How To Use Marketing And Advertising To Win The Game Of Life And Get What You Want - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #176

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and.

This is the I love marketing podcast.

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And here we are for another fun filled episode of I love marketing with something kind of strange and weird. Other than I might occasionally eat a pistachio here and there during this episode because I got a jar of them in front of me. I don't know why, but just wanted to throw some professionalism in there. We've got Sean Stevenson joining us again. The last episode we did now, we talked about how to basically make money as a speaker. And Sean shared some really just killer ideas on his transition from going to who he is to being a professional speaker. That makes 10, 20, $30,000 for half an hour to an hour of his time and how you can do it too. So that was the topic of the last episode. But I asked Sean, who's a dear friend of mine, to join us again. And if you haven't listened to the last episode, then go and listen to it. I think you'll find it extremely valuable. And Sean, for those of you that don't know his name, Shawn Stevenson. He wrote a best selling book called get off your butt B u t not b u T T. And basically Tony Robbins wrote the forward to that book. And Sean is 3ft tall in a wheelchair and has never walked his entire life. And in spite of that, he's one of the most enthusiastic, optimistic, brilliant guys. He's a doctor, so he's a PhD. And Sean, welcome to the guest episode of I love marketing again.

It just shows me that you guys are hurting for guests. You got to bring in Sean Stephenson twice, but I'm happy to be here.

You know what's so funny about that is like I have got a. And all kidding aside, I we have high level people that are unbelievable that have asked us to interview them on this episode or one of my other podcasts that if I did literally an episode a week, it would take me four years to get through the list of guests that just want to be interviewed for this thing. So going and picking and choosing, it's crazy. It's crazy. So we're certainly not hurting for guests, but the fact that we're putting you on twice means our selection process is really screwed up.

You don't have a doorman looking at what really is coming in the door.

That's all that's kind of funny. So what Sean gets to do this week is like on Howard Stern, he often has George Takei come and sit in for a Week just as a buddy on the show. So that's what Sean gets to be today. Just to add some color commentary and talk about all the things we're going to talk about today.

Yeah, I don't have to be smart, intelligent, important. I just have to be funny. So I can handle that.

Yeah.

Sean, tell people real quickly kind of what you do. On the last episode, we talked about public speaking and stuff, but give people some pearls of wisdom so right out of the gate, people can have a perspective on how to think about success, how to think about their life. I mean, you recently went through a pretty serious accident where you fractured your skull, your right leg in three different places. I was there at the hospital the night that happened, literally within just a matter of less than probably, I don't know of it happening. You were in really bad shape, excruciating pain for several weeks, and you had an amazing comeback. There was real concern that you might die because you had bleeding on your brain. And I just remember all of that. So when it certainly comes to perseverance and everything, you've won many awards for that and what you've had to endure. So kind of give everyone that perspective. Although it's not about what we're going to talk about today. We're actually going to talk about marketing. I think it's a good way to reframe anyone if you're having a bad day or you're thinking, how am I going to get through? Learning all this marketing stuff is sort of difficult. Well, they're challenges, and Shawn certainly knows how to overcome and has overcome many challenges. So to whatever you could speak to that.

Well, I will. I'll wrap it up in a nice, pretty package for you, Joe. And the pretty package is based on marketing. Actually, I went through that awful accident. As Joe said, I fractured my skull. I had bleeding on the brain and a severe concussion. Fractured my hip, my knee, my ankle and my femur. Bruised ribs, collarbone, shoulder blade, all these things, tons and tons of pain. But I actually reached for my iPhone and did a bit of a social experiment. Didn't even know it at the time, but I posted a video on Facebook when I thought I was going to die because of the bleeding on the brain. I asked my entire social media following to either pray for me if they were prayerful people or just send me positive, loving vibes if maybe that didn't resonate with them. Terms of prayer and just put out good thoughts about Shawn Stevenson. And what took place from that moment really was interesting because I bared my soul in that moment, wondering if I was going to live and watching the outpour from around the world, from, you know, some of my closest friends to celebrities, to, you know, people I've never even met before. By the first, it started with hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people were hearing about this act accident. And it literally increased my following from just talking to people about what I was going through and then doing updates. I mean, I did some crazy updates while on heavy narcotics, and I said some funny things about, you know, my bowels and just be bearing my soul to these people about what I was going through to the point now where I think it increased my. My following by 20 to 30%. I went to the grocery stor a couple nights ago, and three complete strangers at three different parts of the grocery store came up to me and asked me how I was doing. And I'm like, who are you? And they're like, oh, well, we followed you through the whole accident on Facebook. And it really goes to show that marketing is not just about strategically selling shit. That marketing is about sharing what is important to you, what you're going through, what you have to offer with people around you so that you're building a community. And I believe that marketing is about solving problems for a community. And that's. I mean, I wasn't really solving a problem. I was asking them to solve mine. And it just created this transparent, authentic conversation that I'm so glad I entered into.

Well, there you go. It was quite a little. But it also is a testament, too, that you have done a lot. You've put a lot of good out into the world. And I think a lot of the outpouring just came from that. And people could see the, you know, they could see the sincerity. And did you get any hate mail during any of that time? I mean, you know, because I did a couple.

Yeah. People saying, how dare you sensationalize your accident and try to use it as a marketing tool. How dare you ask people for prayers? Some people hit me up and said, you know, prayers don't work. It was all the doctors doing, you're foolish. I mean, I definitely got my hand full. But you know what I've noticed, Joe? No matter what I do, I get hate mail. No matter what I do, I get. And it's weird because I finally reached a point in my career where people. People think I sit on ivory towers and get fed caviar and have, you know, people, you know, feed me grapes, like. And the truth is, I'm no different than anybody else. I struggle. I have insecurities, I have frustrations. But once you get to a point of visibility that people think you've made it and you're on this cloud of eliteness, they think that any negative comment they make is never going to reach you. And if it does, you know, they hope to get a rise out of you and pay attention to them.

