How to achieve greatness in your life: With Jay Abraham and Ramit Sethi

Foreign. I'm Jay Abraham. I grow businesses for a living and I'm a professional teacher and a student.

Thank you for being here.

I'm flattered to be invited.

Well, this has been a long time coming. You're one of my most influential mentors. I've told everyone who's watching this what an impact your work has had on me personally and professionally. So it's a real honor to get to talk to you today.

And I want to reciprocate. It's an honor to be talking with you because it's extraordinary when you see somebody take quality work and use it to touch a lot of people and make people's lives better, richer, happier. So I'm very proud of you.

Thank you.

So we're all programmed in our DNA to be great. Nobody wants to be average. No one wants to do a mediocre job. No one wants, wants to accomplish a fraction of a fraction. We don't start our day or we can say to ourselves or our loved one or a significant other. One or a significant other, I'm going to spend all week and I'm going to get a fraction of the outcome and I'm going to be mediocre. But 98% of all society are. Why? Because no one has ever helped them, first of all, understand what greatness looks like, what it feels like, how differently it's manifest, how it's received. If they get that, I'm going to go real fast and then you can ask me any question you want. If they get that far. Most of them don't have a path to take to progressively get themselves there. And they want to basically pull vultures and do it. They want to set the Olympic record the first time out instead of thinking in terms of the Panama Canal and locks. Third, if they get that far the first time, this is the answer the first time they start out. It is predictable human nature. They are going to be mediocre. Think about anybody. You're young, you don't have any kids. I got seven that are older than you. So the first time a child tries to walk or talk or eat or poo poo or ride a bicycle, what happens? It's a nightmare. Yeah. And if somebody doesn't support them, re encourage them, put them back on the horse. So it's almost like the statistical probabilities you are going to fail. It's almost this, this is an aside, but I laugh all the time when people say, well, I'm calling people and I'm just getting their voicemail when they're trying to either sell anything or make contact. And I go, well, statistically, what do you expect? Most people have no plan on getting a voicemail. They're shocked. Yeah, I have my strategies. I expect to get the voicemail. So I have a. So it's just, it's a way of critical thinking. And most people aren't very good critical thinkers.

Well, what I'm hearing you say is like being realistic is the most critical part of it. When you first start, expect to fail, you're not going to be great. But if you walk in saying, as we say, it's not a failure, it's a test. We tested part one, didn't work great. Let's move on to the next strategy. Oh, that doesn't work. Move on to the next one. I would like to talk about knowing the rules so that you can break them. Let's take the context of someone who's in their 20s, 30s, 40s, they've been at a few different companies. They want to know the rules so that they can ultimately break them. How did you think about that early in your career?

Well, part of it, it's a great question that's never been asked. So I, I. When you ask interesting questions that have never been asked, just a knee jerk is a disservice to your viewers. So let me try to reflectively answer it. I think there were many parts. One, I was always a great observer. I always would, at the end of the day, stop and say, what have I learned today about myself? What have I learned from somebody else? Well, I'll tell you a very, very different story. This might be very, very indicative. When I was first married and I didn't know what to do, I had a great big business card made up that big, and it said UC Sales. And I lived in Indianapolis. And it's a time when many of the companies there had receptionists because they didn't have voicemail then. And the receptionist would be behind a glass window, but the window wasn't that big. The window had a teeny, tiny little crescent that you could put a business card through, but you couldn't really do anything else. So I would walk in, I'd just pick an industry and I would walk in and say, hello, I'd like to speak to whoever the owner is. And they'd say, do you have an appointment? Of course I did, and I'm making a point, so I'm not trying to be tangential. They'd say, well, who are you with? I'd look and say, no one. And they'd look bizarre. And they'd say, do you have a card? And I'd say, yes. And I'd try to get this card in this little door. And they would look at me and I would go like that. And they would take the card back, and it never failed to get me an interview. And then I would sit and ask questions. And I had people that would allow me to sit in their offices for hours watching them do business because I was so incongruent with their model. But I would ask a myriad of questions. I would try to figure a way I could add value. Add value is the key. Not take value. Not what they can do for me, what I could figure out to do for them. If I couldn't add value without being covert or surreptitious, I now could go, figuratively speaking, down the street and talk to their competitor. And I had the knowledge, I had the understanding at the context, But I think that the rules are a very. Not amorphous, but it's a very dynamic concept. I think that there's three things in life. It's got to be ethical, equitable, legal. You cannot change legal. Although some attorneys will give you interesting interpretations, ethical and equitable are pretty subjective. So what I always tried to do was figure out is the way this business or this industry is operating makes sense to me. I'm a very. I'm a mad scientist, but I am actually very super logical most of the time. Didn't make any sense. Yeah, because it didn't.

In this very program. In Brain Trust, very often you'll have people in the community posting and saying, hey, I'm joining this program, or I just heard about this. What do you guys think? And there'll be 40 comments saying, oh, I haven't heard about that at all. What's going on? And I finally weighed in and I explained that we. We don't even market some of our programs to people if they're not appropriate. So if we know that you're not right for this program, I don't want the profit. And so we don't even market it to them. Now, if they really want to, we have a recommended product page where they can go. But when you go to that recommended product page, we specifically say, we don't recommend you buy this product because you already have X, Y and Z. If you really want to, you can. But my goal, I said, save your money. Use it for something else. Use it for another one of my programs. Use it for going out to lunch with your mentor, but don't Use it for this. And that is a profound shift from my goal is to maximize my profits to my goal is to be their trusted advisor for 20 years.

For life.

For life.

And that's what I was going to say. There are two other points and just reminded me. And I love that. And just for all of you, I'm not trying to be his shill or his tough. But he really lives and believes that it's not marketing rhetoric. He doesn't want you to buy it if he doesn't think it's right for you. And he doesn't want you to buy it if he doesn't think you're right for it. But part of being preeminent is recognizing it's only a matter of time before you're going to have. And again, you can fill in the blanks. If it's business, a compensated commercial relationship. If it's love, a romantic. So you invest first in the relationship. You don't wait for money or love or sex or whatever is to change hands before you invest in the relationship. That's profound. Secondly is there's risk in everything. You figure out what the risk is and you're the one that takes the risk out of it. Yeah. Third is you're playing a lifetime game. You're not playing a static, you're playing a dynamic game over forever. And you're thinking in terms. And there's one more which is wonderful and you use. And I'm not a big one into neuro. Whatever you are, but. But in this one I'm a great believer. You, you live in the future with visions of the impact you're making and will be making in people's lives. It's not like the secret, it's just you really see that you in their lives and you have to believe you're a great addition to their life. You're going to make their life happier, richer, better. If it's in business or personal. When you give people clarity, most people don't have focus and it transcends human nature. Whether it's business, you help someone get focus, it gives them clarity. When they get clarity, they get understanding. When they have understanding, that gives them power. When they have power, that translates to trusting the person who empowered them. It's a little complicated, but it's very powerful concept.