This Entrepreneurial Mindsets Will Shape Your Future! Joe Polish Mashup

The basis for my three diagrams is an ability that everybody is born with. And most people don't look at this as an ability. They don't actually look at this as a skill. But it's three time senses. And the three time senses are called past, present and future. So how many of you are familiar with past, present, present? How many of you are shaky about one of them or the other? And what I find from coaching entrepreneurs is that there tends to be frustration with the future and impatience with the present and a lot of regret about the past. Okay? So there's a weirdness that I notice that everybody has with these three time senses. And my feeling is that the number one problem why people have trouble with past, present and future is is they don't see them as capabilities. So if you think when a baby is born, there are some built in potential capabilities that come with just being human. And for example, we now know that children are wired for mathematics, that in a very, very short time, children begin to be mathematical in relationship to their surroundings. And it actually shows up very early, like three or four months. Children can start to distinguish and actually start differentiating things in terms of numbers. And so we have that build in ability. And of course, how many of you have discovered that some people are better at math than others? How many? I mean, you're probably better at math than some people, but there's people who are way better than you are at math. The other one is language. We have hard wiring to be able to speak, okay? And so language comes to it, we don't have it right away. And it makes a huge difference, the environment that you grow up with, whether you get language or not. And for example, they find children who are born in very, very disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States. Inner city neighborhoods never develop the future tense of the verb. They only speak in terms of the present. And so if you don't have a word, you also don't have the idea, okay? So words are actually ideas. And so children who are very disadvantaged and do not have people talking about the future actually don't develop a sense of the future. On the other hand, children who are born into very educated families of goal setting parents tend to develop that future sense very, very powerfully, okay? And they start thinking powerfully and it's a reinforcement. And if it doesn't happen early, it's very, very hard for it to happen at all. Spatial recognition, three dimensionality were born with that. The one I would like to talk to you about though, has to do with looking at the past. As a skill and a capability, looking at the present as a skill and a capability, and the future as a skill and a capability. And I say that if you get these three capabilities right, then all the other capabilities that you develop are right also. And so what we're going to do is we'll just put these up on the screen so we have past, present and future. And what I'm going to show you is three diagrams. So the three diagrams, one of them is called the Freedom Cycle. The second one is called the Captivity cycle. And then I have a really neat one at the end, which is called the four Cs. And I'm going to show you the Freedom cycle first, because this is the right way of actually arranging the time senses of past, present and future, so that these three time senses really work for you. They're always on your side. And then I'm going to show you the captivity cycle, which is, I would say that the vast majority of people on the planet are actually have a relationship to time that I call the captivity cycle. And you will know people personally who are involved in the captivity cycle. And when I give you the conditions, you will immediately have dozens and dozens of examples of individuals and groups and organizations and even countries that are in the captivity cycle. And then I'm going to show you the four conditions for actually creating a really great future. And this is also a capability, and so that more and more you have the ability to actually use the past, present and future in a way that constantly creates a bigger and better future. So the right way to proceed with the time senses, we always have to start in the present, and you start in the present and you move to the future. And this is called choosing. So a distinction I like to make. I'm very passionate about words. And so when I was about 15 years ago, my team, not knowing what else to get me for Christmas, actually got me the Oxford English Dictionary, which consists of 20 volumes, and each volume is 1,000 pages. So the S's in the Oxford English Dictionary cover two and a half books. It's the biggest letter in the English Alphabet is 2 1/2 volumes of S. But one of the things I notice is that there's two words that people use interchangeably. One of them is choose, and the other one is decide. And I notice when people talk about choose and decide, it's like they're equal words, you know, they choose, they decide. But one of the things you have to understand about choose is that choose can only be used in relationship to the future. It's a future sense. You can't choose the past, you can only choose the future. And so the thing that's really important here is that choosing comes from the inside. It's not dictated from the outside. Okay? So people who choose the future are doing it on the basis of their imagination. They're doing it as a result of the life they've lived and capabilities they've developed. And every human choice is kind of unpredictable before it happens. And it's very, very important that the very basis of creativity of creating new things actually comes from a very, very strong capability of choosing the future. So people who are very creative people sort of say, well, how can, where do the ideas come from? The ideas don't come from anywhere except an act of choosing a bigger and better future. And the reason why they create something new is because they need to create something new to satisfy a chosen future that's bigger and better what they have than what they have right now. Then what happens when you choose the future? Now you're in a position to do something with the past. So a lot of times people will come to me because I'm really good at giving advice. And when I was six years old, I was very good at giving advice to people who were older than me. And one of I must have got onto this time since very early. And people say I'm having a hard time making a decision. How many of you right now have a decision? And it's a bit hard, it's a bit hard right now. You're having a hard time getting your mind around it. And what I've discovered is you cannot make a good decision in the present. It's impossible to make a good decision in the present. You have to first of all choose a much bigger and better future At a date in the future, let's say three years, we can decide. Decide is a very interesting word. It comes from a Latin word. And the C, I, D, e part of decide. We have other words like that in the English language. And one of the words we have in the English language is homicide. We have suicide, we have fratricide, we have pesticide, okay? And what it means is to kill. So the cide means to kill. So that when you decide, you're actually saying something's okay and something has to die and it's an actual killing off. So what I say, just to make it positive, is that what you actually decide is what part of the past gets to come along. What part of the past, given the new, bigger and better future that you've Chosen what part of the past gets to come along? How many of you like that sound rather than, this can't come with me? That's sort of a negative. But you're actually deciding what part of the past gets to come along and how many of you have parts of the past that if you create a new, bigger and better future, there's definitely parts of your past that get to come along. Any idea what the two main things that always get to come along from the past? What would be one thing that always gets to come? Yeah, well, knowledge. Yeah, I put it down. So knowledge, learning. But I say skill. Do skills always get to come along? How many of you would develop a skill and then leave it behind? No, no, but we always bring the skills and how many of your achievements you actually bring forward. So one of the best ways to really clean up your past is just see your past in terms of skills and achievements. Just see it. And you say, well, what if my past is really worthwhile? And I said, well, any part of your past that represents a skill is a good part of your past, and any part of your past that's an achievement is a good part of your past. So once we're there now, we've done two things here. We have to choose the future. Okay, so we're choosing the future. So it's being created bigger and better. And with that picture now in our mind, visualizing our mind of the bigger and better future, now, and only now, are we actually in a good position to make good decisions. So we often wonder, why do people make bad decisions? And it's because they're trying to decide in the present. You cannot decide in the present. You can only decide in the future from the standpoint of the future.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Once you're in the past, then we can do something else. Now we can move from the past to the past to the present. And what we get to do now is utilize our past. So I'm a big deal that my past is very valuable because I get to use things from the past, skills and skills and achievements to arm myself in the present to actually take the actions to create the bigger and better future. Okay? Now, so this is really, really interesting because this is innovation. So a lot of people say, well, how are these creative people creative? And I said, they choose the bigger and better future. No, no, no. But I mean, how does it actually happen? How does it actually happen? You know, I've listened to all the CDs, I've read all the creativity manuals. I can't quite get a handle on what it is they're doing. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I'm talking about creativity. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. I can do this for 25 years. They're choosing a bigger and better future. No, no, but I want to be really creative. Yeah. Choose a bigger and better future. It's got to be something else. Got to be something else. No, it's just choosing a bigger and better future. And. And I'm going to show you, in my third diagram, the four Cs, how you get really good at choosing, okay? Because a lot of people are very, very bad at choosing. Very, very bad at choosing. I call this the freedom cycle, okay? And I've gotten permission from Harley Davison to actually use this language. So it's a freedom cycle. And that is that the feeling of using your time senses to innovate gives a very powerful sense of freedom, okay? And the freedom shows up. The freedom shows up. Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship and freedom of purpose. And this is why you became an entrepreneur. I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 years, and people say, you know, how can people just do that for money? And I said, well, they're not doing it for money, they're doing it for freedom, okay? It's just that in our world, freedom costs a lot of money and they have to have the money to buy their freedom for them. So that's the innovation. And what it is, it's related to abundance, okay? So abundance is the constant feeling that you're innovating a bigger and better future and that your life is becoming more and more innovative. This is out of want. Why are you doing this? You're doing it because you want to. And why do you want to? You want to because you want to. No, no, no. I mean, but what's the reason why you want it? It's because you want it. And people say, no, no, no, there has to be a reason why you want it. And I said, the reason why you want it is you want it. And this seems like a very simple statement, but most people don't want things because they want them. They want things because. And then they tell a story about why they want it. And from the moment they start telling the story about why they want something, they're pure fiction writers. They're just making it up on the spot to justify why they want something. The only reason why we want things is because we want them. Well, this is just going to eliminate the entire psychological industry, psychiatric industry, because they're saying, yes, but why do you want it? You want it because you want it. And the truth is, it's a creative act. And you cannot psychoanalyze a creative act. It just happens and it's creative. Okay, so this is the freedom cycle. Now I'm going to do the captivity cycle. Okay, you can say boo. Boo. Okay, so here's the thing. This is what happens. They still start off with the same three potential skills. But what happens is when they're in the present and they get the notion that they would like to have a bigger and better future. Okay, so you take Joel's prescription, Joel Kahn's prescription, that you can have a picture of in every health indicator that you have, that you would have a higher performance. It would be a bigger, better world, or what Robert talked about of people really, truly being breakthrough leaders. They have a high sense of energy and they have a high sense of engagement. They have a high sense of empathy. They have a high sense of productivity and creativity. So they have these five things, and all of us can visualize it. But people who are in the captive or in the captive cycle have a hard time visualizing, because the moment they even start to visualize that it's going to be different from what they've been doing up until now, they immediately get clicked right back to the past. It's almost like they get a thought. I'm really thinking about bigger and better. And they get an email. And the email says, what are you doing? Let's come in on Monday and talk about this new, better thing and bring counsel with you. This is the justification board in your mind. How many of you. The justification board. And the justification board says, we notice that you're thinking this thought bigger and better. What's that all about? You got a problem? I mean, is there some complaint that you have about the way things are now? And you have to understand that people who. The vast majority of people, the moment they get a new thought, a new possibility in their mind, immediately, their past, which is completely unionized. Their past, which is completely unionized. Why don't we talk about this why don't we look it over, brainy man for a couple days? You know, he'll forget about it. And every time you. Every time you come to the justification board and you have to tell lies, because that's what happens. See, the justification of what you want is a lie. And you get used to lying about what you want, okay? And you feel it. I mean, when you lie, you lose power. I mean, it's just one of the things about lying is that you lose power because you're removing yourself from reality. You're not telling the truth about the reality. And there's a loss of confidence. There's a loss of power in that. But not only that. That becomes the dominant experience in your life, is that if you even so much as have a glimmer of something bigger and better, boom, you're right back to the justification for it in the past. Okay? And so what happens then is that the past. So you're choosing the past, you're not choosing the future. And then the past decides what you get to do in the present. So your past gets to decide what you do in the present. And the only acceptable thing to do in the present is to utilize your time to reinforce the past. How's that feel? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, so how many have you. How many of you have done this? I do it. I do it. I mean, I'm. You know, I teach this stuff, but I still do it. But in the major parts of my life, not so much. I do it with minor things. You know? I mean, we all. None of us are 100% anything. We're all doing this. But how many of you know, people around you who do this? That the moment you would suggest a new idea, what happens? What?