Yeah, I mean, you know, people. People forget that these are, you know, we're all real human beings there. And certainly there's some that are probably more awful than others, and there's some that are wonderful. And hell, I remember you're going over your house and cooking for you during that whole time, if any. If we would have videotaped that, people would add all other perspective on the shit you had to go through and everything. But, yeah, you know, people. Yeah, people are interesting. But, you know, for every negative person out there, you probably had a thousand.

That were just like, you know, in the words of the great poet Taylor Swift, haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. That's all I have to say. You gotta shake it off. You know, I was thinking about that when you were talking on the last episode, Sean, about, you know, the. The inspiration. You know, some people are just wired to be, you know, contrary, to be just different, you know, to use it, whatever you're saying, as exactly the opposite. Like, for every, you know, person that's saying when they see you speak and they see you as a professional speaker and say, well, if a guy who's in a wheelchair can overcome that and become a professional speaker and make hundreds of thousands of dollars and, you know, be riveting to audiences, surely I can do that. That's. I'm sure happening. But then there's probably people just like those same people sending you hate mail that are saying, well, of course he's in a wheelchair. He's got an angle. I mean, that's. If I was in a wheelchair, I could be a successful motivational speaker, you know.

Well, they can always get themselves put in a wheelchair. I'm sure Sean can give some instructions on that one.

The way that I like to burst that one is I like to say, you know, there's 56 million people registered. I don't know if they're registered, but they're noted as having disabilities in the United States. Do you know how many people become successful professional speakers that are. That have disability? I know of about 12 that are the best that are making, you know, six to seven figures a year as a speaker with a disability. That's 12 out of 56 million. So to hear that, I just chuckle now. And I know that if it wasn't that they would say it was my hair color because I was super tall or because I was, you know, when somebody wants an excuse not to succeed, they will find it at all times.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

Let me, let me say a couple more things and I will, you know, I'll keep saying we'll shift in gears, but I actually love talking about this stuff. But we are, we are going to talk about some marketing insights and strategies and so we'll get there and I'll, I'll ask you to kind of launch that one, Dean, and have you kind of go with it. What, you know what's interesting is there was an article written about me and Forbes a couple weeks ago from the time we're actually doing this recording on Forbes.com and it was the, you know, I picked 10 of the most inspirational people that I've done interviews with. And so the article, the lady Cheryl Connors wrote the article and then we listed the interviews of the 10 people. So it's not only a Forbes article, but it lists all these interviews that people can click and link to. It became the third most trending article on Forbes.com, which was awesome. It was getting shared everywhere and spread everywhere. And just the comments, even on the article, if you type in Joe Polish in the Forbes and read the article, the comments are just like really beautiful and nice and glowing and they made me feel awesome. And all the Facebook shares and everything was, it just kind of took off. And what's funny is my team, I was in the middle of an event during, you know, the time that this article was being shared everywhere. And my team, actually Eunice, sent out an email saying, you know, Joe had an article posted from him in Forbes. Check it out. I mean, it wasn't pitching anything, it was just sharing it. And the cool thing about the article is it lists like all these interviews that people could listen to. So it's actually a pretty incredible article because it gives People access to 10 hours of recorded content. And this guy, who I won't mention his name, he's kind of a well known marketer who I've known for many years, sends back a response back to the email that goes to my team because we're sending it out to our whole list, or at least a portion of our list, saying, should I send you guys all of my articles? Every time they come out, just like a real snippy, kind of bitchy Email. What was funny is this is a person who I considered a friend of ours. Not just me, but people in my company. It was a rude email. We unsubscribed him, of course, because he obviously subscribed. And it was really funny because it wasn't even selling anything. And this is from an individual that sends out emails that just promote the hell out of his shit. I mean, they're not even valuable like the article was. But the bigger picture is for every one thing like that, there's probably like 2,000 that are extraordinarily positive. But it really made me think about. And I wanted to ask you this question. And then let's jump into some marketing stuff. What are your goals, Sean, is to rid the world of insecurity. I went to the Google Zeitgeist event that was here a few weeks ago and in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Bill Clinton was the very last speaker. And you used to be an intern at the White House. You actually know Bill Clinton personally. And you know, you got endorsements from him and all that stuff. And I got up, I was the last question of the whole thing, and asked him, you know, I met you in 2009 at Russell Simmons house. Which he remembered that. And I said, I asked you a question, but it was never recorded. You know, how do you handle criticism? You know, because there's a lot of people that don't like you. And he said, well, that's an understatement. And then he went on to explain how he handles, you know, handles criticism. And that's always an interesting question for me is for one, how do people handle it when they get to a level, because if you are going to be successful, you're going to have haters.

What did he say?

Well, he said, he talked about Don Miguel, Don Miguel Rees, Book the Four Agreements. Not taking it personally, really realizing that what someone says is not about you, it's about them. And it was really great. Here's what's frustrating to me also too, because they record all of Google Zeitgeist. If you go and type in Google Zeitgeist, guys, 2014, you can see all the talks there. Snoop Dogg was there. And you know, Martin Rothblatt, who started Sirius Radio, satellite radio, you know, Bob Roth, who's a friend of mine on Transcendental Meditation, you know, just a bunch of game changers. I mean, you can, like watch these presentations for free. You know, they even included the Q and A with Jimmy Carter, who was also there. And I think the only presentation where they just Stopped it where they didn't show the q and A from the audience was Bill Clinton. And I'm like, damn it. You know, because my, you know, it's recorded, but they don't have it on the site yet. Maybe they will. But. Yeah, he just simply talked about, you know, you can't make it about you. It's about the other person. You know, he'll listen to what they say, he'll take in what it is they say, but it's really, you know, someone just flat out attacks you. You know, that's really more about them and your interpretation of it. So my question to you is, since you so focus on ridding people of insecurity, it still is biting. I mean, when I. I mean, me and Dean have people that criticize the free podcast that we do. You know, they're, oh, you guys could do it shorter. Oh, Joe, name drops too much or, you know, whatever. But, you know, they're. They're very tiny compared to Dean.

