How to stop focusing on the good things, so you can grow the great things.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, guys and gals, I’m actually driving right now in a brand new Lexus. Not because I bought a new Lexus, but because I took mine in for an oil change, and it turns out something was jacking it, and so they wouldn’t give me a loaner car. Then Brent that works with me told them, “You know Russell’s in the market for a new car. You might as well give him something nice. He may come and buy from you guys,” and so they gave me a brand new Lexus. I’m driving a pretty sweet car right now.

Today, it’s about seven in the morning. I’ve been awake for three hours so far. I got up early this morning for my accountability call, which again, I’ve mentioned this to you guys multiple times, and I encourage you to do this if you haven’t done this yet – find an accountability partner. The way we do ours is I write him a check, he writes me a check, and every two weeks we meet together. We have some goals and if we don’t keep one of our goals – if he doesn’t keep his goal, then I cash his check, and vice versa.

Right now I’m doing that with him, and I’m doing it with someone else in a spiritual standpoint. I have some spiritual goals, and I have a buddy who does, too. We did the same thing. We wrote each other checks, and if one of us screws up, we cash the other person’s check. It’s amazing what happens when you do this. I’m going to write a book about it someday, because I’m making huge strides in my business, and in my personal life, so I’m going to try to find another couple of accountability partners. Maybe I’ll do a weight loss one as well, and a couple of other things.

Today I want to talk about the entrepreneurial – I don’t even know what the right word is – ADD, right? Something we all get. We get into these shiny object syndromes, and the guy I had my meeting with, my accountability partner, today we were talking about stuff and I was showing him our businesses and how we were doing. I showed him our supplement business, which is blowing up and growing faster than anything I’ve ever had, and faster than I probably want it to be [laughs]. It’s a business that scares me. There’s liability that makes me nervous. There’s inventory management. All of these things that I haven’t done in the past, I can learn, and we’re learning and we’re doing, but it’s not my core competency. We’re making good money on it.

He asked me an interesting question. He said, “If you were to get rid of that business, Russell, how much money do you think you would make focusing on your core passion, your core business?” which is our marketing and Click Funnels and some of the other stuff that’s coming out in the next couple of weeks. I sat back and I thought about it for a while. He said, “You know, Russell, you’re struggling right now because this business is netting you whatever each month, but what you don’t understand is that that business may be costing you even more in your focus. You look at retailers like Wal-Mart. They have all of this shelf space, right? They look at every single SKU on the shelf, and if something’s not performing or making enough, they get rid of it, right? Their shelf space – they’ve got to be very protective of it. Entrepreneurs like us, our shelf space is between our ears, in our mind, and we’ve got to be very, very aware of it, and be very careful. If something’s taking up a lot of shelf space, and if it’s not making as much money as it should, you’ve got to take it out, because it could be suffocating other parts of your business.”

I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about how, whichever part of the business I focus on starts growing, so when we focus on supplements, “Boom,” it starts growing and growing and growing, and then all of the sudden, everything else starts hurting. All of the sudden we’ll look and say, “Hey, the coaching business is hurting,” and I shift my focus over there, and “Boom.” It starts growing and growing and growing. Then I look back and the supplements are suffering, and everything else is suffering. Whatever we’re focusing on is growing. So, what’s the opportunity that you have and that I have that’s going to make us the most amount of money? Let’s focus a hundred percent of our time and effort there, and let it grow. Don’t let these other good things suffocate and kill the great things.

This is stuff, obviously, I know and I’ve heard before, but it was a good reminder for me this morning, and it made me start thinking about some of my side projects, and made me start thinking about what I can sell, what I can kill, what I can give to partners, what I can do and where I can do it to get to the point where I can focus on the great things, and so that’s my focus for today. I just got home from the gym, and I’m going to go see my kids and play with them for a little bit, and then I’ll be in the office to go try to accomplish that, so it should be fun.

I hope you guys have an awesome day. I hope you guys can do what I do and take some inventory of your mental shelf space, and make some good decisions so that you’re focusing on the great things and not the good things. Thanks guys, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Are you the type of person who finds problems or are you the type of person who finds answers? Find out who you are on today’s exciting episode!

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car”.

It is currently 1:14 in the morning, and it’s funny. I volunteered at our church to lock up the building this week, and I completely forgot [laughs]. I was about to go to bed, and all of the sudden it popped into my head, so I’m driving to the church to go lock up. I thought I would jump on the phone and leave you guys all a message.