Whoa.

What's that all about? What are we doing here? So the big thing is that the vast now, the freedom cycle really requires a lot of individual effort. This is totally supported by society. This one is totally supported because society basically wants to stay the way it is. That's why, you know, that's a stable society. Yeah. So all of you here are change agents in one part of human life. I mean, this is really what Genius Network is about. You would not come into Genius Network. You would not be a member of Genius Network if you weren't a change agent in some part of human life related to individuals, related to organizations and. And everything. But it's going to require people to have a vision of themselves that's bigger and better than it is right now. Okay? So the thing is that if you're going to be better and better as a change agent, you better really, really get the freedom cycle down as a very powerful skill inside yourself because you will not be able to help people when they say, I can't meet a. Can't meet tomorrow. I'm at the justification board. I'm at the justification board. Can we make it Thursday, 10 years from today? Anyway, so this is repetition. It's repetition and it's a constant repetition. Now here's. It has some very, very interesting. Has some very interesting connections in this society. I believe that the lifetime experience of not being able to get out of the repetition cycle is the basis of all addictions, especially drug addictions. And the reason is that people really, really want to have this sense of innovation. They're really passionate. I mean, it's something that people. It's such a powerful idea of the ability to feel that you're creating something really new and really different and really better is such a powerful feeling. And people have had this feeling. I mean, you know, it may have been accidental and it may be when you were five years old, but you have that feeling of innovation. And your circumstances as you become an adult doesn't allow you to have that. But drugs will give you the experience for a short period of time that you're actually in that innovative mode, you know, that you're actually in that innovative existence. And there's all sorts of addictions, but it's an artificial way of actually creating the sense that you're innovating. But then of course, it doesn't last and then it's destructive. It's self destructive. So what happens here is this ability to actually engage with the future for people who are in the repetition cycle is actually cut off. And after a while they just can't really, really do it. Okay. And you can say, well, anybody can turn them around. And I said, well, no, you can rearrange the wiring in your brain so much over such a long period of time that, you know, you might have a religious conversion and you know, you might have deep psychotherapy, shock treatment, or that you might get a chance to do it, but it's not going to be self, self created. You're probably not going to make it. And a lot of people are in that, they're in that degree.

Okay?