Talks too much. Right?

Or whatever. Yeah, but. But my.

My thing to you is too much value. That's. Yeah.

You know, how. How do you recommend our listeners interpret attacks inter.

Because sometimes they could be legit.

I mean, I' say, hey, you screwed up, or hey, you should look at that. I'll take it in. But the question is, you know, letting it eat at you. Letting it, you know, letting it become.

Toxic models that I use. Because, you know, I've been a public figure. We'll just call it that. Some people say I'm a, you know, an industry celebrity. I've been called lots of different things, but let's just call me a public figure, right? I've been in the public eye through YouTube and television and on stage for years now. And so anytime you expose yourself as a public figure to the world, you're going to. It's a numbers game. You're going to get a certain percentage of the audience that is not going to like you because that's a certain percentage of the audience that doesn't like themselves. Okay? And so we take that a little further and we get these comments. They're either emails or handwritten letters. Rarely, rarely, Joe, do people ever say this shit to our face. They would be mortified if they actually were called on it. In fact, I. I've made great strides. But what I'm about to tell you is going to sound a little obsessive. Okay? It's because it is. I used to be fascinated with haters, and I would track these mothers down and I would find out who they were and try to get them on the phone and talk to them and figure out, like, why they felt the way they did. And now I don't do that now because I don't have the time, nor do I care as much anymore. But what I found was that these individuals were starving. That these individuals were starving for attention. They were starving for a claim, they were starving for approval. They were starving for any level of need that we have as a human being to be acknowledged and significance. These people were starved in it. And many of these people had been bullies their whole life because they were bullied at some point or they were neglected at some point. And my level of empathy has risen tremendously for haters after I started tracking them down. That's one thing. The second thing that I have done with criticism is I ask myself, do I know the person and do they know me now? They know me, that's fine. But if I know them, I'll listen a little closer to what they have to say. Then the next level is, do I care and respect them? Do I care about them and do I respect them? And if the answer is yes, then I'll carry and then I'll listen even closer to what I have, what they have to say. And then the last ring is, do I trust their guidance? Okay? And so if I know them, I care about them, and I trust their guidance, then and only then will I fully absorb a serious negative criticism. Because, you know, like, literally, if Dean or Joe or any one of the people that I talked to by my 21 Advocate Circle in the previous podcast we did, if Anyone in my 21 advocates called me up with something very scathing about something I had done, I would stop everything. I would take it very seriously, and I would sit and listen and utilize what they'd have to say. And maybe they were having a bad day and it has nothing to do with me, but more than likely, if I love them, I trust them, I respect them, and I listen to their guidance, then what they have to say is probably very valid. And then, and only then, will I let it really deeply impact me and get past my filters. But the problem is, most people get so upset and hurt by people that they don't know, that they don't care about, that they don't love, and that they don't trust the guidance of. Then they get all upset when they hear these scathing words. But really, where's your filter system? You have to have filtration. We have filtration in our air purifiers. Or water purifiers. We have to have them in our feedback purifiers.

That's great advice.

That really is good advice. Yeah. Well, there you go.

So this episode is a combination of. We're going to get into some marketing techniques and simultaneously how to deal with criticism and whatnot. I like it.

I do, too. Yeah.

So anything you want to add to that, Dean?

You know, it's interesting that we have sometimes in the comments in. And not so much anymore. We used to have maybe some. In the comments, people would say things, but I always take the thing, especially if it's, you know, where they're lashing out in a forum or in a comments or on Facebook or anything like that. It's. It's often more interesting to watch other people come to your defense than to come to your own defense, you know, and that's kind of the thing, I think, without knowing it, that's kind of the approach that I've always taken. Just like what Sean was talking about.

If I don't.

If I don't know them, if they're, you know, they're just some random person saying that everybody's entitled to their opinion. I don't let it. I don't let it affect me, you know? Yeah.

If I could give one last example here, that's short, is, you know, write a book, then publish it, then have it be a best seller, then read your Amazon comments and you will get a really good idea of how funny human nature is. Because I did this a couple weeks ago. A couple days ago, actually, I was checking on something about my book, and I just typed it into Amazon, started reading the comments, and literally there was this one person just going off. Sean Stevenson just quotes famous people. This is a waste of your time. He's. He just brags about his own life. This is a joke. There's no valuable information. And I'm reading this going, whoa. And then right underneath it, somebody else comes and says, this is the most valuable book I read in my entire life. He has deep, insightful wisdom. The skill sets that he's learned from his life are so worth listening to. And I'm thinking, wait, are we talking about the same book? I mean. Yeah, two different. I mean, and you get this. You get different opinions when you do something with your life. I mean, we are talking about marketing, Joe, because when you create products and services and you deliver them to the world, you have to be prepared for people's response. Do you think everybody liked Steve Jobs? No. There's still people that hate Steve Jobs, think everybody, like, you know, the. The inventors and creators of some of our favorite products and services. No, but if you go into marketing wanting to be liked, you're going to go broke because you're going to get so overwhelmed with the responses from people. Even if they're just one out of ten, one out of a hundred, one of the thousand that are negative, you will have an emotional breakdown. You will take it personally, and it will crush your business.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally. No, that was. That was. That was a good rant.

