Moonshots and Multipliers: I Love Marketing Meetup Special - Part 2

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. So, I mean, who do we start with?

You want to go over there? You want me to go last?

Yeah.

Ha ha.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah.

I'm Dave Streen and I help Joe with the I Love Marketing meetup that's held monthly up in Scottsdale. And I do a lot of different things. They all revolve around automotive dent repair. So I have guys that actually do the dent repair. I've got a tool company where we manufacture and sell the tools. I have a marketing company that does marketing for all the other dent guys around the country. We also help the other tool companies with their marketing and stuff. So I knew nothing about marketing until I met Joe and now I know a little bit.

Yeah. And it helps.

Oh, yeah. It's changed my life.

Everyone is in the marketing business even if they think they are not. I mean, you know, and really the real business you're in is the arithmetic business when it comes to actually making profits. So, you know, no matter what, you got to make the math work. And marketing is the thing that turns on the money faucet and that's necessary. And how you package and position and present yourself. It doesn't matter what it is.

Yeah. One of my favorite lessons was that if you truly believe you have the best product or service, you're doing a disservice by not getting it out there. That was really a paradigm shift for me.

Yeah. And if you're one of those people that are completely unethical and you don't give a shit about delivering any value whatsoever, you at least convince yourself that that's true. Your business will still do better. Yeah, but it is true. How many of you sell something that adds value to other humans lives? Okay. So there's no relationship between being good and getting paid. There's no relationship. And so there's a huge relationship between being good, being a good marketer, and getting paid. And that's where marketing makes selling easy and in many cases unnecessary. Because if you don't have marketing, then you have to rely on selling. And there's nothing wrong with that. Selling is just marketing is just leveraging the ability to sell in far more effective ways so that you're, you're communicating and you're packaging and you're presenting as effectively as humanly possible. I mean, and I learned marketing. Many of you know my story. I was a debt broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards. So I never wanted to learn marketing. I just wanted to Eat. I wanted to be able to pay my bills. And marketing is the one area where I was a good carpet cleaner. But I didn't know how to get anyone to hire me for my services until I started to learn how to effectively communicate that. And it was great that it was something as boring and mundane as a carpet cleaning business because when you have to figure out how to successfully sell something that nobody wants to buy, it actually puts you really in touch with, you know, what do we say about this, how do we talk about this thing? And that's where, you know what I learned that helping people make a buying decision, taking the complexity out of how to buy and educating people on all the things they don't know, that they don't know is one of the most effective and also one of the most ethical ways to, to actually sell anything. So I think everyone should be a education based marketer. And those of you that don't sell, because a lot of times people are like, I hear all these coaches and I hear these speakers that are talking about information, but I don't really sell information and I don't know a single business category where if you don't put information in front of it is not going to make it better. So I was selling carpet cleaning, but I created a consumer awareness guide. I had 24 hour free recorded messages and, and free reports. And now we got videos and we got social media and all this stuff. But if you're not putting information in front of what it is that you're selling, the product or service, you're just not going to sell it as effectively. So in reality, everyone is an information marketer if they're wanting to do the best they can possibly do. So that's my rant on that.

Like Joe says, it's easiest to sell. Like if you're selling food, sell it where people are hungry. Yeah, kind of stuff.

A starving crowd is really important if you're going to self. I mean, the perfect example, Sorry, I'm just kind of, I'm hijacking this thing. I mean, everyone's gone to a sporting event or some sort of event where you're, you know, you're a clean eater, you're trying to do well, but you haven't had dinner. And you know, at first the cotton candy and the popcorn and all the shit that they're selling, I'm not going to eat any of that stuff. And then two hours later you find yourself eating a hot dog because they got supply and demand on their side. And if you have supply and Demand on your side. You don't need to be a great marketer. The analogy I use is, if the world supply of toilet paper ran out tomorrow, you don't need to be a great marketer to sell toilet paper. Because I don't think toilet paper existed until the 1800s. And I've thought for hours, what did they do before that? Because I'm like, psychologically messed up. Yeah. But the thing is, you don't need to be a great marketer. You just put a. You don't need social media, you don't need a website, you don't need anything. You just simply need to put a cardboard sign up and say, I got toilet paper, $50 a roll. You're going to sell it. However, most people are not in that sort of position where you have supply and demand on your side. So that's where learning about marketing effectively. And what are you ladies laughing at? I'm dying over here. I'm looking back, they're both smiling like they're making fun of me.

I'm googling what they did before for toilet paper. Looking at pictures.

Yeah. And it's one thing where someone has a smile, but if the smile looks really deranged and weird, I start thinking.

It progressively gets larger. The smirk.

Yeah. Look at these. Yeah. So, Eunice, would you like to say anything? Okay, so. No, but that's the whole thing. So that's my little rant on the effectiveness of marketing. And certainly everyone is here because they're interested in the subject or why the hell would you be at an I love marketing meetup group?

Right.

So thank you for what you're doing. And you guys have the meetup groups in Scottsdale, and those are the third Wednesday of every month, and they're usually holding them at the Scottsdale library, the civic library. And so if you ever want to go to those meetings, and many of you do, many of you do, and we want more participation with. I love marketing locally because really, the most effective way to learn anything is there's three ways to learn. You can learn through the school of hard knocks and go out and get beat up and bloodied, which I do the first couple years of my business to a degree. I was always a reader. But I mean, I didn't know what the hell to study or read in the area of marketing until I became so desperate, I kind of had to. So you can learn through the school of hard knocks. The second is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, you go to their seminars, you learn their Information. But the most effective way to accelerate even that is to teach it to other people. So the moment you learn something and you go out and teach it to other people. So I think that's why there's a lot of. I think that's why there's a lot of teachers and educators and speakers and in different genres, because those people just wanted to get really good at that thing. And they actually not only learned that that was a real effective way to do it for themselves, they actually learned that they can get other people to pay them money for that expertise. And so it's not a bad gig.

