Jay Abraham on Thinking Differently - I Love Marketing Episode #244

Welcome to I Love Marketing where Joe Polish and Dean Jackson talk about new marketing ideas, direct mail ideas, lead generation, lead conversion, getting referrals, stick strategies, email marketing, psychology, books, people, and even productivity. This episode is a special segment from an industry leader who is a friend of Joe Polish and Dean Jackson that we felt would be great benefit for you here on I Love Marketing. Also, Joe and Dean have put together a free report called Breakthrough DNA 8 Profit Activators you can trigger in your business right now. Visit ilovemarketing.com DNA to get instant access to that report and put the eight profit activators to place in your business today. Now let's get to this week's episode. Enjoy.

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

This is the I Love Marketing podcast. I am extraordinarily pleased to have the next presenter present and as a guest. His name is Jay Abraham. He is a marketing genius. He's probably responsible for making more people marketing experts and consultants than probably anyone alive. He's known as the $9.4 billion man. He's worked in over 465 industries. He popularized a unique selling proposition. Just a ton of stuff, and he's probably never done a 10 minute talk in his entire life. So this is really creating a presentation. But Jay is a brilliant genius. And so with great pleasure, I want to introduce Mr. Jay Abraham.

First thing. I'm overdressed.

Yeah.

Okay, so I got a PowerPoint, but I'm not going to use it because I think I can give you better if you'll let me be the one person that uses his stupid notes. And I got more notes than 10 minutes, so I'll just stop when it dings. But you can put my go backwards. Yeah, that's it. So just that's the topic on thinking differently, because I'm known for thinking different than anybody else. And I'm going to try to give you the why as Joe's thing and I'll give you as much contextualization. So I'm going to start with a couple of things I wrote last night because I think it'll be better than this PowerPoint. So the real question is why people fail to recognize the obvious. A guy I think at Cornell did something really interesting and I read it a couple years ago and it was bizarre. And I want to quote it because he said most incompetent people don't know they're incompetent. And one of the reasons it's very interesting. One of the reasons ignorant people tend to be blissfully Self assured. Think about that. Blissfully self assured is because the skills required for competency are often the same skills necessary to recognize competency. So this is really interesting. So the incompetent think about this and this is gonna get into what I'm gonna say. The incompetent suffer doubly because first of all, they reach erroneous conclusions that make them delighted and they make really bad choices. But their incompetence robs them of the ability to even recognize reality. And the key here is I want to give you a different reality. I want to give you a different reality. But I'm going to give you another quote because I love quotes. So Socrates says, a life unexamined is a life not worth living. I believe a business that isn't constantly reexamined and is a business not worth living. Okay, so now we're going to get into this good stuff. And I did it the other night, so all that stuff I threw out the door. Bear with me. I'm known for being this guy. I can look at strategy, marketing, business models, positioning, preemption, all that stuff from a different point of view. And I want to tell you the why and the how and then what it means to you, because it's irrelevant. If I'm that good and you don't know how to do it, I'm not that good. I've just been exposed to so damn many higher, better, easier, faster, safer ways to do stuff than most people have ever been exposed to. And I want to explain a little bit of my history, how I can give you context for yourself. So I am hopelessly curious. I just love learning about everything I don't know about and my career. I have no education. My career started because I was fortunate that I sort of self selected. I was attracted. And bear with me because I've done 86 hours spontaneously. But I want to make sure I give you this to people who always could look at a situation from a different slant. They seemed to know how to untangle Gordian knots that no one else in their industry even figured out was a deterrent. I realized that most entrepreneurs are confounded and they're impeded by knots, puzzles, status quo thinking, acceptance, challenging business dilemmas they don't even know they're struggling with. Seriously. Okay, so if you don't know you're struggling with it, you can't solve it. So I've developed a really fascinating way of looking at life. And it's because of the influence of confluence. And by that I mean I hope I'M saying it right, I've had such a diversity of experience and I thought that I share a little bit about the generalities and I'll tell you some of the experiences and what I learned from it and then give you a context for yourself. So the one thing and I was thinking about this for the first time. Cause Joe said do this and I'm running. Cause I got now six minutes left is the people that I was exposed to were always felt like they were leading a revolution, a crusade. It was not about being. It was very much like Dean said, and I'll be very fast. But they had undefatigable enjoyment for what they did. Not just what they did industry wise, but who they were doing it for. Meaning their clients, the impact they were having on their business. And I realized that most entrepreneurs are restricted, limited, they're stuck and don't even know it. And I'm gonna share with you now some of the ways that I got to develop what I call divergent thinking. Funnel vision versus tunnel vision. So I'm gonna go through all the things I experienced for the first third of my life quickly and tell you what I learned from and then give you the so When I was 17 I read the book Tom Sawyer. Loved it. I had a job painting fire hydrants. I got paid 50 cents apiece. I thought what would happen if I gave a bunch of 14 year olds the paint and the fire and told them how much fun it was and gave them a quarter. And I made about $4,000 a week while I read bio. When I was 18, I worked for a commercial financial