You know that there's just so much, you know, when you think about all the people. We're really ultimately talking about our interactions with people. People skills, too, because, you know, in the last episode when you talked about the. Your, you know, you're 21, that those. Those people have a. You have a different relationship with those people than you have with your sort of your inner circle personally. And then your, you know, the, the people who have, you know, bought things from you or who are. Who have paid you money and then your. Your broader audience. And, you know, it's really interesting how all these dynamics. I was thinking about it with, or talking about it with Richard Rossi. We've been recording a Perfect Life podcast, and one of the elements, we kind of broke down into five main sort of divisions that go into a perfect life. And we started with kind of the me, which is if you stripped naked and landed on a. An island, that's the me division sort of thing. Everything that you brought with you, your. Your mind, your body, spirit, all of that stuff, your skills, everything that you. That you do to equip yourself is. Is kind of the me area and then the. The next area, the kind of the outer ring. It'd be interesting to get your guys feedback on the progression of this, but everybody starts with that, and that's one of the units. Then the next thing that we all have equally is our time. And so we've got to manage that sort of division of our life in terms of what we're going to do to allocate that time. So everybody comes in. Everybody. If you strip it all away, we've got those two things in common. We've got our. The basic. The body, the mind that we were born with or we have now. And sometimes that creates a different environment, like Sean, the way, you know, being born with the, you know, where every sneeze could break your collarbone creates a different experience for people. So that requires some level of adjustment or management or whatever goes into that, and that takes Uses some of your time to do that. But then the next layer out is your environment. This is all the things that you surround yourself with. You know, where you live, your house, your car, all the physical things, all the sort of context for your life. If you choose to be a teacher or a firefighter, or you choose to be a priest, or you choose whatever your context is that's going to create an environment around you. And then money is the other one that we all have to deal within that. We live in a society that runs on money. And so our ability to make money, save money, you know, allocate and distribute that money to support all the things that we've chosen for our, for our lifestyle are, is another element that we have to manage. And then the people, you know, we're, everybody has. We're a, you know, people based society. So we've got. This is where I was going with this when I was talking with Richard about this. You know, we. It's just, it's, it's amazing when you think about all the different flavors of people, all the different categories of people that we have to sort of manage and having people. Strategies really is an important part of it, you know, and having. I love that you have a system to deal with criticism that's coming in, but, you know, looking at the different levels of people from, you know, your, your spouse or your partner, your kids, your immediate family, your, your extended family, your friends, that is your chosen family, your clients, the, your team, the, the audience that you have, your prospects, your community, the, the world, you know, going out to the, the world, how you interact with the world. There's just so many layers of that and often we're realizing a lot of people don't have strategies for managing all of those different relationships and they end up getting out of balance in a lot of that.

Absolutely. We see it when we see. I was just reading an article about how many suicides happen amongst entrepreneurs who are starting up new companies and how in the entrepreneurial world, no one wants to talk about how they're struggling because it feels like it's a negative reflection on your business and therefore hurts the business. So we deal with an industry where we always have to act like we have it all together. We're always fine, profits are good and things are awesome. And yet the truth is we go through seasons, we have winter, where times do get tight at times, we go through personal challenges. And to always put on a face like you have it all together and that you have it all managed properly actually can cause More problems than by being honest, you know, and they've proven in psychology that when you resist telling the truth, you have what you're going through. You actually amplify the impact that the truth is having on you. If it's a negative impact, it continues to grow worse because you're trying to suppress it. And, you know, I. I believe as entrepreneurs, as marketers, we have to understand that to run our businesses, we first need lives that run well. You know, I think it is a massive failure to be worth billions of dollars and hate your time on this planet.

Right.

That's just me. Not everybody's going to agree with that. But I personally think that wealth isn't just about the number of Benjamins in your bank account. I think that that's massive of wealth. But then we have how we feel in our body. How's our health? I think that health is an incredible part of wealth. I think there's the quality of relationship. If you're lonely, hugging your pillow at night, wanting so desperately to be touched, and not having any human interaction, that is a form of bankruptcy. As bad as not having money. So I'm a big believer that if we got incredible chance of understanding these strategies that you're talking about and mastering them, and we can grow our businesses.

Well, we were looking at them as. And kind of having the discussion about them as like, you know, five dials that you're adjusting, and every one of them has ramifications through the others. You know, it's what this. What you choose to invest your time and energy into building up your skills as a speaker or a marketer or your knowledge or your, you know, abilities as a, you know, craftsman or skilled. Whatever it is that you fill in the blank on that. That time that you spend on that turning that dial is going to change the environment that you get to surround yourself with.

You know, every marketing conference I've ever been to, people always come up to me afterwards and saying, you know, there's millions of books on how to strategize your business, but I really just need to understand how to communicate with my children. I mean, why am I busting my ass in my company if my children hate me? So I totally get it.

Yeah. So it's really. It's kind of a fascinating thing. We've been so. I'm glad to kind of bring that out there. This seems like more of a context for the conversation we're having than specifically talking about marketing, because some of the things that you've been sharing are just, you know, tremendous People strategies and life strategies. So I wanted to bring that into the, into the conversation.