Yeah, there was a guy, I read an article this morning, very successfully, bitcoins are hot right now. He sold a million dollar worth, million dollars worth in one day. He's in jail though, because they were Chuck E. Cheese tokens that he was selling.

Wow, that's funny. And it's funny to a degree, I guess, if I was. Yeah, that is. But that's an example of like, you know, in the gold mine, the gold rush days, whoever made the money were the ones selling the picks and shovels. The whole cryptocurrency is, I mean, for one, it's fascinating. I mean, I've invested in a couple different companies on blockchain and whatnot. But that being said, there's always people that will come out of the woodworks and present themselves as experts and they will fleece people. And that's the unfortunate side of. Yeah.

And I guess my moonshot is I recently purchased dentrepair.com and I'll be building that up. That'll be a whole system. So that's my 2018 moonshot.

And so if people decide tonight they're going to go beat up their car, run into people, how do they reach you?

Davedentrepair.com Just shoot me an email.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks. Hey, I'm.

The Kevin Kaufman.

It's never happened before. I'm Kevin Kaufman. I actually own a real estate company called the group 4610 Real Estate Network. And funny story is I was emailing with Gina a few months ago right before the annual event to get in the book. And I was answering the questions on the questionnaire and I just signed up because I had known Joe for 30, 40 seconds. And so I said yes, here's my check. I would like to join that group and go to that event. And my, my vision of a moonshot I got from Peter Diamandis. So I read Bold, I don't know, a year, year and a Half ago. And it literally blew my mind. And in a lot of ways has changed by real estate practice, which is big in my world, but when I look at it from those lenses, it seems very small. And so I remember emailing Gina and I said, gosh, I don't. I guess I need a moonshot. I'm not really sure I know what one is. It dawned on me as I was sitting here figuring out what the hell am I going to say, that my moonshot is actually the vision statement for my company which is to change the world the way the world views the real estate agent. It's been my experience that most real estate agents and we've, we've earned this to a large degree and I apologize if anybody sells cars, but we're bid about looked at as the same as a used car salesman or that saying if you know. And, and so we want to change that. My business partner and I take a very different approach. We, we don't even put on shoes. That's. We are in our real estate industry, an industry where most people are very proper and I'm going to say the word professional and formal. We take a very different approach. However, we are very serious about our results. And so the way we do that is our platform is I truly view our company, the Group 4610 Real Estate Network as a platform for real estate agents to succeed on. I view my customers not only the end buyer and user of a home, but the buyer and seller, but also the real estate agent who I have a relationship with. We're a little bit different in the fact that we operate in seven different states and we all. From this parking lot just a couple hundred feet to the east of where I'm sitting. We operate everything from there from the way we lead gen to the way we market our technology platform. We've got a tech team over there building tools for our agents that are just for our agents and inside of our company. And so I guess my moonshot is to change the way the world views the real estate agent.

Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. And let me mention this about Susan also. You'll hear from her in a moment. And so I won't try to repeat what you. Well, I'll say a couple things. Has anyone ever been the celebration of fine Arts, the big Tent and North Scottsdale? She's been doing that for 25 years. So that's her business and great artists and she's very bright, very smart, very cool and creates an environment where these artists can sell their art and make money. And she does all the setup and has been doing this successfully for many years. And what I want to say is that I ended up meeting Susan from a buddy of mine, Joe Woodford, who's a professional ceramic artist who I went to high school with. And he. I think other than doing drugs in high school, the only thing that allowed my brain to escape was storing pots. Throwing pottery is the only artistic skill that I ever really developed. If you want to. I guess there's many weird artistic skills I develop, but the ones that produce, like, a piece of art, it would be pottery. So Jo introduced me to her, and I ended up. She asked me to come and speak to the group of artists, which I did. And I was talking about marketing, and I said, I'm not an expert in art, but I do know how to package and sell things. And I kind of told my story of being a drug addict when I was 18 years old and at my worst state, weighing 105 pounds from freebasing cocaine. How art is, you know, the whole concept of how artists struggle so much with addictions, and they're very sensitive people. And some of you have seen the Artist for Addicts trailer. That helped me gel this whole idea of, how do you go to the exact group of people that seem to struggle and suffer the most with addiction and use art as a force for good? And so that's what actually put me in. Into this. One of my moonshots right now is that invitation to speak to a group of artists. Because after I spoke, six people came up to me, and one man had tears in his eyes, and he said, if it wasn't for art, I would be dead. And that's when it got me thinking about this. And I actually say that in our first documentary that we just did, which has not yet been released. We premiered it at a small event in Jamaica. And so Susan asking me, and me reluctantly saying, well, God, I don't even know what to say to a group of artists. But I did it anyway, because I have this philosophy is even if it scares you, it's probably worth doing. I heard this saying early on in my career, do one thing every day that scares you. And that's different than walking in front of traffic on the street. I mean, it's like intelligent things, things that force you to grow. And so I didn't. And you asked me, like, four days before this thing, and I'm like, I called up my buddy Wylan, who's an artist. He does all those whales and all that shit. And I said, you know, how do you sell art? Because he's one of the most successful commercial artists and he had given me some suggestions and stuff. And so I kind of showed up and just talked to a group of artists. But the strategic byproduct is what came out of it. And so just showing up. But I want to thank you for that and putting that together because I think now we're exploring all the different ways we're going to work together to help not only artists, but people struggling with addiction and using art as a force for good. So I should have not said as much, but I wanted to say so. Thank you. Thank you.