So this is the captivity cycle and it's freedom cycle. Captivity cycle. Okay, okay. And this is about scarcity. And what it is is the scarcity of being able to create greater freedom for yourself. It's a profound scarcity. That a lot of people have, it's time. They have a scarcity of time, they have a scarcity of money, they have a scarcity of relationship and they have a scarcity of purpose. And so they're driven strictly from their past. And it's about need. Okay, so very, very interesting. One of the most dominant models of the last 50 years has been Maslow. And I disagree with Maslow totally. The first time I saw Maslow, I totally disagreed. It because it's about needs. And needs are dictated from the outside, they're not created on the inside. So you've got survival, you've got safety, you've got belonging, you've got achievement, and you've got self actualization. But notice the structure that Maslow used. It was a pyramid. And when I was born in 1944, society was pyramids. Government was a pyramid, big unions were a pyramid, corporations were a pyramid. And it was kind of like this pyramid. Society was created as a reaction to the Great Depression and the Second World War, which, you know, my parents lived through that. Some of your parents lived through that. And just to have the basic things that you needed to live was a real win. And so everybody thought about needs. You know, you got to satisfy your needs. We don't live in that world. Okay? And it's probably why things are kind of confusing today, because we've switched over to a world where wanting is possible. As a matter of fact, wanting more and more things. Okay, yeah, but why do you need that? Well, I don't need it. I want it. Okay, why, you know, why is need. Why does Stephanie need to be on a boat for six months? He doesn't. He wants to be on a boat for six months. Why does he want it? Because he wants it. See the distinction? How many of you are really grasping the distinction here between needing and wine? Now I'm going to tell you something. I gave this talk at JJ Virgin's Mindshare in August. And afterwards, after I gave this speech, I had about 20 entrepreneurs come up to me to tell me how much of an impact they had that my talk had on them. And they were all female. Everyone was a female. Okay, there were men there, but all the women came up and talked to me about it and they said, I can't tell you how much this wanting just because you want it is liberating. And I asked them, this started happening. I had three or four of them. And because we have ever since the beginning, whereas there's just as many successful women entrepreneurs in the marketplace as there Are men entrepreneurs? Our percentage in Strategic Coach has always been between 15 and 20% women. So I started asking him this question. I said, I'm going to say something and see if you agree. Me, agree with me. Really successful women are as successful as they need to be. Really successful entrepreneurial women are as successful as they need to be. But really successful men entrepreneurs are as successful as they want to be. So you ask a woman, well, why do you need to do that? And what happens? They say, well, I've got a family to feed. I've got this. It's a justification of why they're ambitious. So I just want to say that, and my feeling is that this is culturally induced, that women are really forced far, far more than men to justify their success and standing out as an individual. But if you get this wanting thing straight, you immediately get relieved. You won't need a justification because wanting requires no justification. Okay, so this is really the big difference about need. Okay, so diagram number one is the freedom cycle. Diagram number two, Spoose captivity cycle. Now I'm going to show you how to really get good at wanting and the way you get really good at wanting. If you turn the sheet over. The sheet over this sheet right here. Turn the sheet over. So I'm going to just take the present and I'm going to do the future and we're going to choose the future. Now, how do you get good at choosing? So I'm going to tell you a story. August 15, 1978. I was both bankrupt and divorced on the same day. August 15, 1978. Okay? Divorced in the morning, bankrupt in the afternoon. I arranged that way so I could keep my credit card and have a really good lunch. Celebration. Then I had to give in my credit card. I mean, you laugh about it, but it wasn't laughing time back then because you just got really two very, very bad report cards, you know, and you had really screwed up in two areas. So I began thinking about that for about three months after my experience. And I came to two decisions that I was, number one, going to relieve everybody else of responsibility for what had happened to me because I had to get my power back. And you can't get your power back if someone else is responsible. So one of the things, if you want to free yourself up in a situation, a bad situation, you've got to relieve everybody else of responsibility and take it on 100%. So that was number one. But number two is I came to the conclusion that I had had the relationship failure and the business failure because I Wasn't really telling myself what I wanted. You know, I was expecting that. I feel like I got married, I would be told what I wanted and that if I just started a business, I'd be told what I wanted. But it's not that I didn't have the wanting skill. So I came to one goal at the end of 1978, and that was for 25 years. Every day for 25 years, I was going to keep a journal. And in that journal I would write at least a sentence about something I wanted every day. I could write a paragraph if I wanted, I could write several pages if I wanted. But I had to write a. I had to write at least one sentence. And it was about something going on in my life right at that point. Fast forward, it's 2003, it's January 31st. Babs and I are out with some close friends of ours. We're having dinner and I said, I just want to let you know I'm finishing a project, a 25 year project. And over the last 25 years, every day except 12 days out of that's 9131 days. So 9119 days I wrote in my journal. And you know what? Something I really became a muscle bound wanter. And I'm like wanting on steroids. I really want things. Don't need much. Want lots. Okay. And wanting, we're talking about keeping young, needing ages. You wanting makes you very, very young. So it's a skill that makes you young because no matter what you've wanted in the past, you want more in the future. Bigger and better. Okay, so how do we get to be a really good wanter so that we can constantly stay in the freedom cycle and not in the captivity cycle? Well, people say, how many often have you heard this with what you sell? I would do what you're telling me to do. If I had the confidence I would become an entrepreneur if Obama would subsidize me. The department of free stuff. Do that. So you say, well, no, no. So the weird thing about this is that people always want to get what is essentially confidence, which is the fourth thing you get in becoming a good wanter. You get confidence. And I said, so that's number four. And they said, no, no, no, no. I know what you're saying. Not confidence, I want the capability. And I say, that's really unfortunate because capability is number three. Okay? And they say, well, I want. I don't know what I want. I said, it all starts. I'm going to go right to Number one. So capability equals confidence. It really starts with a commitment. And what a commitment means is that you're giving yourself a picture of bigger and better in the future. And you're saying, regardless of what it takes, I'm committed to get there. Because that starts it. Because you have to organize and channel your energies. And once you get there, you have that commitment. Then. And this is the tough part. This is the tough part. It requires a second step. And the second step is courage. Requires courage. Okay, now just to clarify. Courage, the difference between confidence and courage is that confidence feels really good and courage feels really shitty. How many of you right now, in some project or area of your life right now, are experiencing courage? Yeah. Yeah. And I have to tell you that this courage is a skill. It's the ability to go through periods of feeling really shitty because you've had a really strong commitment to change something with the knowledge that if you can just stay in the state of courage and having made the commitment long enough, what will happen is that the courage will give you capability, and the capability will give you confidence. And once you have the confidence, you can then jump to a higher level of commitment for something that's even bigger and better. So what we have is a virtuous cycle here of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence. And our past. Our past all becomes raw material. And the raw material is what. What are the two things that you always want to bring forward? Skills and achievements. So you keep stockpiling in the past, skills and achievement, which you get to come forward, and it's that higher level, constantly increasing level of skill and achievement which allows you to make commitments to higher and bigger, better things. And then it starts over again. So here's a weird thing with entrepreneurs, because I've been coaching them, little survey in the room. How many of you, your biggest breakthroughs since you started being an entrepreneur came when you went through periods of commitment and courage where you weren't guaranteed capability. How many of you, okay, and how many of you right now are planning your future to such an extent that you'll never have to go through another period of courage? I had this guy. He was born. He was a hidden child. During the Second World War, a Jewish child in Europe went through a horrendous war, comes to Canada, doesn't speak English, speaks French. So he went to Montreal and he taught himself English, got a doctorate from college, became an incredible expert on the Canadian tax code, was a financial advisor, made millions of dollars. And then he's sitting there, he's got 20, 21, 23 year old children and they're slugs because he said to himself, everything that I had to go through, my children are never going to go through that. So he had to demonstrate incredible courage and develop incredible capabilities. But he created a cocoon for them. So they had. And now he's spending the rest of his life subsidizing them because they never developed any courage or capability. So I really watch out for entrepreneurs who are always trying to make things easy for their kids. Don't make things easy for your kids. Have them go through the same four Cs so that they can actually master the freedom cycle. And if you can do that, by the time they're adults and walking around, you've done everything you possibly can for your children. So this is the three, how many of you. I made the claim that three diagrams were going to totally change and transform your sense of the past, present and future. So I want to survey how many of you. I've actually done that with my three diagrams, actually do that. And how many of you can see that the more you use the four Cs to reinforce the freedom cycle one, you'll become an extraordinarily good wanter of the future. And the other thing is that you'll find yourself separating and not being bogged down by people and organizations that are in the captivity cycle.

