the planet in this particular area. So you obviously have a process in the system for writing books, for putting information out there. You've been doing it for many, many years. How do you do it. I mean, what have you learned that if you were to be able to download here's how to get, here's how to write a book, here's how to put your ideas together, here's how, you know, I mean, because I'm, I don't know. Out of all the books, have you written any books that you wish you would have not written that you would have not put out there? Are you pretty happy with everything?

Well, I'll tell you two funny things, but I want to start with the second thing is many years ago I was writing books and I'll tell you why in just a second. And my people in my coaching classes, people in my seminars would say, well, how do you write a book? And how do you write so many books? And how do you have so many books? And I say, well, you just do this and you just do that and so on. And, and finally I said, look, I'll write it down. I'll write down my book writing system. So I wrote down 20 steps to write a book and get published. And I put it on my website, Brian Tracy dot com. And I said, look, if you want to learn how to write a book, go and get those 20 steps. And then my partners, you know Eric Berman, don't you?

Oh yeah, yeah, very well.

Eric has been my partner for 20 years. He said, brian, we should create a really fun first rate course on how to write a book and get published. Because 64% of adults dream of writing a book. They fantasize about writing a book. They plan to write a book and less than 1% will ever do it. And then less than 1% of those will ever get published. Why? And they always say the reason I is because I don't know how. I just don't know the process. So anybody here who's watching who wants to write a book, go to my website and there's a download. It's called Brian Formula on how to write a book. 20 steps and it's free. Just go and take it. And here's the steps. Step one, step two, step three. What I call it is like a recipe. And again, it's one of the things that I learned from you and from other people in the Genius Network is a recipe has a series of ingredients. And what you do is you combine the ingredients correctly. You don't cheat on this ingredient and ignore or delete this ingredient. You follow the recipe and you get a good dish. And if you practice enough, eventually you'll be able to prepare a beautiful dish over and over. Again, for example, when I was single, I found that I was going out to restaurants to have Caesar salad. And so I would meet a girl, and I would invite her out for dinner, and we would go to a restaurant where they served Caesar salad. And one day, and I still remember this, I noticed that the guy making the Caesar salad, and this is where they brought all the ingredients to the table, and they mixed it all up in a bowl and they put it on your plate. And so he's mixing up the salad. And it was a very good salad, Very good restaurant, good salad. And I said, how do you make this salad? And he said, well, they give me the recipe and the ingredients in the kitchen, and then they just had me do it. So I come to you to come to the tableside and make it say, well, if this guy who was not very smart, if this guy can make a delicious Caesar salad, so can I. So I decided, I'm going to get a recipe, and I'm going to make a Caesar salad. And I did. But what I did is I tried to cheat is instead of using fresh romaine lettuce, I used butter lettuce. Instead of using freshly squeezed lemon juice, I used lemon juice out of a bottle. Instead of using fresh garlic, I used minced garlic from a bottle. Instead of this, I did that. And the salad just tasted crummy. So finally, I made this decision. I remember this because it affected everything else in my life. I made this decision. I'm going to stop screwing around. I'm going to follow a good recipe exactly, and then I'm going to work with that recipe. And I did, and now I have a recipe to make Caesar salad. I am probably, immodestly, probably the best Caesar salad maker in the world, or very closely, everybody who has ever tasted my Caesar salad say it's the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. And it has 14 parts, 14 steps, ingredients, the way that you mix them, and so on. And I have people who beg me, please make a salad. Come to my house at Christmas and make a salad. Can I come to your house? Because once they've had my salad, they'll never be satisfied. So people say, well, how do you make your Caesar salad? I say, well, you do this and you do that, and you put this and you put that and everything else. And I said, oh, what the heck, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down, because I have this passionate desire, like you, to help people. I just want to help you. I don't want to make money If I make money good. But mostly I want to make a difference in people's lives. So I said, okay, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down and I put on my website, briantracy.com. you go there, Brian's Caesar salad recipe. And you can download it, it's free. And everybody who's ever done that, they communicate with me and they say, I made that salad. I've never made a Caesar salad in my life. I followed the recipe and everybody in my family said it was the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. So therefore, if you like Caesar salad, go and download it. So I used to tell this story just the way I just told you. I used to tell this story in my big seminars, my Peter Lowe seminars with 10, 20,000 people. And I said, here's an example. And the example is that people don't follow the recipe for success. If you want to sell successfully, by the way, there's a seven steps that I have discovered and developed, which I teach a thousand different ways. I've taught more than 2 million salespeople my recipe for selling. And many of those people become millionaires. Chip Wilson is also a friend of mine. And he told me, he booked me. He told me, he said he was working as a yoga instructor in a small yoga studio in Vancouver, in Kitsilano, which is a. A neighborhood. And somebody put him through my course and had the course on video with workbooks and everything else. And he said he suddenly realized that there's no future being a yoga instructor. And then he looked around because we teach the superconscious mind in that course, Psychology of Achievement. He looked around and he said, the money is in yoga clothes. That's where the money is. And the quality of clothes being produced, generally speaking, was very poor. So he just came up with this idea of producing high quality yoga clothes made with high quality fabrics, well put together, and the rest is history. As you say, he's worth almost $5 billion today. He told me when he brought me up to speak. We spent two days together. He told me that basically these ideas made him rich. Very, very simple idea to set a goal, work on your most important goal, unlock your creativity and so on. He's a super guy. He's one of those guys that deserves to be successful. You're happy for his success when you talk to him. So the key is get the recipe if you want to be excellent in sales. 20% of salespeople earn 80% of the money in sales. Why? It's because there's a recipe for selling. And it has seven parts, seven ingredients. If you follow the seven ingredients, what will happen is it'll come out at the other end, sale after sale after sale. And if you don't, it won't. If you want to be successful in business, you have to have a marketing plan. As our friend Dan Kennedy says, is that whatever business you're in, you're in the marketing business. And your success or failure income, the size of the house you live in, car you drive, what happens to you in life is determined by how good you are at marketing your product. And marketing is attracting qualified people who can and will buy your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And what I just told you is the result of thousands of hours of research. Marketing means attracting people who can and will buy and pay for your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And so therefore, once you learn how to market, you can market any product if it is a sellable product. So people have to learn how to market in selling. By the way, and I'll just give you this quickly because I produced after Psychology of Achievement, I produced a program called Psychology of selling. And Psychology of Selling, according to their research, has made more salespeople millionaires than any other single training influence in the world. Psychology of selling. And how do you get Psychology of Selling that you go to audible. Go to audible and there it is. And you download it. You download it on audible and listen to it. Nothing hard about that.

Well, I got. Let me do this. Don Cooper, go ahead and let me see if I can pin your video. If you can put that up on the screen again. He's got the. Let me see if I can pin. Well, I'm trying to, but Psychology of stuff.

And by the way, it's in book form and I decided it was such a big program, I decided divided into two books. One is Psychology of Selling, the other is the art of closing the Sale. And countless people write to me and tell me, omg, omg. It made me rich. It made me rich. You changed my life. You made me rich. I hear that so many times. You changed my life. You made me rich. And it's not because I'm a genius. It's just I found the recipe and work with the recipe.

Okay? I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.