Gosh. The funny thing about that is, and maybe this kind of pertains to what I'm going to talk about is we just met through our mutual friend Joe, and we were kind of, you know, geeking out about success and marketing. And every Friday for The last probably 20 years, during the art show, during our 10 week run, I would do a Friday morning meeting for the artists. I probably should give you some more background than that, but basically a lot of our artists are fabulous, creative spirits, but they didn't have business savvy or, you know, marketing skills or know how to follow up when they meet somebody. So we saw a dramatic change in sales revenue over the years that we started doing this. And I am second generation. This business was started in 1991 by my father, Celebration of Fine Art. And everything aligned with my passion in helping others. But that day I just said to Joe, oh, you should come do one of our Friday morning meetings. I mean, I knew he was kind of a big deal, but I didn't really know. And he said, well, yeah, let me check my calendar. As soon as somebody pulls their calendar out of their pocket, you know, you have them sold. So here in like a very short time, I say this and then I go, well, we only have one week left, so you pretty much have to come this next Friday if you're going to do it. And he's like, okay. He called Eunice and he showed up with Rakim and the whole all the girls back there. I mean, we had a whole video shoot of this amazing off the cuff presentation that he did with amazing information just from that one asking a question. And do you remember what you said to me about what you charge for a keynote?

Oh, yeah, 50 grand.

He's like, yeah, I usually charge 50,000. I just agreed to do this for free. I'm like, yes. So we had a great time, but a little backstory. The Celebration of Fine Art. Like I said, my father started it. I've spent most of my working career in hospitality sales or working with people. I did one year working in accounting, which I'm glad I have that because you have to know your numbers. But I'm much more of a people person. When the business was started, my dad was very much a visionary and serial entrepreneur. And pretty much everybody thought he was crazy to consider putting up a tent and inviting artists to show their work and actually let the artists meet the end user. Because prior to that, it was. Most art was sold through galleries where the gallery directors don't want you to know each other because you might steal the business. So what we've done is created a unique experience of trust and partnership with the artists and then our collectors. And how I kind of came into it is I started with providing the training. At my previous career, I did a lot of public speaking and training and sales, and I had done a presentation on mission statements. So for me, that's still sort of my moonshot, is to inspire and empower others to see themselves as capable and deserving of success and happiness and to spark joy and courage in the world. And I don't know where that came from, but just life experiences. I realize that we need those things. And most people might want success and happiness, but may not believe that they deserve it. So in my vision, it's like, how do we teach people that they're not just, you know, able to, but deserving to have that success and true happiness in their life? And for me, a lot of that revolves around gratitude. And it's something that we hear all around now, and we could easily take it for granted. As you know, the tagline of the day is you have to have gratitude. And there's gratitude journals. But the truth is, it does work. It is reality. Jim Rohn talks about the, you know, the beginning of receiving is being grateful for what you have. He said it better than I did. But using gratitude and sharing gratitude with others has been what's kept me going through almost any difficult circumstance I've dealt with in all different situations. Fifteen years ago, right about now. Exactly. I was not really quite sure I was going to survive cancer. I was battling a pretty rare form of cancer and had gone through some bad chemotherapy. And, I mean, I literally had the family friends over sitting there at Christmas going, it's the last time I'm going to see all of you. But every day through that, I experienced gratitude when the nurses would come in and draw the blood. I'd go, thank you.

Thank you.

They used to fight over who would take care of me because I was the grateful one as opposed to. I'm not sure where that came from, but that was just my coping mechanism was gratitude will get you through this. And then, you know, other. Other hurdles that come up in life. Negotiating to buy the family business, living in gratitude and knowing that for me this was a platform where my. My other great business decision was partnering with my husband, who's setting up the show right now. So he's not here. But my vision always remains. How can I inspire others to see themselves as capable of and deserving of success and happiness? And right now, that platform is the artists within my show. And we have 100 artists that come from across the country. And we've, you know, they don't all come back every year. Many have gone on to, you know, experience success beyond their wildest dreams. One simple story I have is we have an artist who, prior to coming into our show, he had never sold more than $12,000 in an entire year of being a full time artist and cowboy. And by the time he came in and he would come to the Friday morning meetings and he applied the information and I would teach anything from Jim Rohn to Darren Hardy or whatever I was reading at the time, I would just share. So now he sells over 250,000 in the 10 weeks that he's at our show in addition to what he does elsewhere. So the talk about the compound effect. So for me, that just brings me such joy and to see that spread and to watch those people mentor others. So it always brings me back to the whatever, whatever it is that we're doing. And there may be other different things that my husband and I will go on to do, but the idea of inspiring and empowering others is always what's driving us and teaching through that, the courage to get up. And I love what Dan Sullivan. I'm not a coach client of his, but his books, the four Cs. Courage leads to competence, which leads to confidence. We want to teach people to be more confident and to feel, you know, that they're capable of anything that they set their mind to. And then the rest of the world, financially, all that can come for me if I'm focused on that one mindset of teaching gratitude and inspiring people to see themselves capable of and deserving of success.

By the way, how can someone go to the show this year?

The Celebration of fine art opens January 13, and it's located at the southwest corner of Hayden Road in the loop 101. Probably a lot of you have driven by every year and saw the big white tent. And I want to talk about tents for just a minute because in 1991, we were the largest tent clear span tent installation west of the Mississippi.

Wow.

And now if you go through North Scottsdale, we've got Westworld and we've got the tpc. And so now we've become like the little white tent. But we were the original big white tent tent pioneer. I have a tent. Well, I give my dad credit for that. But yeah, I kind of live in a tent in a trailer for 10 weeks out of the year when, when we're up and running. But we're open every day 10 to 6. I do, I just have hot off the presses, some programs that I'll put over there by the cans.

Oh, awesome.

If you would like that. And last year we had the courage to go through a whole marketing overhaul and it's been layers and layers and layers of rebranding and re purposing. And tomorrow my new website will launch. So celebrateart.com awesome.