How do you do the communication in a way that deeper connects the person with the messaging?

Well, let me give you an example. I'm going to use a couple of visuals. One of the visuals is I want you to picture a grape. And this grape is resting on a dime. And that grape and dime are resting on a beach ball. So you can see how off sized that is. That grape represents conscious awareness. And that conscious awareness is seven bits of information per second, plus or minus two. This is not my opinion. This is scientific research. This is the reason telephone numbers are seven digits. And at one point France tried to create an eight digit phone number and the people nearly rebelled when they tried to do it. This is where the human brain operates. That dime that represents critical faculty. The beach ball represents the unconscious mind. That unconscious mind can process 10,000 pieces of information per second. So I'm going to give you a quick example. You're driving to work and you drive to work. You've driven this path many, many times. And you're driving down the freeway. Tell me what your brain's doing. Your brain is thinking about the next meeting, the first meeting you have at the office. Who are you gonna meet with? I've Got a lunch to do today. I've gotta be out of the office by five. Cause my wife and I are gonna go someplace. None of your thinking is about driving the car. Who's driving the car? Your unconscious mind is driving the car. Now, all of a sudden, as you're going down that freeway, somebody comes flying in from an entrance ramp on the the freeway and swerves into your lane. You in a heartbeat, in milliseconds, look in both mirrors, find an opening, move the car over, get out of the way, save yourself from the accident. And then your conscious mind says, what was that idiot thinking? As marketers, we keep trying to talk to the conscious mind. We keep trying to create advertising that speaks to those seven digits per second brain. Because we think as marketers, we think that's what people want to hear about. We think they want to hear that my product is 62% more effective or my product comes with a five year guarantee or whatever these things are. But that's not who buys things. Who buys things is the unconscious mind. Here's another example. You still drive your Tesla?

Yeah, yeah.

It's $110,000 car. A $22,000 Chevy Spark would take you to work just as well, wouldn't it? Yes, it would get you there at the exact same time with no problem. Why did you buy a $110,000 car instead of a $22,000 car?

Because my low self esteem and need for acknowledgement and validation and status required me to have a cooler car.

And we should applaud his honesty. That's the reality. The reason there's a Rolls Royce or a McLaren or a Tesla is because people buy things based on how they feel, how it impacts their life, how they feel about it. And think about. I'm going to give you an example of somebody walking into a Chevy dealer. You walk into a Chevy dealer and there's a Corvette on the showroom. But you really came in to buy an suv, but you look at the Corvette and it's like, this is so cool. And I would look so good in this thing and it would feel so fast. And you get behind the wheel and you feel the leather on the steering wheel and you're like, this is so nice. And then the salesman comes up and what does he do? Well, he decides, I'm going to feed the grape just enough information to let the beach ball make a decision. And he says, joe, you know, you look fabulous behind that Corvette, man. You should see how you look in this thing. And you know this car will go from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds. You ever done that? Have you had that experience? And then he tells Joe, do you know the Corvettes have the highest resale value of any American car? So you know that you could buy this Corvette and drive this car for the next two years, and you'll sell this car and actually spend less money driving this car than you will that Chevy Tahoe. Now, Joe can all of a sudden say, I need to buy a Corvette, because that makes me a smart consumer. He's not buying it because he's a smart consumer. He's using information to rationalize his beach ball. I'm giving him the information he needs. So in this case, he can go home. The guy can go home and tell his wife. She's like, why did we just get a Corvette? Honey, I did this to save money, and let me tell you why. I talked to the salesman, and he told me, this thing's gonna have such a great resale. We're gonna drive this for nothing. That's how we have to approach our marketing. We have to figure out how to get to that unconscious mind, that conscious mind, the conscious mind. I want you to think of that as a spam filter. So I'm gonna jump into hypnosis for a moment. In hypnosis, if I was going to hypnotize a patient, what I do is I get the conscious mind to shut down. I just throw it offline, and I can talk to the unconscious mind. When I'm speaking to your unconscious mind, Understand, your unconscious mind always wants to do what's best for you, but your conscious mind is literal. So if I put someone in a hypnotic state, I can quickly tell how hypnotized they are, because I would say, can you tell me your name? Now, normally, if I said, can you tell me your name? You'd say, yeah, my name is Joe Polish. If you're in a hypnotized state, I would say, can you tell me your name? And you would say, yes, because your conscious mind is literal. Your conscious mind says, yeah, I know my name. It's not going to interpret what I'm asking. It's going to answer exactly what I'm asking. So oftentimes, we create these ad messages where we create these convoluted messages, and we're asking people to pick up the nuance. We're asking them to understand what we're trying to tell them. We need to not do that because people aren't paying attention to advertising. Advertising is an interruption into my day. I'm not waiting for your new 30 second commercial to come out this week. So you need to talk. You need to get that spam filter offline. Talk in literal terms, tell me what you want me to do and give it to me as a direct command. You can actually give commands. Have any of you ever seen a stage hypnosis show? We all get trained the same way. I know how to do them. Every one of them is exactly the same. You call 15 people out of the audience, you line them up in a little horseshoe, and you do something called suggestibility testing. And what we'll do is I'll tell somebody, put your hands together right now. But I'll lock your fingers together, push your arms out as hard as you can. Now, no matter how hard you try, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. But no matter how hard you try, you can't pull your hands apart together. And they won't be able to pull their hands apart. Now, out of the 15 people I get up there, five of them will pull their hands together. And you'll see that somebody on stage will say, thank you for participating. Go ahead and sit down, and we'll keep the people that can't. Now, why can't they pull their hands together? Because I get them in such a state where I keep saying, keep trying, keep trying. Try is a mental word. Try is an escape word. So as an example, if I was to call you up and say, joe, I'm moving Saturday and I'm going to move my 8,000 square foot house, I'm going to do it myself. I wonder if you come over and help me. And you're going to say, I would rather take a beating than help somebody move furniture. Which personally, I would rather get in a ring with Mike Tyson and move furniture. So what does your brain do? Your brain's going to say, geez, Marc, I've promised to take the kids someplace, and I've got this party that my wife wants. If I can find some time in the day, I promise I'm gonna try to get by and help you. Try is how your brain says, I don't have to. Now, what do people do in their advertising? Try new product X today. And your unconscious mind is literally saying, or not, because I don't have to. Cause I can get out of this. Because that's what we do. And this is why they can't pull their hands apart, because I'm yelling at them, try it, try it. Keep trying. And that's what panics them. So they can't pull their hands apart. So we have to deal with people, literally, we have to tell them what we want. So we wouldn't say, try Product X. We would do something like, get Product X now at. Literally give them a command. And if you ever listen, if you ever pay any attention to commercials or radio spots, we do. We literally change the cadence in the voice. So as an example, we might be talking in a very soft cadence about a product. And then when we get to that part of the audio where it says to go get it, it'll say, product X will do this but. And then. But it'll get Product X now at cvs, that the voice will drop and it will become commanding, and then the voice will come back up. It'll get singsong after that and soften up because we're throwing that grape offline and we're telling the people what to do. Again, like in hypnotherapy, what we do in hypnotherapy is we take that line off, we talk to the conscious mind, and we tell the conscious mind what it needs to do. Yeah. So we say, look, you have this fear of spiders. We're going to talk about your fear of spiders. And right now, I want you to imagine that you're sitting in a chair, and on the arm of the chair right now is a spider. And you're looking at the spider, and you see the spider is harmless and the spider is not doing anything. And you even reach over and you touch the spider and you realize, wow, spiders actually won't really hurt me. Your conscious mind is then taking in information saying, oh, yeah, okay, I guess that wasn't so bad. And now we're gonna bring you out and you won't have your fear of spiders. How do we do that in our advertising? And there are different cadences we can create, we can do. As an example, we do things like feel, felt, found. If any of you have ever seen the commercial on Fox News that I do, it starts out with. It's about Earwax. And the commercial starts out with, have you tried all kinds of products for Earwax and been disappointed? Feel. Yes. I feel like that guy. So we have an ethos. Yeah, he's just like me. Now, by the way, if you don't have a problem with earwax, I don't care. Tune out. I don't need your attention. I'm not ever going to try to sell you something you don't need. So the reason I'm saying, in that particular spot, have you tried other products for Earwax and Failed because I want people to raise their hand and say, yeah, I have a problem with earwax. Yes, I've tried products. He's just like me. What is the next thing that we say in that Ed? Me too simple. That comment. Me too. Feel. Felt. Felt is, wow, this guy. Not only does he have the same problem as me, he just validated who I am. He just literally said, I'm right. Because I thought it was only me that couldn't, you know, that was having this problem. But yeah, he's got the same problem and nothing worked for him. Too feel. Felt found. Next comment is until I found, in this particular case, WaxRx. So somebody who has a problem, like me, who I have an ethos with, who just validated me, said, hey, I've got a solution for you. Okay, I kind of trust this guy. What's he got to tell me?