Hey, let me, let me mention something too, just so you know, because I do want to talk about marketing strategies because I opened my big mouth and said that in the very beginning that we would. And I do agree. And I, you know, I think I have some sort of bizarre talent that if I have to push hard enough, I can segue almost anything into anything and make it seem like it is interrelated. The truth is that had it not been for me studying marketing, I never would have been exposed to all of the personal development and all of the things about life and many of these amazing relationships that I've ended up having in my life and breakthroughs and overcoming a lot of things that were issues in my life and that many that still are and that I'll go into that pool, that library, that resource that I've got kind of years of entry into, had it not been for the study of marketing. Because marketing gets a real bad rap, as we all know that. And it's because it's misunderstood. Sales gets a bad rap mostly from people that can't do it and aren't affected by it. So therefore what people are not up on, they're down on. And it's like human nature. And marketing is really applied psychology and everything. You know, Sean is a PhD. I mean, Sean's a hypnotherapist. I mean, he's a really well educated therapist. I mean, that's dealt with a bunch of stuff in marketing. In order to persuade and in order to influence people is really about human behavior and how to, you know, I mean, even on the episode that we just did with Sean, he talked about, you know, speaking is transferring ideas and shifting people's emotions. Well, that's exactly what we're trying to do in the field of marketing here. And one thing that you mentioned, Sean, is like, if you're lonely at night and you don't have anyone to touch you, that could be as much of a form of bankruptcy as not having any money in the bank. And if you understand marketing, your chances of meeting somebody are much more likely than someone that isn't. If you have a family member that needs an organ transplant and there is a limited supply of organs and they are going to die. Knowing how to write a sales letter, knowing how to access a community gives you a much greater advantage than someone that does not have those skills. And the bottom line is the vast majority of people not only don't have these skills, they don't even have the context of understanding skills like this even exist that they actually can go somewhere and learn from them. I mean, we hear it almost weekly when we are out public where it's like, my God, you know, I wish I even knew about. I love marketing. You know, three years ago when you first saw, you know, I wish I would have learned this 10 years ago. And it's like, well, yeah, but so what? It's 10 years ago and you didn't, but you have today, and that's awesome.

To plant the tree.

Yeah, exactly. What's that whole quote? The best time to plant an oak tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is like today. So let's talk about dean marketing starting from before we started the recording here, you know, going into. To breakthroughs of the before unit. But I wanted to paint that picture so that all of this is interrelated. I mean, everything we talk about is interrelated. It's all, you know, I mean, you know, you got to do a sales job and a marketing job on yourself every morning when you wake up with where you're going to spend your time, with, what, you're going to write a love story, you're going to write a tragedy. You know, I mean, it's all a marketing angle.

I mean, to me that it's because you're right, like treating it like. Like a movie in a way. You know, it was a great metaphor for it where you're talking about writing a love story or a tragedy or whatever. But there's a lot of great stuff in treating it like a movie.

Yeah, to me it's a, you know, life is a game and I want to set it up so I play the game. So I enjoy the game. And sometimes I don't enjoy the game because I will trip myself up and I will make dumb decisions and I'll whine and I'll bitch and I'll bellyache about stuff internally, sometimes externally, and other times I'm enthusiastic and I'm awesome, but it's a sales job job. And you know, we're always selling ourselves. We're always marketing to ourselves. So I take marketing to that level. I mean, to me, that works. That may not make any sense to anyone else, but to me it totally. It works for me and I like it.

Something I wanted to say based on what I've learned from you about marketing, you know in your Draw Shop video where you talked about how sales is oxygen to a company.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I've been thinking about this and sitting. If sales Are the oxygen to a company, then that makes marketing the lungs. You know, the lungs are marking. You have to, if you don't, if you hold your breath, you aren't going to get the oxygen. If you 68, right. You have to be breathing, you have to be utilizing the lungs. And it's the marketing that brings in the oxygen. So you can't have one without the other. I mean, if you have the oxygen but you're not willing to breathe, you're gonna die. And if you are willing to breathe but you don't have the oxygen, you're gonna die. So I feel like sales and marketing are sustaining life and business.

No, totally. Let me share one thing with you, which you guys have seen this before, but I, I shared it on, I shared it on my Facebook page and a guy posted it and tagged me. And you know, I've seen this before, but it's, it's a headline that says why is it a man wakes up after sleeping under an advertised blanket on an advertised mattress and pulls off advertised pajamas, bathes in an advertised shower, shaves with an advertised razor, brushes his teeth with advertised toothpaste, washes with advertised soap, puts on advertised clothes, drinks a cup of advertised coffee, drives to work in an advertised car, and then refuses to advertise believing it doesn't pay later. If business is poor, he advertises it is for sale. Why is it.

Very interesting?

Yeah, yeah. So now we can use the field of advertising. But advertising is, you know, salesmanship multiplied as you know, the late famous John. That was John E. Kennedy, right. That said that, I think. But it's, you know, life is this, we're all affected by, by it. I mean you can either, you know, it is oxygen, you know, I mean if you think, you know, if you think marketing and selling and advertising isn't, isn't useful, you know, try holding your breath for three minutes and see how you feel. I mean, do that to your business. Do that to your life. So with all the conversation we had, you know, what I'd like to say was what Sean has, you know the last episode we just did with Sean about, you know, public speaking. I mean these are all forms of ways to communicate. It's all, you know, advertising is what you say and who you say it to. And sometimes people self talk. They need to rewrite the copy of their own brain, their own internal dialogue. I mean truly one of the reasons I meditate and got into meditating is like my self talk in my life based on things that I learned based on things that happened instead of responding to things, reacting to them. I mean, I could have written so many horror stories based on the internal self talk in my brain. And it's been a journey to reprogram those things. And that's also one of the reasons why I became friends with a guy like Sean Stephenson. Because we can add value to each other by, hey, you know this, I know that, let's talk about it, let's make each other better. And I mean, I think of our, I love marketing podcasts as just sharing our thoughts and ideas to the world. To go back to what Sean said, to transfer ideas to other people and to shift their emotions and hopefully that will result in a behavioral change that will be beneficial.

And Sean said it about everybody trying to put on a good front is Eben was saying, try and approach things bringing your latest chunk of marble than your latest David. Which that's pretty subtle, but it's pretty interesting. A lot of times people are trying to present themselves as the, look at this masterpiece that I've created here. Everything's great, but the real thing is to bring it as, here's my biggest piece of marble here, you know, that I'm working on trying to create my David.