Thank you. You know, let me say this because you reminded me about this whole notion of gratitude. Just in case. Just in case. And so the two areas to protect as an entrepreneur are your confidence and gratitude. Because you will do things much more effectively once you have confidence in something. If you don't have confidence and you have to rely on courage, which never really feels good. Confidence feels good. Courage just is like you gotta kinda go through it. But you can have all the money, all the relationships, all the access. But if you don't have gratitude, you can be a very miserable human. And what you were saying reminded me of this. When I was speaking at Ryan Deiss event a few months ago. I said to the, I asked the audience, I said, how many of you in the room are worth a million dollars? You know, a few people raised their hand. I'm like, is anyone here worth $10 million? And I think like one person raised their hand. Anyone here worth a billion dollars? I said, how many of you would like to be a millionaire? And everyone raised their hand. I said, well, how many of you in the room would like to be a millionaire? If you're not already, I'm asking you, all of you.

Okay.

Yeah, okay. So what I said, I said, well, how many of you. Would anyone here give me your eyeballs for a million bucks? Would anyone here just hand over your eyeballs for a million dollars? What about 10 million? Anyone give me your eyeballs for a million bucks? 100 million? What about lop off your thumbs? Anyone lop off their thumbs for a million bucks? Or maybe cut out your tongue or, you know, just. What's that?

10 million.

10 million you'll cut off your tongue. Shit, man, I'd almost do it if I wasn't so worn out I got a knife. But the point is, like, all these people want to be millionaires. They want to have all this stuff. And you're walking around with assets on your body, in your life that people just take for granted. The fact that you can see and that you can hear and that you can talk and that you can eat. And it's that whole, that proverb which is, he who has their health, he or she who has their health has a thousand dreams. He does not have their health, has only one. And if you have aspirations, you're sitting here right now, you're able to do the things you're doing because you're not laid up in a hospital bed. And I, eight days ago, prior was on a 14 day liquid diet. I didn't eat food for like 14 days and I'd never done anything like that in my entire life. I probably lost like eight pounds in the last three weeks. And basically the first day was the most difficult. The second day was pretty difficult. But. But on the first day I just got a whole sense of gratitude. Like, I can't believe this. In my soft, cushiony life that I have and I have my challenges like anyone else.

It's a slow problem.

Totally. What it made me realize is like, man, I mean, how painful it must be to just, like, I wake up every day and I can eat mostly what I want, you know, it's not like, am I going to eat today? So I want Mexican food, do I want Chinese food? You know, and it just got me in touch how many millions of children go to bed every single night starving, you know, and how painful that is. And when you get in touch with gratitude, it actually makes you appreciate everything you have that much more, but it actually gives you the ability to do something about it. I mean, Kevin talking about his surf and serve, if he didn't have gratitude, he wouldn't be doing that shit. I mean that like value creation and contribution and being of service actually comes from a place of appreciation.

And I would say generosity is gratitude in action. When we're generous, it's actually the activity of abundance.

Throw them that box.

So I was saying generosity is gratitude in action. So that's what's so great when we're face to face. To poverty. And some of these folks, you just talked about the pain of hunger. I mean, just to get an idea, they huff glue. They'll pay 5 cents to get a coffee cup full of glue. And they'll huff glue to get themselves high enough. Not because they want the high, because they want to forget that they're starving to death to get rid of the pain. And so, like, that's what, you know, I say, when you give, I've been in the presence of that, where you hand that person food and you realize they haven't probably eaten in the last few days. And like you said, all of your problems disappear. And then I'm in awe. Like, it's a funny, selfish thing, because what you're talking about is so great. I'm in awe of my. Of the possibility of my own generosity, like at that moment. And then Jennifer and I were looking back at the photos. We're like, my gosh, like, we created this and these kids are smiling and laughing, even if it's just for a few days. And so our moonshot is like, how could we do that longer term? But really, generosity being that gratitude of the abundance that we have and sharing it with people who have no way of paying us back.

Yeah.

And I'm a huge believer in abundance. I truly believe there's enough of everything to go around, especially if we're generous with what we have and share that. And to your point, if health is everything, how many other cancer survivors, warriors in the room? Oh, that's unusual.

Super unusual.

Anyone in your family? Yeah.

Congratulations.

Yeah, it is. A lot of people asked if it changed who I was. It didn't. I already was a happy person, but it gave me a bigger depth of gratitude and to understand that every day is a gift and especially in this country, you know, we do have first world problems here pretty much. And when you've seen what you've seen, so what if we have to go around an accident or something? On the one on one, we have cars, you know, and we have. We can eat in our car and probably talk on our phone too. So.

Yeah, yeah. Like Lee Brower, who's a buddy of mine from Coach, he said, you know, he said, how many of you hate to take out the trash? You know, a handful of people raise their hand. He's like, you know, do you know how many people in different parts of the world would love to have someone come to their home or where they live and pick up the trash and take it away? He's like, you don't have to Take out the trash. You get to take out the trash. He goes, what? I mean, it's a fricking luxury for some people and the point is not to get all touchy feely or whatever. I know a lot of people are going through their own private silent battles and life is difficult. Look, everyone has their own shit and their own crosses to bear at all different times. It's just as much as you can keep yourself in the mindset of gratitude and, and appreciation, you're simply going to be a better entrepreneur. And when you're in that particular state, you're going to make more money. And I think one of the best ways to help the poor is and not be one of them. And secondly, people that say money can't buy happiness are idiots. Because I buy happiness all the time with money. I mean, there's all kinds of shit. I like nice dinners, it makes me happy. I like going to the movies, that shit makes me happy. I like staying in nice hotels, it makes me happy. So the people that say that money can't buy happiness haven't given enough of it away. Because even if you're a miserable person with a lot of money, I mean, I've had people that have been really struggling and my ability to help them medically, education wise out of challenges, access to people they can talk to, has helped make their lives better. And so, I mean, there's so much you can do with money. So it's not the money, it's what it gives you access to and how you do it. You know, the experiences that can give you. So I'm all for capitalism, I'm a capitalist. And Hayek says the biggest problem with capitalism is it was named by its enemies. And so capitalism in its purest form is simply collaboration between individuals exchanging money for value. And we live in a world where there's a lot of anti capitalist behavior and people will attack you because you're actually doing. And there is crony capitalism, there's corporatism, that is sometimes called capitalism, and there's bad aspects of everything. But most entrepreneurs that I know are really hardworking people adding value in the world, you know, just doing good stuff. I mean, most entrepreneurs I know are not evil, exploitive people, they're just good people working their asses off trying to do stuff.