That's great. Do you see the applicability?

Okay, awesome. So.

Just like you just shared, what are some things if you only had like two minutes to rattle off? We got more than two minutes. But if you wanted two minutes to rattle off, here's something you could do that would make a profound improvement in your marketing and advertising and how you spend money.

What would it be as far as a technique?

Yeah.

The word because.

Because.

Okay, the word because. The word because. You can make a lot of money on the word because. And I'm gonna tell you how to do it. There's a. There's a researcher from years ago. Her name was Dr. Ellen Langer. And Dr. Ellen Langer was amazing. And she did just amazing experiments. Well, one of her experiments was to find out how people's brain worked when it came to getting people to do things they didn't want to do. So she hired actors to go to university bookstores. For those young people, this won't make sense to you, but for us older people, we used to go to the college bookstore and stand in line at the copy machine to make copies of stuff. So there would be 100 people standing in front at the copy machine. And she sent these actors in and she asked them to go in and cut in line to ask people to cut in line. So they first just went up and said, do you mind if I cut in line? And about 20%, 15, 20% of people actually would let them do that. Then they went to, do you mind if I would cut in line? Because I've got a class in 20 minutes and I'm going to miss my class. Like 80 plus percent people would let the Person cut in line. So then she said, well, what happens if the. If the excuse gets dumber? So they started making the excuse worse and worse and worse. They finally got down to, do you mind if I cut in line? Because I don't like lines. Guess what? 80% of people still let them cut in line. And here's the reason. The reason. This is how your brain works. Your brain is always looking for the other shoe to fall. So when I. And I proved this to my wife, by the way, I was telling her this, and I'm like, I'm gonna give you a demonstration. I went up to my daughter's room. My daughter's room was a mess. And I said, andy, you need to clean your room tonight because we're going to go out to dinner tomorrow. We go out to dinner all the time. And then she cleaned her room. And my wife's like, son of a bitch. How did you get her to do that? It's the because statement. Our brains crave reason. We want to know there's a reason for something. So when I say, get product X because here's what happens. Your brain goes, okay, here it is. And the first statement I said that was, get product X passes to the unconscious mind as a command statement. I literally just told you, go buy this. And you let that in. That got past your spam filter. Because you're so busy doing this, waiting for. Because you can literally build these bridges like that.

That's great. I mean, so what other forms of techniques or manipulations do you have for influencing family members, children, team members, all that. That are really sneaky and clever? And I'm saying this jokingly, of course.

I'll tell you one very quick, though. I was at breakfast with my niece, and she had a little boy, and he's playing with the car on the table, and she keeps telling him, stop throwing your car on the floor. And he would look at her and smile, and he would throw the car on the floor. And I'm looking at him like, do you realize you're telling him to put the car on the floor? And she goes, no, I'm not. I told him not to. I said, okay. Understand. He's a year and a half years old. He's one and a half years old. His brain is literal, which your brain is literal, too. Unconsciously, when you tell somebody, don't throw your car on the floor. Car has a visual image. Floor has a visual image. Don't is an abstract. Abstracts don't have visual images. So all the kid's hearing Is car, floor, car, floor. So I picked up the car. I said, aj, keep your car on the table. And then for the rest of the meal, he sat there doing this with the car on the table. And then my niece looked at him, and she's like, so I'm the problem. I'm like, yeah, in this particular case, you are. Keep your advertising literal like that. Don't use abstracts. Use concretes. Because our brains think in pictures.

That sort of explains. Which I think is one of. It's clever, but it's also evil. There's a couple of evil advertising slogans. One is drink responsibly.

Okay?

Which is the command, because they're commanding you to drink, right? Drink responsibly. What they hear is drink, okay? And I don't know what the stats are now since post pandemic, but before the pandemic, which dramatically increased smoking, drinking, everything, it made people. More people are dying and have died from the health challenges than have died from, quote, unquote, Covid and whatnot. So I think it was, like, 80 to 90% of alcohol consumed was from, like, 10% of drinkers. So, you know, the alcohol industry wants people to drink. And then what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Except a friend of mine that made that slow.