Well, I think when people look at marketers and successful business tycoons and entrepreneurs, they, they look back and they go, wow, I so want that. But if that person said, oh, really? You really want that? And then they open the curtain and said, here's what I went through, here's what I had to go through. Here's what I had to learn, here's what I had to endure to have this. It would be potentially so overwhelming that the person might say, never mind, I don't want that. Or maybe it would be so amazing that they would say, whoa, that is worth it. But that looks like a lot of work. I don't want to put it in, you know, and, and that's the thing is when we are building our businesses, we have to remember as we look up, the people that have what we have didn't always have it. They, they had to go through things and learn things that you may not want to personally endure.

Yeah, exactly.

It's so true. It's so true. So, Dean, let's bedazzle people for the next, however much time we have left here, 15 minutes or whatever on this episode to tie in some marketing lessons. So by the time everyone's done, they got a good dose of how to rethink criticism and haters and feedback, be more self accepting of humanity because Knowing those that have the toughest shells hide the tenderest meat and those that are the hardest to love are the ones that need it the most. I'm just using cliches from movies and books and shit I've read and then just to give the appearance that I actually have some idea of self help talk about define the before, during and after units and how everything we've talked about can apply to that and also any breakthroughs that have occurred. But let's.

Yeah, I mean that the thing I think in the, maybe even the next couple of episodes that we do, Joe will do the talk about a lot of these breakthroughs that I had over the summer here I got to.

You wear Lululemon yet?

No, not yet. Sorry. Yeah, A lot of the different, you know, seeing so many different businesses and seeing where the breakthroughs are, I mean that's the part of what we were looking at always is where's the big breakthrough? Where's the thing that you can have the biggest leverage. And one of the things that really kind of is universally true that I've seen in most businesses is that if you've been in business for a while and you've been adding value and you've got an audience, you have people who are paying attention to you, whether you've been doing a newsletter or a podcast or on your social media or whatever it is, there is a built in audience of people who would like a deeper relationship with you. No matter what you think. Even if it's, even if you have only sold $97 products or one $97 products or something, even if that's the thing that you've. Or a lower priced membership area. And so one of the best examples of that was a guy in Australia, he came to the breakthrough boot and the second time that he came and he does music, he's a former DJ and producer who made a six figure living as a DJ playing in clubs and doing all the music as a career. And so he's been doing you know, info products and trainings for people who want to make music, their career, you know, showing them how to be more productive, make more music, how to, you know, improve the music that they're making. And he'd always came into it it with a mindset that well you know these people in the aspiring DJs, it's really not, they don't have a lot of money. They're you know, in a situation where, you know, it's low priced things that they, that they buy. And I challenged him in the event while we were at the event to rethink that belief because it's a limiting belief that, you know, well, they don't, people, they don't buy expensive things or whatever. And I said, you know, we wrote a message that he sent out to just his list of subscribers in Australia and just a trial balloon message, just sent out a message and said, hey, I'm doing a music mastermind in Sydney next month, you know, with a small group of musicians or a small group of deeds. I forget the exact wording but the essence was hey, I'm doing a three day, you know, music weekend or two day music weekend. Would you like to join us? And that's it, right? Just sent out the message just to see would people like to join that. And when they sent back yes. And he was surprised. All these replies are coming in while we're sitting there in the event. And he, you know, picked the date. I had him, you know, reserve a room in the same hotel where we were the board, you know, one of the boardrooms right where we were. So I kind of like just kind of pushed him over the fence. I said, let's you know, pick a date which is this weekend coming up. Now this was end of August, so now it was kind of six weeks away. And tell them exactly what you're, what you're going to do. That's just a small group. And you know, the highest price that he could imagine charging somebody for that was $1,000. And so I said, tell them it's $1,000. Mind you, he'd never sold them anything that was, you know, more than I think he had. His membership site was like $50 a month or something like that. And you know, so he ends up getting all these people confirming that yes, I'm in, I'd love to come to that. So he had half of this event sold out at, while we were at the actual Breakthrough Blueprint and he had enough people from Melbourne to get a start on, you know, 30% of another event in Melbourne. And so it's pretty amazing that just that kind of, you know, taken the leap kind of thing if you've got an audience of people that are.

That.

Are paying attention to you and like you and you've been adding value to them that there's this, I think a kind of pent up group of people who would love to do that and know the value of spending time with you. And it's kind of interesting.

Dean, do you think that's a, almost like a self worth? Like when a person Goes, really? You think people would pay that you really think people would want to learn from me? I mean, do you think that how much of that is like a self worth believing in yourself, that what you have to say is worth money versus like the technical side of it all?

I believe it's all that, yes, 100% that. But the truth is, the thing is that people often, they don't want to do something like that because they're afraid to fail. Right. And I heard Gary Vaynerchuk has started a new show on YouTube, which is great. It's Ask Gary. Vee's like 25 or 27 episodes in now. He's doing a daily like 10 or 12 minute video where he just answers questions. And somebody, he got to the root of something in one of the episodes that I was watching this morning that they were afraid of failing. And what usually that failure, that fear is tied to a specific person. And the question he asked them was who? You got to kind of dig a little deeper and ask yourself, who is it that I'm afraid of failing in front of and acknowledging that? And maybe it's going and having a conversation with them on that, you know, and so often where, you know, it's like, I think that people have a fear of failing publicly, like to their, their audience or to their mentor, whatever it is. And so, you know, doing a message, like just sending out a simple invitation and saying to people, hey, I'm, I'm doing this. Send me an email if you're interested or just reply and let me know if you're interested. And then you can just make your offer only to the people who said they were interested. So you're not going through this big thing. Like, I think everybody would have a fear of if I'm, if I'm gonna publicly say I'm doing this big event and then nobody, you know, I'm constantly having to, you know, know, promote it, promote it, promote it to try and convince people to come. And then if it didn't work out, that would be perceived as a failure.