And so anyway, thank you Genius Network, for sure.

Totally. Yeah, totally. Thank you, thank you.

I'll take that as the applause for me in advance. I don't know if there's going to be time for this afterwards. So I just wanted to say in advance, Joe, I haven't been to one of these meetings yet. I want to thank you and everybody, if you get a chance to the whole I love marketing team and your team for having the courage and the time to put this together. Because a lot of places you can be tonight. I've never been to one of these. Been a genius network about a year now and absolutely love it. So part of my moonshot has a lot to do with something I've never told you that showed up in a table that was. You'd have to be here to understand. There was a table here in this room saying big. That came up. Side note. Do you do paintless dent remover? Yeah. Okay. So you could stop at the house. And my wife had the something fall on the Tesla. It's horrible. I don't want to get into the story right now, but you could take care of that. Okay. Side note. Okay, that's a big part of the. I'll tell you that story later. How you come home and there is a book, there is an entire garage cabinet and screwdrivers and everything on a Tesla that's two weeks old. So I'll feel that feeling right there. I should have been called, told not to come home. So anyways, side note, moonshot. I never got a chance to put one in my book. I still have it in the book. I still haven't done it. I got three emails. You guys were on top of me about doing it. Procrastination kicked in every excuse in the world. And maybe it was because I was making it bigger than it really was and I was making a bigger deal instead of just getting really real with my big moonshot for my life and for the world. So I'll take you back in time as I explain this right now. And this whole tonight reminds me a lot of how I get started in business and when I first got started, the struggles that I had and I was at least smart enough to recognize a lot of things I didn't know. So I'd go to meetings like this. Not exactly like this, but I'd go anywhere I could go to learn cutting edge stuff because I wanted to figure out what I was doing wrong. Because I was selling back then, zero marketing. And what I was doing, I didn't think I could do in marketing. And I was selling and I was pushing and I came across the idea that I could learn how to sell better and I could learn how to be more influential. So I dedicated. I see a lot of my students here know me. I Wound up learning influence skills. And I started learning what could make a difference. How I could get more people to buy, how I could get more people interested, how I could get more people to really buy stuff. Because when you're struggling and you're broke, the biggest thing you think about is making more money. So I'd go to meetings like this. And it didn't dawn on me back then how obvious these things are and how blind I was. I was in a relationship I should have never been in back then. I should have got out day one. And I was in it. Because when you came home from a meeting like this, I'd be excited about what I was doing and what I learned, but I couldn't actually talk about it because the other person had no interest at all in what I was doing. And I would make up excuses, and I would tolerate things in my life. And I was living a lot of my life as a lie. And I would sell. And I finally, after about three or four years, I got so, so good at this influence thing that I made a lot of money. I got really, really good at influencing other people. I started making six figures, then I made a quarter of a million dollars a year, then a half a million dollars a year right around the time that I met you. And I started doing really, really well at what I was doing. But I was still not happy inside. And what was interesting was then I thought if I could teach enough other people how to be influential, then what happens is, then I can be really good at this. Then I could build a business which helped a lot of people out. And I was helping people do the same problem I was doing. I was helping them have more money, be more effective, sell more. But I was missing the whole piece of the coin. So I remember something when I first studied Earl Nightingale, I'll throw this one back at you, and thank you for bringing that up, is when I learned that 3% of the world is successful, or 3% of the world makes 100,000 bucks a year, or 3%. And that was something I first learned in 1998, when I first got into personal development. And the saddest thing hit me when I was sitting here in a meeting one day and Joel had brought it up again about Earl Nightingale and how. How he talked about the strangest secret and how only 3% of the world is successful at what it is that they do. And it hit me. I said, that's. I'll speak. I'm from New Jersey. I'll say it's bullshit. It's been literally 20 years since I've been at this, Thousands of years since everyone else has been at this. And why is it that number has not changed? And I made a commitment. I walked out of my Office pissed about 90 days ago after walking. And when you come back from a genius meeting, when you come back from being a genius network, sometimes you scare your team. So I came back with like a million new ideas and they have to get prepped. I have a COO that stops me at the door right now and takes the ideas and makes me take a day off afterwards because I'm so pumped up and excited about what I learned here. And I get stopped at the door, go, Michael, you can't see them yet. And I'm kind of like in a fish tank. How many of you had a fish? You got to introduce them to the water. And I get to get reintroduced to my team after my new ideas. And I came back and I said, you know what? I'm done with this whole teaching success to people. I'm done with this whole influence thing. We have old products for that we're going to do. I've been talking about this whole idea about teaching a 1% advantage to people for a long time time about if people knew how to do little subtle things like I teach little subtle things that every one of you in this room could get people's attention, make more money, sell people quicker. I guarantee I could teach you in five minutes, two things would make you more money tomorrow, guaranteed. But what I wasn't teaching people how to do is those same patterns that help people reframe things. The same patterns, hypnotic language patterns, reframe influence skills. Could be yours on the most subtle things in the world. I mean, I teach this stuff to my kid. I think my life changed a lot. Having kids and my 5 year old has been really influencing me a lot in my life because this gets into my moonshot and this gets into really my purpose in this plan. And I'm really excited and really pissed at the same time. And a lot of times you gotta be excited and pissed to make things happen. And I recognized nobody is teaching kids and people how to live effectively. They're teaching them church and do this and don't do like 10 Commandments are cool. Like obviously we know not to kill our neighbor and sleep with the neighbor. Do you know what I'm saying? If you're married, we know that stuff. Ready? But what they're not teaching is very basic things like how to deal with life. Like you get in a Fight with your wife, how to deal with. Or your girlfriend, or you just get a fight with a business colleague. How do you deal with the rest of your day? So I'm walking in meetings and I'm using a technique on you and getting you to think differently, make decisions, buy something. Why not flip that same technique, which I do anyways, in seminars? Why not teach people how to use those same techniques on how to make their life work better, how to really make a difference in the world? So in the last 90 days since I went to my last meeting, I came home and I came back to the team and said, we're done with the whole success thing. Let Tony have success. Let Tony have. Let all these other people have success or marketing or make money. Let them have that. What I really want to do is teach people the 1% advantage to make a difference in how they communicate with themselves, make a difference in their lives. Because personal development as a whole is something that's embarrassing for most people to talk about. Most people go to an event. I know this because when I ask for referrals, a lot of times people don't want to give up their friends. They don't want to tell people, like most people don't walk out of a Tony Robbins event and go, I'm going to go tell 20 people I was there. They may post it on Facebook because it was cool that they were there. But a lot of people don't want to tell people because it makes you seem like you're broken or damaged or something's wrong. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. You don't want to rush and tell everybody, I went to an event to make a difference, yet I want to find a way to really change the conversation. How people communicate about personal development and how they really. What it really is. So the biggest thing I've been working on, I got a book coming out called the Human Owner's Manual. And human, I got to say, because I'm from Jersey, there's an H at the beginning. Human Owner's Manual. And it's really about how we operate ourselves and how we operate, how we communicate the stuff in our brain. So when something happens in your day, you put it in the place in your brain. I do this to people with intervention work. But why shouldn't you know when you get bothered how to put it in the right place or you get turned on by something, put it in the right part of your brain so you can use it anytime you want. So for me, the big takeaway from this, and my big push is we bought a building about six months ago in the middle of a renovation. Right now we want to find a way to make personal development no different than going to country club. We want to find a way. We've gotten the real estate business now, so we're looking to put up in the next three years. We want to put up 25 locations all over the world in high market areas and create groups that it's not for success, business, marketing, anything like this. People that want to go somewhere and they really want to make a difference. They want to make a change in the world, and they want to get around people that think the way they think. So what Genius Network does for marketing and success in business, we want to do with communication, with influence, with the ability to influence yourself and make a difference. So the collaboration of everything we're doing is huge. So my big. My big moonshot is really, I would love to, before I die, before I leave the planet, and I'll steal something from Warner Earhart. My favorite quote I've ever heard is, the tombstone's already been picked. It says, all used up and nothing left. And I would love it by the time I die that 4% of the people in this world can say, I'm successful, I'm happy, I'm doing the things I want to do. If I can get about 1%, although I did my part and it sounds silly, but I'm pissed and excited about it, I'm gonna make it happen. And if you don't know me, you don't know me well enough. So I'm gonna make that happen. So that's it.