Today was the first day back after being gone for two weeks, which is kind of stressful. I don’t know – our business runs well, but when you get back there’re all of these little fires that are on fire when you come back, and you’ve got to figure out how to put the fires out and what to do, and there’re so many questions. You have this stuff you want to get done. You want to move forward, but all of this reactive stuff keeps pulling you back and pulling you back. I’m sure you guys have felt that.

It’s funny, because I still remember when my wife and I were engaged. I was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I was starting this business. I thought I was so cool. I had my laptop, and I was selling stuff on eBay. I had a website, and I probably had two customers total, maybe [laughs]. I might not even have been that lucky, but I remember on our honeymoon, every day I’d have to turn on my laptop and check my e-mails and make sure customer support had been handled. I didn’t want my business to collapse, and it makes me laugh so hard now. I could have not e-mailed those two customers back for that whole week, and it probably would have been a smart idea.

But I digress, so I’ll come back to what I was talking about. I’m sure most of you guys who own your own business have that. You leave for a little bit, and you come back, and it’s just like you have to spend a day or two putting out all of these fires. Today for us, we specifically had a lot of stuff. I’m outside, and its 1:14 in the morning, so if I get mugged or something, we’re going to catch it live on the podcast [laughs], so all of you faithful marketers in your cars are going to be hanging out. Okay, the first door’s locked.

Anyway, so basically, I came back, and our supplement has been blowing up. I’ve talked about this during the podcasts. It’s literally just going crazy. We can’t even keep up with it. Literally, if we wouldn’t have run out of inventory a little while ago [laughs], we probably would have passed a million dollars in sales this month, which is crazy. It’s just growing and growing, and it’s like a wildfire. We can’t put it down. The immediate buyers, we had to cut them down to a fourth of what they were spending, and they’re still spending like crazy. We’re trying to order new supplements and import the ingredients from all over the country. The growing season’s over, and they don’t have enough in stock of the things we need. It’s just issue after issue after issue, and problem after problem [laughs].

We’re behind on support, and we’ve got two full-time support people and they’re still so far behind, we have to hire another two or three or four more on top of that. We’re putting out ads, and we’re trying to hire people. You have people that are applying for ads. We have an ad out there that’s pretty good, that gets them to want to. In theory, it gets them to. We make them jump through a bunch of hoops and do a bunch of stuff. They have to apply, and we have to get good people.

We ended up getting ten or fifteen good people that actually went through all of the hoops that we put out there and applied. We called them back, and out of everyone, only two people called us back. It’s just amazing how people, humans – disappoint me [laughs] over and over and over again. They just don’t do stuff. Its like, “If you need a job, then return the call, or...” I don’t know – just whatever.

So all of these kinds of things are happening, and then we’ve got our mini call center that we’ve set up, and they need more leads, and these other leads they don’t like. We need a new funnel. Our funnel has been stale because we’ve been driving so much traffic to it. It’s been seen by all of the audiences on Facebook. It’s been worn out. We need new leads for it. It’s just thing after thing.

Click Funnels is almost about to launch. We found out that there’s an error here, and we’ve got this thing here, and the day we were planning on launching, it turns out everyone on our team’s out of town. Literally, just all of these issues today – thing after thing, and by the end of the day, I have this little couch by my desk, and at the end of the day, I laid down on it, and I felt this overwhelming feeling. I was like, “Man, I’ve made more choices in the last eight hours than I typically make in a year,” and all of them are big choices.

I think it was Dan Kennedy who said that every six months or every forty-five days or something, that an entrepreneur’s going to make a decision that will make or break their business. I felt like today, I made enough decisions for our entire years’ worth of stuff [laughs]. I was lying on the couch, and I was overwhelmed. It was like, “Ugh, I’m so far behind.” I’m sure you guys have felt that, right? It made me think about – well not at first. At first I just felt overwhelmed. I had a sick feeling. My wife texted me and she said, “Are you coming home for dinner?” and I was like, “Yes, I need to get out of here. I need to just get away from it.” So I got away from it for a while. I ate some dinner. We may or may not have watched “The Bachelorette” tonight, which may or may not be my favorite show [laughs]. I kind of passed out during it a little bit, because I was pretty beat up and tired, and I fell asleep for a little bit.