Sure. Well, I can tell you, I mean, I got my event coming up and I felt that twinge of pain at times of, oh my goodness, you know, I'm gonna have J. Bram and Joe Polish and all these people presenting that whole, you know, big businesses and have tons of people attending their event. And what if I only get 50 people? What if I only get 60 people? You know, what, what is it? What if it's not a packed house? What are they going to think of Me, are they going to say that that was not a good event? Is it not a value? And so that. But focusing on that can cause every great idea, every great action step that I could take in my marketing to get paralyzed.

It can just.

It withers away. And. And I'll go even further and say two little aspects about that, Dean, which is one, people who are afraid to market an event, a product or service, I think it's got two aspects. One is they're afraid of failure, but specifically, they would rather never send out that email campaign. They would never like to do the podcast, because if it never explodes, they could always say, well, I could do that, you know, I could do that, you know, but I choose not to. And so therefore, they can keep holding that little vision that they could be successful if they put in the effort, right? But if they actually put in the effort and it didn't succeed, then they'd have to sit with, holy crap, does that mean I'm not good? And then it would hit their identity, and then that's when it really starts to hurt. And the second component that I think is even higher level, even deeper underneath the skin of it all, which is I really think people are also really petrified to succeed. And what do I mean by that? Well, when you fail, you usually get people to put their arm around you, say, it's okay, Dean, it's okay, Joe, you'll get them next time. And you get this weird cousin of love that we call, you know, like, sympathy, right? But it's not really love. It's like, you know, you. You didn't get it this time, kiddo. You'll get it next time. And then at least we get that, right? But when we succeed, holy shit. That means we actually have to raise our game. That means we actually now have to deliver on that seminar. We have to deliver on the product. We actually have to continue to raise the stakes. And success is scary because it means now we have to hold ourselves to a new standard. When you don't do anything, you have those standards to worry about. But when you actually start achieving something of greatness, you know, and I see this when I watch Joe's events and I. And I see, you know, Tony Rock Robbins doing things, you know, they have to up their game every year because people are gonna be like, okay, now what, Joe? Okay, yeah, you had Steve Forbes. Okay, now what? You know, like, who are you gonna bring to the table now? What are you going to do to bring value to 25k now? You know, it's and, and that can be scary to people that don't believe in themselves.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

You know, one thing I also want to mention, this is going to sound kind of weird and stuff, but it, this is my interpretation of what I'm hearing you guys say going into anything. I always have loved the Henry Ford quote. If you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right. And if you go into something with an attitude of playing to win versus playing not to lose, you're going to, it's going to become a self fulfilling prophecy. You can operate within an Abundance mindset or you can operate out of a scarcity mindset. And me and Dan Sullivan did a great episode on The Abundance neighborhood versus the Scarcity neighborhood on 10Xtalk.com, which I highly encourage people to listen to. It's pretty darn cool.

I'm addicted to it myself now. Joe.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's good. And the whole thing with this, it's about as close as I can get to Law of Attraction sort of stuff from an attitude sort of standpoint. And of course, Shawn, you can speak much better to that subject than me. For years. I've had the top selling marketing program in Nightingale Conant for over a decade. And one of the guys who's no longer there that was heavily involved with working with all of the different authors and stuff, what I find kind of irritating, but sometimes you look like a jerk if you mention this. And so, so I'll put myself out there. There's a lot of people that always talk about how money's not important and what's really important is your legacy and a fulfilled life and changing the world and saving the world and all that stuff. And I don't believe I'm going to save the world, nor does the world need to be saved and it's going to be operating perfectly fine after I'm gone and that sort of stuff. A lot of people take this really seriously. And so they will, they will poo poo marketing and basically talk about things that they think are the most important or that are more noble or higher level and they'll do programs about it and they'll do talks about that. And what's funny is that at Nightingale, this guy told me, he goes, the authors that we have that talk about how mostly a lot of spiritual subject matter, there's a difference between someone doing a spiritual program and being a spiritual person, by the way, I mean, we all know that if you ever invalidate the message because of the messenger, you may never read another book or attend another seminar because a lot of people that teach stuff don't do what they teach you.

Yeah.

What he told me is that the authors that actually complain the most about their royalty checks are the ones that basically do programs about how money's not important, that sort of stuff, but they're the ones that actually complain the most. And I always thought, you know, that's the backstage of this fucking world.

I like Tim Ferriss, I love Tim, but that boy doesn't work a four hour work week. I think he works like a four hour, you know, coffee meeting, you know, Like, I don't who among us really can be as perfect as we try to share it and sell it as. I mean, but the truth is if you tried to sell the real solutions, no one would freakin buy it. Because let's look at it. Okay, you say, how do you get rich? Okay, let me tell you how you get rich. You work your ass off, you struggle for years, potentially. You surround yourself with mentors, you get up at 6am, you keep your body in shape, you learn about, you know, constantly listening to podcasts and reading tons of books and going to events and keeping your mind shut. And you just list all the things that it takes to get to where you're at, right? And then you say that's what it takes and you make that the title of your program. I don't know. No, you say the Four Hour Workweek. Oh, okay. I could do a four hour workweek.