Awesome.

Thank you. There's my buddy, Tom Bilyeu, who has, like, a podcast. He spoke at last year's Genius Network annual event. He did an interview with Dr. Drew, and he talked about change. And the great thing about it is that what Dr. Drew, who may write the foreword to our book that I've got coming out, the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery, on doing with Hal Elrod and Anna David. So that book will be out next year. And one of the things that he talks about is disgust. So on the wall here is one of my favorite quotes, which is, be willing to destroy anything in your life that is not excellent. And the thing about that is, in order to change something, you have pre contemplation, you have contemplation, you have execution, and then you have maintenance. And being willing to destroy anything in your life that is not excellent requires you first to think about it and to contemplate it. And then you have to actually do something. And then once you do something, you have to maintain that something. And so in order to change, the difficult thing with change is not just doing it, it's maintaining it. And so what's always funny to me is all the New Year's resolutions that people make. And I was talking about this before we started the meeting in our conference room back there, and that you have people that will make goals and going to eat better. And they do for either a few days, few hours, few weeks. I'm going to join the gym. I'm going to get a gym membership. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to do this thing in my relationship. I'm going to do this thing with my kids or whatever. And then as most human beings, they just stop and they don't maintain it. What I would encourage you to look at is what disgusts you so fucking much right now, that you're like, I'm just so done with this now, you're going to have to contemplate that. You're going to have to think about that. But if you get yourself now, the difference between disgust and shame, though, is that disgust, you're just kind of disgusted with it. Shame, though, you're not going to be motivated with shame because that's. I'm a bad person. And that's the thing that I've learned with being an addict is addiction thrives on shame. Addiction has an appetite for destruction. Addiction will actually make you do bad things. Disgust may cause you to change. And if you are just okay with it, you're probably not going to do much. So if you really want to affect change now, one of the best ways to do that is to put yourself around people that are doing great shit, because then it forces you to look at. Well, you know, they seem to be capable. I mean, one of the biggest motivators for me was when I was a deb bro carpet cleaner, living off credit cards. There's this guy who works. This guy went to high school with. He's working for a guy in Mesa, Arizona, who's an alcoholic that treated his. I feel bad because he's an alcoholic. I mean, addiction comes out of pain and hurt people, hurt others. And this guy was a really bad person, but he had made $600,000 the previous year. And here I am working my ass off, going broke. That disgusted me. I'm like, what the hell? What is the deal? What does this guy know that I don't? And so it's all how you use it. I mean, your whole life is just a series of raw material sitting around waiting for you to put the ingredients together and to produce a certain result. And be it good habits, bad habits. I think everyone has habits. And, and if you wake up in the morning and you wake up late and you eat two Egg McMuffins and you smoke ten cigarettes and you guzzle four cups of coffee and you kick your dog and you yell at your spouse and you just go around being an asshole, you've just developed really good habits of doing that if you do it every single day, right? So winners find ways to win, losers find ways to lose. And so wherever you're winning in life, you're winning because of the way you're putting together. It's the formula. You have a winning formula. And if you're losing, then you need to change that, discard that, abandon that, do something with it, surround yourself with other people. So the whole concept of moonshots and multipliers is how do you actually embed into your brain? So to go back to Michael, Michael, I'd love to ask you this. How does one best. Let me do a setup here. Now we have a whole book here and I'll forget if I don't do this. So here's a book. Now this book is filled with Genius Network members talking about their moonshots.