Then I woke back up, and when I woke back up, I had some ideas. I contacted one guy, and I asked him questions. I got a whole bunch of ideas for the supplement, like how to fix that one. My buddy just gave me a bunch of some really good stuff from his experience. And then all of the sudden, I was just lying there, and this other idea just popped in to my head about how we could solve the application problem for our call center, and all of these things started coming, and I’m like, "Hey, Collette, I've got to go back to work. I’ve got to get all of this stuff implemented quickly, before everyone else wakes up in the morning,” and so I went back into the office until about 12:30, and I literally got most of the issues all lined out with all of the stuff I was stressing out about and all of the issues. My brain just needed a little reboot, and then I was ready to go back in and answer the rest of the questions and solve the problems, and now I feel like most of the problems are solved.

Now by tomorrow, I’ll go in, which tomorrow’s the fun day, because I’ve got lifting. I’m lifting weights in probably four hours from now, and I’ll have jiu jitsu practice tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, but anyway tomorrow I’m going to go in and just do normal stuff, but it made me think tonight about something my dad told me, and I hope I don’t offend anyone with this. That’s not my intention. The sprinklers are on, so hopefully you guys can still hear me. So I don’t want to offend anybody, but my dad told me something when I was a kid, and my dad is an entrepreneur like me, and he had a bunch of his own little businesses and stuff that he did, and I don’t remember the situation when he told me, but I remember it had a big impact on me. He said, “Russell, there’re two kinds of people in this world. There're people who find problems, and there’re people who find the answers. You always want to be the latter.”

That had a big, profound impact on me, and I started thinking about that in all areas of my life, actually. I was thinking about wrestling. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about business, thinking about our coaching programs, thinking about everything. There are two types of people. People who find the problems, and people who find the answers to the problems, and I was thinking about how, not all of them, but a lot of the employees on my team are people who find problems. They find a problem. If they have a problem, they come to you with it and say, “I found a problem. I found a problem,” and they just don’t find the answer.

There are a couple of guys on my team that are amazing people at finding answers. One of them who I’ll mention is this guy named John Parkes, on my team and one of the neatest people I’ve ever met in my life. I watched him today, because he gets the brunt of the problem people. They go to him first before they come to me. He has the major job of solving most of the problems. People come to him with all sorts of questions, and he finds them answers. He’s able to think about it, and find an answer. He’s a great person at finding answers.

It’s interesting. I’ve done this experiment over the years with people when they ask me questions, just to see. I think I heard Tony Robbins do it the first time. That’s probably where I got it from. People would ask him something. They would ask him a question, and he would say, “Well what do you think?” and they’d go, “Well, I don’t know the answer.” He’d say, “Well if you did know the answer, what do you think it would be?” The person would almost always give the correct answer afterwards, and so I’ve done that sometimes in the past. It’s interesting that most people can solve their own problems just by asking, “Well what do you think the answer would be if this was you?” and magically they can go, and they can answer these problems.

I think all of us have the ability to be the person that finds the answer, but for whatever reason, we’re nervous, or we like that crutch, or we have this thing where we always want to put it on somebody else. The person who’s willing to find the answers becomes the leader in every situation. In wrestling, I became a leader because people brought me problems and I found answers. In business, I’ve become a leader because of that as well. I look at our coaching program, and it’s interesting – a lot of the calls I do with our students – they come, and they’ve got an issue, and most of the time, they know the answer, and they just want me to tell them that they’re right. It’s just interesting how much people need that validation.

I think for you guys that are listening to this, think about yourself. Which kind of person are you right now? Are you the kind of person who finds the problem, or are you the kind of person who finds the answer? If you’re really the person that’s going to find the problem, I think the fastest way you can get a pay raise, or get more friends, or a bigger following, or whatever that thing is, is you’ve got to shift to the other kind of person, and I know that the answer’s there. When I hear some of our support people come and ask John questions, I know they know the answer, but they want the validation. They want him to answer it for them, because they don’t want to mess up. They don’t want to get in trouble, and they want somebody else to blame if something goes wrong, but if you’re willing to step into that role and be that person, and be the one who’s taking the brunt of the responsibility on your shoulders and if it’s wrong then you take it, you will go a lot further in this life.

That’s for sure, so that’s my message for tonight, and those of you who are entrepreneurs who have those days like I had today where it’s hard and you get beat down and you just want to lay down and cry for a while, just know that it’s okay. Lay down. Take a little nap. Watch The Bachelorette or whatever show it is that you need to, but then get back up and get back to work and solve your problems and make it happen. For all of you guys, focus on that. Focus on shifting from being someone who finds problems to somebody who finds the answers, and as soon as you do that, it will change everything around you.