company that financed farm equipment. I learned that farm equipment is not financed like Reg. It's not every month. It's by the seasons of harvest and you structure the deal depending upon the way they harvest. There was one crop yield, two crop yield, three crop yields. When I was a little older I worked for a charge card different than a credit card. A charge card is really wealthy people who get who charge stuff and pay for it at the end of the month. Most of them were always late. You had to be able to motivate finesse, diplomatically compel them to pay their bill in the moments of a transaction when they would call in and they would be either over limit. And it taught you incredible ways to deal with influence and implication without ever offending anybody. I was working for a company that was a big, big, big, big, big investment financial company in Indianapolis. And the young scion loved me. Everyone liked me. Cause I was young and interesting. When I was 18 and the guy took me aside and said, you've got to always be a trend spotter. You've got to be ahead of it rather than behind it. They invested in a lot of you young people. They invested in gas stations that were self served before it was legal to be self served. They invested in cable TV before anybody had cable tv. I worked for Hertz Truck Leasing and they taught me there's no money in leasing trucks. There's incredible triple profit if you throw into it maintenance for three years. And there's an incredible difference if you get three or four extra mills. That's fractions of a cent per mile for a truck that goes a million miles a year on a three year lease. I'm just going through it. I worked in the association business and most small groups can't afford their own association. I met a guy, I was always attracted to these nonlinear thinkers. This guy was very smart. He'd go to associations that couldn't afford, 35 years ago, an association. He charged half the price of them doing their own, but he would have five of them. He'd make twice or thrice what everybody else made. He would repurpose the salespeople, the staff, the organization, the lobbyists. Very, very, very interesting. And I'm going to bring all this stuff home very quickly. I worked in the radio business and I learned you could have something very desirable and you can make people buy a lot of undesirable things, packages. I learned that you could create buying power at will because time costs nothing. But you can for cars and you can trade it for furniture, you can trade it for restaurants. I learned that you can repurpose one station and have an AM&F. And I learned that you can package more exciting things together like trips and get people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. I learned that you can go to people who don't advertise and give them something exciting that's non threatening, like one spot a week on the Cincinnati Bengals and they'll buy it. Very interesting. I sold electric shavers. Nobody wants to buy electric shavers. Retailers don't care about electric shavers. They only sell electric shavers at Father's Day and Christmas. So you got to give them something else exciting. So I had to find a way to make no co op marketing dollars. Co op is what you earn when you buy it go a long way. So I'd buy billboards at the end of the year for retailers and nobody ever buys the billboards at the end of the year. So you can buy them for 5 cents on the dollar. I'd buy millions of dollars of billboards for about 10,000 do and give that to people if they bought shavers. And I realized all the psychology of all these things. I was in the consignment business. I realized that somebody else's distress is always somebody else's opportunity. I found a guy that had $10 million, I'm dating myself of eight track stereo tapes in a warehouse and I put it in the equivalent of seven elevens. And I made $5,000 a week just by the connection. I found a guy that had a million dollars worth of curio items and I put it in all kinds of specialty shops in Indianapolis and made thousands of dollars a week just from making the connection. I work for a company called JW Gibson and everyone else bought growth companies, he bought loser companies. Companies are on the way down. Third generations, he bought them for three reasons. One, the third fourth generation didn't have a clue what all the equipment was worth, what the building was worth. He would buy it, pre sell all the equipment, all the building, make a profit before he ever closed. He bought chemical businesses that always could be integrated into his master business that had enormous capacity. He could duplicate all the services and he had distribution that could grow it. And he taught that to me. It was really interesting. We were the first people to do. I mean, so we did Watts telemarketing. Seems antiquated now. We were in it before anyone ever did it. We were in it when IBM had photoelectric paper readers where you had automatic. And we used to learn how to send letter upon letter with every scenario and, and that sequencing and unrelenting value communication is like a positive Chinese water torture. I worked for ICOT and we had no money. But I learned incremental cost. I learned allowable cost. I learned how to overcome preemptively all the negatives. I learned how a lot of littles can be worth a lot. We had a thousand. Was that the ding? Okay, I'm a quote. I'm just going to quote. Yeah. The trick is you got to learn what you don't know and you got to observe what it means to you. And you got to look at things different. I'll quote from I like the old Apple commercial. Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs and the square holes. The ones who see things differently, they're not fond of rules and have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may seem as crazy and wild ones, we see them as geniuses. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. From Joe Polish and Dean Jackson on I Love Marketing. Most of the episodes are based on Joe and Dean's eight Profit activators to grow your business. Joe and Dean have put together a free report called Breakthrough DNA 8 Profit Activators you can trigger in your business right now. Visit ilovemarketing.com DNA to get instant access to that report and put the eight profit activators in place for your business today. Again, that's www.ilovemarketing.com DNA SAM.