Really? He's a bad person. Is he gonna burn in hell?

No, actually, he's actually. He's a really good guy.

So he came up with that.

Yeah, it's R and R Agency. That's actually.

I want to talk to this dude.

I can introduce you to him.

I would like to. Yeah, that would be. Would make one hell of an interesting conversation. But, like, you think of it, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Vegas, Right. Except debt. Except lots of things.

Right.

But what you're doing, though, is you are like, drink responsibly. I mean, it's what you're saying. You're embedding these sort of commands. And I think most people completely overlook the, you know, the significance of how you.

Oh, it's brilliant. Think of the phrase, you deserve a break today. You. That's my favorite topic, right? Deserve. You're recognizing that I'm special. A break. Damn it. I do deserve a break today, right now. Talk about a call to action. I mean, how perfect is that phrase?

Yeah.

The other thing that they always try to get people to do. I'll give you an experiment here. Go drive down the highway and look at billboards. If you see any billboard that has more than seven words on it, I guarantee you that they just took money and Set it on fire. And the reason is because remember those seven bits of information in your conscious mind. Guess what? Your brain can only read seven words as a phrase. That's why headlines should always be under seven words. Billboards need to be under seven words. You deserve a break today when you do that. If I say you deserve a break today and I put that on the wall, you don't need to read it. You take it as a phrase. Once I start you reading, I broke that cadence. That's why you see these billboards that are complete waste of time. Seven words on a billboard. That's it.

What are some of your favorite action steps that you've written about? And Dave Asprey's in the room. Where's Dave? Okay, Dave did great interview with Arianna and thank you for the shout out. I want to point something out that's always, it's a little subtle thing, but I noticed it like, you know, I introduced you to Dave and he did an interview for you. He has a big following, people that listen to his podcast. And, you know, he says, you know, he thanked me in the beginning. Little things like that I love. And I can't tell you how many people, when you make a connection, they don't acknowledge the person or they hear a quote and they don't really credit the person that gave a quote. You know, one of the attributes of a giver is giving credit and always acknowledging people. It's just the right thing to do. But, you know, he talked about how much science is really in your book because it's really backed up with a lot of great science. And so what are some of the things that you've written about action steps that are just game changers for all these entrepreneurs and people that are here and people that will be watching this.

On video so specifically. And thank you, Dave. I love that interview. Dave came to that Huffington Post newsroom and we did it there. So one of the things that is worth stressing here, because it's a room of entrepreneurs, is the connection between renewal and creativity, which is the exact opposite of the connection we assume is the truth, which is working around the clock, burning out and creating great things. In fact, if you look at the data that 3, 3/4 of startups fail and that startup entrepreneurs, as the stereotype would have it, you know, work around the clock, never sleep, et cetera. Well, maybe if they actually slept and renewed themselves, we might not have three quarters of them failing. Has anybody thought of that? And now the science is very convincing that when we are sleep Deprived, exhausted, burnt out. We can be transactional, but we are not really ultimately creative. And I have quotes in the book. Steve Jobs famously said that his best ideas that led to the most iconic Apple products came after Zen meditation. Bill Gates would take think weeks and go off in the mountains in a cabin, without devices, without anything. And if you go back through history, you know, Archimedes, my fellow Greek compatriot, the Greek mathematician, you know, came up with the scientific theory of displacement when he was having a bath and therefore really relaxed and ran out in the streets naked shouting eureka. Which would have made a great Instagram. And, you know, Newton sitting under a tree, having tea, contemplating. And the upper. And the theory of gravity. So, you know, it's like endless examples. The whole point is that if you want to be creative, you want to come up with great ideas. It's much easier to do that when we are not operating from burnout and constantly on deadline. So one of the ways that, of course we need to do that is by learning to disconnect from our constant thoughts, you know, our mind. And somebody here mentioned the obnoxious roommate. I write in the book about the obnoxious roommate living in our head that constantly questions, doubts, puts us down. You guys have it, too, but we women have it much louder, right? So how do we learn to silence that voice? So I have a lot. I have a couple of steps in particular. One of them has to do with learning to put our devices outside our bedroom before we go to sleep. Because we need to have a transition between our waking life and our sleeping life. Whenever people say to you, I can't sleep, it's because they can't silence the mind. And it's very hard to silence your mind if, as most people, most of us do, we just stay on email or texting or whatever until the last minute, and then we crash. So very important, how many of you sleep with your phones by your bed? Okay, you guys are successful. If you stop doing that, you'll be even more successful, I promise. Just take your phones at the end of the day and charge them outside your bedroom, because the science is incontrovertible. If you wake up in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, you're going to be tempted to look at your data, especially if you can't go to sleep right away. And that A, makes it harder to go to sleep, and B, your sleep is not as deep and recharging, and it's not worth it because you all know that when you wake up recharged, there's nothing you can do, right? Life is there to be taken. And another connected part here is to really recognize that very often we carry a lot of projects, things that we thought we would do that we are not going to really do. So having regular life audits, I mean, I had a recent life audit during which I decided, you know what? I was never going to learn to become a good skill skier. I'm a lousy skier. I was hoping one day I would become a good skier. But realistically I'm not going to invest the time and energy to do it. So it was very liberating to realize that you can complete a project by dropping it. So as far as I'm concerned, skiing is done. When I go skiing now with my friends or daughters, I sit by the fire doing. Drink hot chocolate and read a good book and I feel just fine.

And just listen to I love marketing on your headphones.

I love marketing. I will do that. I'll try that next time.

The thing you said about. Well, let me ask you this. What about hula hoops? Are you good with hula hoop?

No, but I'm willing to try that.

Have you ever been to Burning Man?

No.

Okay, just curious because I wanted to see if there's another siderion. I just don't know. Just don't know. So the thing you're saying about not sleeping near your phone, I don't do that. And I'm, you know, I'm an addict. You know, I mean, an addict is either in their active addiction or they just. I mean, I believe in the disease model of addiction, that it's a brain disease and my brain does not do well if I have electronic friends because they aren't friends. When I'm trying to sleep. I live in a church two story home and I keep my phone downstairs because it is a magnetic force that seems to be more powerful than my willpower and ability to manage it. And it does tempt me and it's annoying And I simply, you know, when I even go to hotels, I will keep the phone across the room because when it's next to me for some reason, it just, it's just a temptation. And although that's a subtle piece of advice, I mean, I've talked to a lot of people that do that. It's just, it's very difficult. And there's little hinges, swing, big doors and these little things that you can do make all the difference in the world. Let's talk about advertising and marketing and brand building. And since you work with a lot of big brands. And I am pretty much a hardcore direct response guy. I want to talk to you about that subject because you're an expert in it. And I'd like to first start with asking you to define what is a brand.