That is it. I’m home. It’s 1:26 in the morning. I am up in four and a half hours to life weights. [laughs] I hope I don’t pass out. Hopefully something I said made a lot of sense. I’m pretty tired, so I’m not really sure, but I appreciate you guys listening in. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, guys.

Russell’s test for increasing his energy and focus for this week.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. It’s been a long time, but I want to welcome you to another “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, guys and gals. I hope you guys are having an awesome time. I actually took almost two weeks off from everything, which sounds really nice, but it’s really painful for entrepreneurs like me who just want to go and create cool stuff, so I’m back in the heat of it, and I’m super excited for this week. I hope you are as well.

While I was in San Diego, some really cool stuff happened. I had a chance to hang out with Todd, who’s one of my partners. He’s the one who has coded all of the Click Funnels, and it’s always fun hanging out with him, just talking about everything from financial stuff to making money to health to weight loss. Always fun stuff, and he got me thinking about a lot of things.

I had a chance to hang out with a guy named Drew Canole. Some of you guys may know Drew. If not, check out FitLife.TV, I think. It may be FitLifeTV.com – one of those two, anyway. Drew is a juicing expert and a super-cool guy. I saw him online, and I was really impressed with him. It turned out that he was in San Diego, so I wanted to go meet him. I had a chance to go hang out with him.

This weekend, I decided that I was going to go, and I was going to try some experiments on myself from an eating standpoint. I’m really going to track it closely. It’s interesting. I’ve done diets and weight loss things for my whole life. All the time from when I was wrestling and I was losing twenty-five to thirty pounds a week, to when I was just out of shape and trying to figure out how to get back into it, but I’ve never been that good at tracking everything, especially from a food consumption standpoint.

What I did is I went out on Saturday, and I went to Whole Foods, because I wanted to do the whole organic, grass-fed everything. I spent a lot of money [laughs], because Whole Foods is not cheap. I bought tons of vegetables – everything I could find – all of the leafy greens and as many different varieties of vegetables as I could find, and I went and found the organic grass-fed meat, and found a bunch of stuff. I came home yesterday, and I took all of my vegetables and I broke them down into five different days, so I’m going to be juicing every day for the next five days. From Mercola.com, I bought his new juicer, which is different from the one I had before. The one I had before was the Jack LaLanne one, which spins and grinds. This one’s got more of an auger in it or something like that, where it squishes the juice out instead of cutting it, so it’s supposed to stay fresher longer. I don’t know [laughs]. I thought it looked cool on the video. I’m not going to lie [laughs].

So I’m doing the whole juice thing, and then I started making frittatas, which if you don’t know what a frittata is, it’s probably the best way to eat simply, so I probably spent an hour yesterday, on Sunday, making frittatas that will last me for at least a week, if not longer. Basically, it’s eggs and vegetables and a whole bunch of stuff like that all mixed. It’s like an omelet/quiche thing, but we call them frittatas. I made some huge ones, and what was awesome, because I went and put in tons of spinach and kale and broccoli and okra and all of these really cool vegetables in my frittatas. I’m just veg-ing it up like crazy. So this is my experiment, guys. I’m calling it my hippie paleo juicing week-long thing [laughs]. I don’t know what I’m going to call it – something like that.

It’s funny. We’ve been teasing about how we were in San Diego, and the area we were in had all of these hippie-type people there. Everyone’s got dreadlocks, and they’re surfing all day long. We were joking about how when I was younger, we used to always make fun of the hippie culture and stuff like that – eating green, where now it’s the cool thing to do, so this is my hippie juicing paleo, because the frittatas are pure paleo the way we build them. It’s going to be fun, so I’m excited.

I’m excited to see how much energy I get from the whole process this week. It should be really, really cool, because I’ve got a lot of stuff happening this week, so I need the energy. I need the excitement. I need the newness of it all, so I’m excited. I’ll let you guys know throughout the week how it goes.

For you guys, I would say, “This week, figure out something different. Figure out a pattern interrupt. Figure out something that you’ve been doing. If it’s diet, or if it’s health, or if it’s how you wake up in the morning, or if it’s how you work, or whatever, figure out something, and just do a big interrupt like I’m doing right now – just a big pattern interrupt. Do something that’s just going to totally shock your system, and see what happens. For all I know, this could be the worst thing in the world, but I’m still excited for it. I think it’s going to be awesome.

I’m at the office, you guys. I am going to go and get some stuff done today. I hope you guys enjoy your Monday, and we will talk to you all again soon.

Why you should never ask somebody for free advice.