Buy one.

And it doesn't just say what's your moonshot? It says what is your best business decision? Your best business decision. What is the one thing you feel accounts for your success? And how might every Genius Network member benefit from it? What is the biggest tangible performance enhancing, addition, modification and replacement activity or approach you've discovered and added to your model or marketing in the last year? Who are your current business heroes and non business heroes? What are three things you do differently or better than your competitors that drive your business success? And how might everyone in Genius Network utilize any or every one of those advantages? And what is the single best piece of business and non business advice you've ever received? And how did it alter your past? So we ask these questions to all these really bright people and it's freaking phenomenal. Now when you read this stuff, you actually will probably get inspired. You will probably learn things, you will discover some things. You'll probably. And they give book recommendations. What are the most impactful books? This is 100 bucks. All the money we're going to put into Artists for Addicts and Genius Recovery. So it'll go into my recovery Moonshot. If anyone wants one these are 100 bucks. That requires though, you to actually influence yourself. So my question to you is, given resources, tools, recipes, how does one influence themselves most effectively?

Okay, so it's a loaded question. How we influence ourselves? Every one of us, first off knows how to do it. We influence ourselves all the time. No matter what, we're always influencing ourselves. If we were influencing ourselves, as simple as answering ourselves, the question, should I buy the book or not? Is that a good question?

We can influence ourselves in this particular context. That's perfect.

Okay. That's perfect. Okay, so the. I'm getting set up right now. Okay, so the.

And by the way, we can disregard the book entirely and just.

Yeah, either way, if we were going to, we'll talk the book real quick and then we'll just throw an. An idea. Because I believe this will make a difference for you. Number one is instantly inside of your brain when somebody asks you to buy something or whenever you're planning on doing something else, instantly your brain has a chemical reaction that goes off, a series of chemicals that go off, and also pictures start to show up inside of your brain. So one of the ways to influence ourselves is I teach some hit class. It's a very, very simple technique. It's understanding what state that you need to be in. And I don't mean like Tony Robbins, get yourself in state. I mean literally what state that you need to be in to pull off what it is that you need. A lot of folks don't realize that whenever you're selling something to another person, I'll put it in the context of them and then I'm gonna turn it on you really quickly. Is the whole purpose of selling or anything is to educate people that it's okay to make a decision and to take down their guard and put them literally find that neural pathway that they've made a decision before, whether they were on an aisle when they were a kid. Like, my daughter did this to me today. She influenced me to. To buy a dog. I bought a dog today. I told myself I'd never buy a dog. But she looked at me and she said something to me that triggered something in me. Abandonment issue. And she found something in me that I don't even really knew I had. And she said simply to me, I'm going to share this in selling and you guys can use any way you want. And then I'm going to talk about influencing yourselves. She said, wouldn't it be nice that when I come home from school, there's a five year old? Okay, wouldn't it be nice when I come home from school that Tara's gonna be going to college soon and you're at work still doing what you do that I have somebody to play with. And I know I'm probably not gonna get a dog from Santa, but it would be nice. I bought a dog today. Okay. And I spent an hour and a half. I spent six hours online and on the phone calling interesting people from places called paradise. Pennsylvania. Okay. Which doesn't seem like paradise at all. Side note, what my daughter did is she put me in that state of mind. So if you want to influence yourself to change a habit or anything else you do, you're never going to change it with thinking about the habit that you want to add. So this is why with addiction, I do work with a lot of people with addictions and different types of things. So let's say you want to get in better shape or you want to get yourself to pick up the phone more or do your marketing or do your moonshot or anything. The first thing you have to ask yourself is what state of mind do I need to be in? So exercise for most people. We'll just start with language real quick. Exercise for most people is something that are working out for me was equate it to something I talk about doing that I know that I'm capable of doing that I really don't do that is also linked to insecurity and something I'll quit. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Okay. So what I did is I instantly changed the language on it and by changing the languages. And this happened two years ago when I met Joe from Spartan Races. I stopped working out. I haven't worked out in two years. But I train on a regular basis. By changing the language of what it is that you do, instantly creates a new neural pathway. This is what Joe teaches in marketing. I said, let him teach marketing and everything else. I want to teach it for the brain. Marketing, how to market to ourselves. So stop trying to get yourself to save money and start looking at it from a different. Like I have, I build a second business that's my financial portfolio. So instead of saving money, I build a second business that I donate money to and I loan money to it on a regular basis. So I loan money to a second business which is almost bigger than my regular business, which is my financial thing. So the first thing I'll say I'm not going to go into a long term on this is change the language to something which then will change the meaning and changes the neural pathway in the brain. Did that make sense? Did that answer your question? So, for instance, a lot of people say they have, like, I watched the dating guys do this. Is anyone in the dating world here? Anybody want to date? Okay, I'm not offering. But the dating guys tell people they have this approach anxiety so they could sell them books. Approach anxiety just means that you don't take relationships seriously. So if you got serious about relationships, that word seriously changes things. And I tell most people, like, you put the word seriously in a context of you really don't take your business seriously. You're not bad at marketing, and you're not bad at sales. You don't take your business seriously. If you did, you would find the time to get around the money, to get around the people and do what needs to get done. So that's my three second version of that whole thing. So if you want the book, which you probably do because there's at least three to five, there's at least one billionaire in that book, right? Okay. There's at least one billionaire you can get a book recommendation or two from. If you want the book. And I have it and I've read it. I wish I was in it. I forgot to put myself in it. But if you want it, you really have to ask yourself, like, how would you get yourself to get it? Like, what would be the person, like, the person you want to be with? They already have the book, or would you have to really talk yourself into or out of it? So that's the long story short. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. That's great.