Yeah, yeah. So my point, my point is this. You know, you can make a giant shift in what we're talking about if you just literally know what to do and you get your priorities straight. And I shouldn't even say priorities. There's a guy who I've had communications with, he wrote a book called essentially Greg McKeon. Great book, highly recommended. Essentialism and what I learned about the word priority. It used to be just priority, one thing, the most important thing. When the word was first used, I think it went like 500 years before it ever had. I think it was like in the 1800s or 1900s. It had changed from priority to the use of priorities. As if there could be more than one thing. Part of it though, is getting your act right. One of my favorite quotes comes from the Book of Survival by Anthony Greenback that said, in order to get through an impossible situation, you don't need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do. A lot of times you can be putting effort, effort, effort, effort, hard effort into something and you're not getting anywhere because you don't know what you're doing. But then you figure out what to do, and then all of a sudden that effort, and sometimes it gets. It could be 10% of the effort. 1/100 of the effort will produce 100 times more of the results in a lot of ways. What we think of. I love marketing. As we talk about marketing, we sell people what they want. They think marketing is a means to make a lot of money. But we give them what they need. That's why we do subjects on health. That's why we do things on the brain. That's why we have you as a guest. We always want to bring in all of these other capabilities, but because the reality is we're getting people into the door with getting them excited about money. But money is only one element of success. And there's a lot of different tools, and you got to pick. These are the tools that I want in my toolbox. But the fact is, you don't need to do 100 things in order to get success. You just need to do a few things right and get them right. And you take public speaking. You've got this event that's coming up in November, and there are people that have for years have been struggling trying to make money as a speaker. They want to do it. They want to figure out how to do it. But if they go to your event, I guarantee you they're going to walk out of there and they are going to know what to do. But there's a lot of people that will hear it, but they won't sign up for the event. They'll spend another 10 years floundering around thinking they don't need that shit. More than anything, like Gary Halbert used to say, we want this to be a giant meat cleaver that separates humanity from the losers to the winners. These are the ones. This is the shit that we have learned how to do. This is how you do it. Go for it. There's other people that are like, those will be the haters that we talked about earlier. But unfortunately, they probably hate themselves anyway since I said the thing with the event. Shawn, plug your event. Give out the website for anyone that may want to check out the event that you're doing on how to be really successful in the event as a speaker.

Yes, absolutely. So if you have to present at any time in your life as an entrepreneur, then you need to be at this event. It's more than just people that want to get paid $10,000 a speech or more. That's how we bill it. But really it's. How do you just become incredible at presenting your ideas and marketing your ideas to the masses through the means of spoken word. And so the event is November 13th to the 16th in Scottsdale, Arizona. To get all the information, we have incredible speakers on how to put together your message, how to deliver your message, how to package your message in the marketing of it all. And then how do you have the attitude that gets you the bookings in the first place? So we have speakers like Jay Abraham, Joe Polish, Dean Graziosi. We have speakers that are talking about, like Larry Wingett about delivering material that gets the eye of corporations and conferences. We have. We have spoken word poets talking about how do you make your voice empowering. We have comics. It just goes on and on and on. And it's going to be an incredible event. You can go to see more details about it at Sean Stevenson. And that's spelled S E A N S T E P H E N S O N.com 10K. So that's 10K. And I would love to see you there. I think that Joe would love to see you there. And I guarantee you you're going to get so much value just from Joe has to say that you're going to get 10 times what you're going to pay just to hear Joe. That's my personal opinion.

That will be true and I can guarantee that. So there we go. And this helped Dean. This boy can pitch. I mean, did you just hear that?

You know what?

Brilliant.

Let's break it down. He was crystal clear, told them exactly what to do, told them what was in for it, said it with confidence. I think that's part of the thing. It's totally congruent. Excellent. Five out of five.

There you go. Yeah. So what we'll do, Dean, we'll follow up on what are we going to talk about on future episodes of I Love Marketing to kind of give a cliffhanger.

I've got a whole list of breakthroughs that are like. I think they're almost packaged breakthroughs. I think things that used in different places kind of like the nine word email is like a magic trick that can be used across so many different businesses. I think I've identified the structure of some reliable, immediately implementable breakthroughs that people can use.

Yep, yep. Exactly.

Cool.

So if you've not listened to Sean's episode that we just did with Him. Go ahead and listen to that. That was the last episode that we did and we've got some great episodes. If you're behind on any or if you're brand new to I love marketing, welcome. We do have people that do meetup groups all over the world. We have a meetup tab on ilovemarketing.com if you ever want to go in person and attend an I Love Marketing meetup group or if you want to start one yourself, you can download the document that we have on our website and you can start a meetup group to take a bunch of other like minded individuals that love talking about the most important subject on the planet as it relates to having a success, successful business, which is direct response marketing. And we have a whole guideline and if you haven't read Breakthrough DNA, that's kind of what started it all. It's free on ilovemarketing.com download and read it. If you haven't read it in a while, read it again. It's one of those things. It's timeless. It doesn't sell anything. It just simply lays out the eight profit activators that me and Dean are constantly referring to and talking about on I love Marketing. And if you know anyone that would benefit from sharing this, we put this out there to the world so we can have as many people, you know benefit from it. So please post this on any social media, share it with friends. We would very much appreciate it and that's what motivates us to keep doing this for everybody. So, Sean, it was great having you again as kind of a sitting guest. That this, this whole episode, I thought just kind of went in a bunch of really valuable directions.

Really? Really? You gonna say to a wheelchair guy, sitting guest, but okay, I got you. I understand.

Yeah. I mean, I need to demonstrate to the world that I'm. Yeah, just sounded like I'm just a careless, hurtful, vicious sort of human being.

That is.

I'm gonna go, literally, I'm gonna go read A New Earth right now just by Accentoli to just get my awareness level too. Yeah, I mean, all day is gonna be spent with some Wayne Dynamics and some Ken Wilbur and just some meditating. I mean, I've got to become a better human being. So that's it, guys. So thank you. Anything else you want to say, Dean? Or have I been rattled?

That was great.

All right, everyone.

I really appreciate being on your program. I love it and I believe in these podcasts and it's, it's almost criminal that you don't charge for these things. I. When I go to bed at night, sometimes I can't sleep. I just slip on a podcast from I Love Marketing or Joe, some of your other podcasts with 10. What is it? 10x talk. Yeah, 10x talk. And you know what? When you just fill your mind with these kinds of information and the fact that they're free, what the hell are you doing with your life? And you're not listening. That's all I gotta say.

Exactly. Thank you. All right, everyone, please comment. And we will talk to you. We will. I guess we will be talking to you on the next episode of I Love Marketing.

Thank you so much, Sam.