What is a brand is an interesting question because I agree with you. Most people don't know what it is and they mistake it for something else. Brands started literally, it comes from the word brandure, which was a term for burning an insignia to show ownership on cattle and other livestock. And that's literally where modern brands, the brand came from. So 400 years ago, brands were about livestock, and then they were set out by certain guilds to protect the purity of the product that that guild was trying to sell, like silver, like gold, and so on. Brands as a phenomenon in business, it's really been in the last probably 15 or 20 years. And that's become a topic of conversation. And it's really heated up in the last 10 or so. And there are iconic brands that we look to, like Disney, what a brand is. And I'll go back to Disney and Apple, which are both interesting examples. A brand is a story well told. That's what a brand is. And that story has to be about what the core value and core product is that you're trying to sell. Where the mistake is made a lot is in not drawing a distinction between a brand and branding. Branding is how you get the message out there. Through advertising, through brand marketing, through public relations. That's branding. But you have to start with a core message about the values of that company that resonate with their consumer base. And of course, you have to have the product behind it to deliver on that promise. Because a brand is a promise. So, for example, Disney, the brand is family entertainment. They deliver on that promise through their amusement parks and through their movies and that kind of thing. It's family entertainment. And they've delivered on that promise very well. They're held up as one of the prime American brands. But when Disney was building the company, he didn't think about it as branding. He just wanted control over his business and over the image of his business. And there's an interesting footnote there. In terms of what Walt would do when evaluating the various opportunities that came his way or when he was thinking about initiating new ideas. What he would say is, what would Mickey do? Mickey was Mickey Mouse, but he used Mickey Mouse as his barometer for what he would do or not do. Would Mickey do this? I don't think so. It's not a good idea. And so those things that Mickey would do became brand extensions, those things that Mickey wouldn't do. And it was literally like that. That was literally the question posed in the meetings when Mickey did this. Jump into Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren, his brand is associated with status, good taste. That's what his brand is about.

Can we refer to him as Ralph Lauren?

Because I would prefer that considering he hires me. I'll pronounce it correctly, don't have to worry about it. But you know, Ralph Lauren's brand proposition is status and good taste. Yeah, instead of the mouse ears, he's got the polo pony, but he's got his iconic brand symbol and the most valuable thing that any business has. This is true of Disney, this is true of Ralph Lauren, it's true of Apple, it's true of all the major brands, is their brand equity. And that means what their brand means to a consumer public. So when Ralph was experiencing very difficult business times in the 90s before he went public, it wasn't the factors full of his clothes or the stores full of the finished fashion or the bolts of fabric. That's not what made his company have such a high valuation. It was the brand equity he had built on a global scale that made that valuable and made that important. And creating that brand is a process that takes consistency in terms of establishing your brand. Brand signature, like family, entertainment. That means if you're Disney, you don't do an X rated movie.

Right.

You know, if you're Ralph Lauren, you don't do something that's cheap or not well done because that doesn't fall under the umbrella of status and good taste. And you take a brand to its pinnacle. For instance, if I go like that, what brand is that? I mean, now think how amazing that is that I can go like that. And you and my students, Parsons and so on, immediately know that that's Nike. Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on advertising and marketing everything to embed that in our minds? The brand equity of Nike is astounding, what they've done. So similarly with Apple, you know, Apple stands for hip innovation, you know, and they do that through their design, through the incredibly effective marketing they do so that they announce things and people are anticipating the next tablet, the next iPhone, the next whatever, whether they even need it, which most people don't. They want it, right? Because of how effectively they have built, built their brand equity.

Okay, well let's take, let's take the Nike example because they're, you know, if someone wants to just go out there and create a swoosh that in and of itself will never make a company, you know, grow. I mean, and you take a company like Harley Davidson, where, you know, I think has some pretty serious brand loyalty when you have your own clientele tattooing your logo and your name on their bodies, physically, I mean, that's taken it to a whole other level. And, you know, in order to get to something like that, there's all of this stuff that needs to occur. And so I think when people try to model all of these companies that you, you know, talked about that are small business owners, they're gonna have a pretty rude awakening if they don't have some pretty effective, you know, what's in it for me? Sort of messaging for people to first start buying, using, consuming, wearing, whatever before consumption starts. Brand in and of itself does not create sales. It may be one piece of it, but there's a whole infrastructure that goes along with it, a whole strategy. And that's what I'd like to kind of get some of your thoughts on.

Well, Nike, for instance, started as, you know, a unique athletic shoe. They first made the soles of the shoes on a waffle iron.

Right.

You know, so they had a unique product that was used by the Oregon track team, and it had a authenticity to its origin. So that swoosh stands for aspirational athletic achievement. That, you know, their phrase, which was brilliant and simple, just do it, you know, became part of the vernacular. But all of the underpinning of that was an authentic product that delivered on the promise. Same with Disney, same with Apple, same with Ralph Lauren. So if you think that you can throw all the money in the world at an ad campaign, you can maybe fool people once. But you can't build a brand because a brand requires repeat business and adding other members to the tribe, so to speak. But all of that is built on the foundation of an actual product that has to in some way enhance the value of the lives of people that buy it, whether it makes them just feel better or they feel they can run better, or they can enjoy their families at a vacation spot better, whatever it is. But you're right, there has to be that authenticity. And a lot of people just think if they promote the hell out of something, they can sell it. And they think that doing that makes them a brand, which it doesn't.

My favorite definition of branding came from David Ogilvy or Brand, where he said, you know, a brand is the personality of your product or service. And I think that's just a great definition. And so I'd like to talk about, you know, obviously a company that you've spent a lot of time with, Victoria's Secret and what is their strategy? How does it all work? I mean, is it the attractive models? Is it, what is it? I mean, what is the. What. What does their brand represent? What are they communicating? And when you put together a commercial for them, what are you wanting to convey?

Well, let me ask you, I'll flip it a bit. What does Victoria's Secret represent to you?

Seriously, what does it represent? Probably the best underwear, panties, undergarments, bras, etc that a woman could buy that is sexy, that is hot, that allows any woman to have the association with beauty and sexiness and that sort of stuff.

And you're right, just like Nike is about the aspiration of athletic achievement, Victoria's Secret is about the aspiration of being sexy and beautiful.

That's it.

It's aspirational wear.

That's right, yeah. So what they have done as a company and what is a, the brilliant strategy that they've employed is that they have worked with developing the idea of Victoria's Secret as that sexy, aspirational brand, yet tasteful, but also, also that they have created their, the personality of their brand through the models they've used over the years.

So they've got, which is obviously a smart strategy.

I mean, part of what I've done with them in the video content that I create for them online is also allowing the personalities of the models to come through. So they aren't just beautiful women that are somehow objectified. You see when you see Adriana Lima, you see somebody who's very funny and has just a great personality and she's a lot of fun. You see the Dowdson who has another kind of a personality. She was authentically an athlete and she's now one of the faces of the vsx, which is her sport apparel. She was a competitive speed skater before she was ever a model. So she's like authentic. When you see the workout tapes we've done with her, she does that stuff. I mean it's pretty impressive on a certain level. They become, if you will, accessible movie stars. People see them in the catalogs, they see them in the commercials, they see them online in the videos. Then they can go to the store and get a signed picture or even have their picture taken with them. So they have created an aspirational brand through, through employing very selective choices of these, what they call supermodels that represent the brand. You know, that's an ever changing, stable.