So change your language, literally. Find a different word. And stop trying to diet too, because that's a crappy word. Start becoming aware of what you eat, and I guarantee you'll lose weight. Got it.

Awesome. Thank you. So I want to thank all of our panelists. If we could everyone give them a hand, everyone who is. And I want to thank all of you for coming. In terms of. Is there any burning desire to say anything from anyone in the room regarding moonshots or multipliers that you just want to express yourself? This is an opportunity. We have a mic and we have a blue box that Kevin has.

Kevin's a good shot, too.

Kevin could easily take with his eyes closed. He could definitely take your head off.

From where he's at. So here's so.

So just talking to this.

Yeah. Yeah. Now that doesn't amplify your voice. It just picks it up for the Facebook live.

Moonshot is what you wanted.

Yeah. Sure.

So I sent the moonshot to Tim after listening to the podcast. Podcast, right. And it's one that I started. See, it's two years ago, and I was just hit 45 years. I was going to be 46, so I hit 45 years old, and I heard Dan Sullivan talk about what he was going to do in the next 25 years. So I put together my moonshot, actually, at that point, and I said, well, in 25 years, I want to be known by at least a quarter to a third of the world as the next Jack lalanne person. And bringing it instead of the exercise side of it, which I will bring through the exercise side, but because of the nutrition. So because of a different angle to how to eat. How to eat real foods instead of a lot of the sort of other foods that we have, but real foods. And bring the nutrition and the strength component together and finish what he started.

Love it. Awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Who else? Anyone else? This is your opportunity. Thanks.

All right, so my story and background. I learned about Joe Polish probably five years ago, six years ago, built up my window covering business. The missing component was the marketing. I sold that and started in the flooring industry with no knowledge or experience in flooring. And we're growing at an amazing rate. Do close to $2 million in our third year here. And it's all really marketing, sales, business principles. And we do an outstanding job for our customer, provide a great customer experience. I appreciate most what you said because I don't want to change the world. My biggest goal next year is to work with a dozen other people in the flooring industry to help them grow their business at least 30% next year.

Well, and you know, and the thing is, like, if I die, the world's not going to, you know, whatever it goes on, like, there's. I don't. I'm not of this belief that, like, change the world, you know, and part of the whole change the world for a lot of people is a cop out. Oh, I'm just changing the world. Oh, yeah, no, no. But here. But Genius Network is changing the world. It's a big difference between Joe Polish. But here's the thing, though, and I. No, look, when it comes to changing the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion and instead of judgment and finding the best forms of treatment that have efficacy, unless I get hit by a truck or something severe happens, I will do everything I can to make that a reality. I mean, it's my calling. I can't leave it alone. And There's a lot of other ways that I can make money. And about half my time is now spent focusing on things dealing with addiction. And it's very difficult. It's very painful. I mean, I talk to people every week. I talk to a lot of people that every sort of addiction under the sun. I mean, going out and talking about having a sex addiction is not something that's winning me awards. I mean, a lot of this stuff requires enormous vulnerability. It's putting myself out there. But the suffering that I want to reduce is significant enough. And there's not enough people that are willing to talk about it. And what I want to do is get people to out themselves because you're as sick as your secrets. And people that are fighting silent battles. You know, these are the hardest battles to fight. However, like, you start by changing one person, then maybe five people, then 10 people. Like, there's a lot of people like, you know, I got something, I want to change the world. And it's like, well, have you changed anyone's world? Have you done it with five people? No, have you done it with 10 people? So the point is, you start with a human like David Berg, figured out how to solve a problem for himself. And I should really say Janice, Dr. Janice Johnson, because she's probably the real smart one here, the real doctor, not the fake doctor over here. No, if I was smart, I'd agree with you. But the point is, you solve a problem for yourself. Like when I first started creating my carpet cleaning course, I'm a convert of my own system. I actually had a problem. I had to figure out a solution to that problem. I actually did. And then I sat and thought, God, how many other people have the same exact problem that I could help solve it? And so when I created that course, the way that I created it and the way I thought about it was I want to create the exact recipes on how to do things that I wish had existed so I didn't have to go through the misery that I went through when I was a deadboat carpet cleaner living off credit cards. And by taking that approach, it actually worked, you know, and. And I think that same philosophy would apply to anyone. And so surround yourself with amazing people. Any problem in the world can be solved at the right sales letter. As a line by Gary Halbert. Any problem in the world can be solved at the right Genius Network. So I look at Genius Network not just as my group, but what is a network of people that have genius level skills, capabilities, processes, methodologies that you can go and Link with those capabilities and skills and make yourself that much better. So I'm going to do what I'm doing in the world of addiction with Genius Network. I mean, it sounds weird to some people, but that's my mechanism. And so one of the reasons I curate a group of amazing people is I get to sit in a room with some of the most brilliant people hearing the most cutting edge things on the planet, and they actually pay to be in that room. And I would do it even if I didn't get paid for it. But if I didn't charge for it, it wouldn't be the same way. Because when people pay, they pay attention. And also the people that invest in it. And when I say it, I mean, how many of you have ever read a book that has changed your life? Okay. And how many of you have given that book to someone else that they didn't pay for that book and it did not change their life if they opened it, if they even read. Exactly. So the big thing that's like the setup is people are like, oh, they're charging too much. Well, when you look at anything as a charge, it's all, how much does it cost? But when you look at it as an investment, it's a totally different ball game. And see, some people, for those that, you know, my friend JR says, for those that get it, no explanation is needed. For those that don't, no explanation will do. So it's that sort of thing. So you're all here because you made a time investment. You all spend money because you're making investments. And that's part of the thing. And that's one thing I haven't totally been able to ever figure out how to make that distinction. Because the ones that are aware of it are aware of it, and the ones that are not, are not. And that's just kind of the way it goes.