What is really being accomplished. Then when you put together, I mean, what, what is the. How do you know when it's working? How do you know when it's not?

Well, that's, you know, the multi million dollar question. Depending on how large your brand is.

Well, yeah, because I mean, I guess a brand could like, you know, a direct response guy would say have a call to action, drive them to a website, you know, have a trackable mechanism, make a specific offer. When you're doing that, without all of that, how do you structure success?

Well, I think your question is how do you measure success? Yeah, right.

And so when I say structure, I mean how do you create, create it so that you know, it is successful. That's what I meant by structured success. How do you measure it?

I mean, there's, there is a strategy to getting the name out there. However, there's no one strategy. And as the marketplace, the way to reach consumers has gotten more and more splintered, you know, you have to do more innovative things to get in front of the consumers. I believe the most precious commodity out there now is people's attention. And to get their attention, to hold their attention, and hopefully to be able to sustain it over time, which is what it takes to build a brand, is a tough gap because oftentimes results are not immediate. You know, and to sort of plant your flag at a particular marketplace. I mean, nobody can think of women's lingerie without first thinking of Victoria's Secret. One of the reasons is they outspend everybody. But in their outspending everybody to capture that attention. They also make more money than any other lingerie company. Ralph Lauren spends probably more than any apparel company, yet they make more money on a global scale than any apparel company. The strategies are again, as you said, and it can't be repeated enough. First of all, having the product that is going to be attractive to a consumer, having an authentic base from which to build your brand is critical. But even the smallest company, the smallest startup has got to start asking itself, what are the brand values that we're trying to imbue? What are the core values of our product? What is it we can say about our product? What does it do? Why does it make your life better? Why should anybody want it? You know, and that's key before you worry about how you get the message out there. You know, first of all, you gotta have a message to convey and a message that people don't hear and think, well, that's bullshit. I've seen it. It's crap. You know, so it's got to be the first question you ask when you start a business. Is anybody going to start a market for this, whatever it is, whether it's a service, you know, or whether it's a product? Is there a market for it? Why is there a market for it? Who's my market? How do I reach that market? What websites they go to or what TV show shows do they watch or, you know, how do I capture their attention and then after that, how do I build on the attention I've gotten? So not only will they come back in the ideal sense, and this happens very much with Apple, is that your consumers become evangelists for your brand. Yeah.

Which, which, which I think says everything about the substance of what you're selling, because I don't know of many long sustaining brands that were just pure crap that had any real competition come along. You know, I mean, there are certainly brands that are cheap and there's certainly things like that, but they still in their own worlds, if there's going to be long, I mean, we're talking decades of sustainability, there has to be substance. And I think all of those things you discussed that are needed with a brand strategy, what's your purpose? All, all of that requires sophistication, it requires execution. So when someone just looks at a brand and says, oh, I've got this really cool web application, I'm going to be the next Facebook, it's like, well, it's a little more to it than that.

I think there's an illusion out there that it's easy to win the lottery.

Yeah.

So you see whether it's Facebook, which, you know, interestingly, since it's gone public, has performed horribly.

Right.

You know, and there's Google and there's those companies that are, you know, in the span of the business. Time.

Line.

Line quite new.

Yeah, yeah, very new.

I mean, they're an infancy stage at the time we're recording this.

Right. Who have, you know, though, built a perceived equity. That's very great. And you know, one of the things that's changed from when I was in my 20s is that as opposed to embarking on a career or something, I know so many people because I'm in contact with them every day as you are, who devote their time and energy to starting a business and if it doesn't go public or pop big, they're on to something else.

Right.

Everybody's looking to grab that gold ring, but most of them just end up going in circles.

Yeah.

Because the number of companies that turn into Facebook, that turn into Those companies that blossom into huge businesses like that are very small. Most start off, fail, you know, and a lot of them just incinerate money along the way.

Yes, totally.

It's really interesting because I don't think that the basic principles of business have changed. You know, you've got to have a desirable product or service that people are willing to pay for, and they have to be willing to pay enough for it so that your business can grow. Yeah.

You've got to be able to price accordingly, position properly, market it effectively, or.

It'S going to go nowhere.

Because there's plenty of amazing, awesome products and never see the light of day because they have the whole strategy screwed up. I'm going to make a couple other points, but I want to ask you first about story, because you are a great storyteller. Even throughout the entire time that I've known you, you've sent me books here and there about stories, telling stories. And it's critical in order to get your message out to the world, you got to tell your story. You got to tell a pretty damn incredible, better story than the next person if you want what you were talking about earlier, which is attention, because that's the economy that we live in. The attention economy.

Yeah. I think that what's really interesting is storytelling is going back to our most primitive tribal selves when we sat around the campfire and told stories. And oftentimes the shaman or medicine man was the one that told the best stories because he created the illusion or perception that he could control the rain and the thunder and the crops coming up and whatever. Storytelling. Storytelling goes back to probably when there was more than one person in a room. And storytelling is a really nice term that relates to sales. You know, you have to tell the story of your product, the story of your brand. Salespeople are storytellers. You know, everybody is to some degree or another, a storyteller. Or if they're talking about something and they're hoping to capture your attention and then get some result, whether it's persuasion, sales, forming some kind of alliance or whatever, it's all about the stories we tell. That's how we bond as human beings, is through our stories. All of these things. I mean, storytelling is huge. So it's huge in terms of communicating what's important important or what we want people to believe is important in things. So you go back to our most primitive selves and then you apply that idea of storytelling to the most cutting edge technology. And if you don't have storytelling as a part of that Technology, then it's like a car without a spark plug. That ingredient will keep the whole mechanism from moving forward.

Okay, so how does someone tell a good story? I mean, how do you do it?

I think that, you know, you can certainly look to Hollywood for telling good stories. You know, getting your attention, holding your attention. And of course, the best movies are kind of timeless stories. So I think that storytelling means that in their traditional sense, there's a beginning, middle, end, and end. You know, when you think of childhood stories, it's once upon a time. You know, you get something going with engaging your listener from the beginning, but you have to make them somehow feel a part of it. Either that they can benefit from that story that you're telling them, they will be entertained. I mean, just like education, which I consider. Consider an act of seduction. In other words, my students need to want to know what I've got to say. That's also the same thing for sales. That's also the same thing for an actor on stage. You know, it's all of those things, you know, when I've seen you, and, you know, I hate to say it, but you're brilliant in terms of on stage, your storytelling, whether you're telling the stories about your guests that you're bringing up to speak or what people can accomplish, that's storytelling. And I think that it's storytelling, I think, is both a skill in understanding how to do it and an art form in terms of how you do it. So there's the ingredients and construct of the story, which is the skill part, and then there's the art of it, which is being able to tell compelling story and hold people's attention.

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

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