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Hey everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I have a very special “Marketing in Your Car” for you for today.

Hey, everyone. I just got my hair cut, and I’m driving back home. I actually wanted to do a special podcast. I don’t normally log into Facebook very much because it stresses me out. Typically I’m getting a lot of people who are asking me for my help for free. It’s just hard, because I want to, and I wish I could give them all the attention. The problem is, with everything I’m doing right now in my own company, in my own business, and in my own coaching clients, it’s hard to find time to even sleep at night. There’s so much stuff always happening, and so I don’t typically log in that often, but the last week, I did for a couple of reasons. I just checked again when I was walking out of getting my hair cut. I saw a message, and it just made me think, so I want to tell you about two different people that approached me on Facebook. I won’t use their real names, but I want to share their approaches with you, because they were both very different.

The first guy that contacted me basically said, “Hey Russell, I’ve been watching you for a bunch of years. I love your stuff. I think you’re awesome. How much would it cost to buy an hour of your time?” I said, “Right now, I sell an hour for twenty-five hundred bucks,” and he wrote back and said, “Oh, that’s kind of steep, but hey, man, I love your stuff, and I think you can help me, so where do I send the money?” So I told him. He sent the money. Two days later, we were on the phone. We spent an hour on the phone with him looking at his funnel, building it out, tweaking it, giving him all the advice that he needed, and after he was done, he was like, “Man, that was awesome. I feel like I’ve shifted my focus. I know exactly where I’m going now, I’m going to go ahead and implement it. Hey, do you mind if I shoot some questions now and then as I’m building this thing out, to help me create it?” and I’m like, “Yeah, no worries.” So he went out, and he’s been building, and he shot me a couple of questions. I gave him some feedback, and I haven’t minded because he understood the value of my time, and what it takes for me to spend some time. I don’t mind helping him now, because he valued my time up front, and he was willing to invest, and now he’s trying to implement what I showed him, and so of course I’m going to help steer him in the right direction and have success. It’s been awesome.

Then I have this other guy. Again, a really nice guy, and my heart strings go out to him and to other people that I’ve gotten this message from. Literally, I think, five or six people this week sent me similar messages about, “Hey Russell, I love your stuff. I don’t have any money, but I want to work with you. I’d love it if you could get on the phone with me and coach me through this. I’ll give you half of my profits, and I’ll do all of this kind of stuff.” That’s their mentality, and it’s tough, because honestly, for me as a person, I can’t even tell you how much I want to, but it’s hard. Most of those I don’t respond back to, because it’s just so hard for me to tell them “No”, but it’s like, “You have to understand, that when I was getting started, I never would have gone to somebody who is as busy or had as much success, and just ask them for their time. I always would have gone and figured out how I could provide value to them, whether it’s money or whatever, because their time is valuable.”

I look at my schedule. For example, this week, I was at the office twice until 3 a.m. in the morning this week trying to get some projects done. I literally had, I think, seven or eight one-hour phone call consultations with people. Every single one of those people, outside of the first guy I told you about – he paid $2,500 – everybody else paid $25,000 for those, and it was hard for me to fit those $25,000 one-hour calls into my schedule, because it’s so busy with everything. I obviously made the time, because they made the investment.

Plus I’ve got the Reactive Coaching for our $25,000 students, and then on top of that, I’ve got my own projects and my own businesses, and in our supplement company, we’re in the process of trying to hire three or four more people. It has by far eclipsed our internet marketing business [laughs] to this point, which is exciting. We’re about to launch Click Funnels, which is a brand new company. We’re in the process of trying to find new office space and probably hiring a staff of, who knows – ten to twelve people to help with that.

I literally don’t have time to sleep right now. I go home. I spend time in the morning with my family and kids and at night with my family and kids. As soon as they all pass out, I’m back to work trying to move things forward, and it’s hard when I get an e-mail saying, “I just need an hour of your time. Remember what it was like when you were just beginning and you had no ability? If you had just gotten some guru to help you...,” and how it would help them, and again, my heart strings go out to them, but I don’t think people really understand the reality of it.

For me to carve out another hour of my time, I would have to put one of my projects on hold, and you look at opportunity cost. The one lesson I learned from my college education is opportunity cost. With opportunity cost, if you remember the concept, you’ve got two options. The opportunity cost is what you lost by not taking the other option, so for example, if I was to jump on the phone with this guy for an hour, the opportunity cost is that I’ve either got to give up an hour of time with my family, which is not something I’m willing to do at all, or I’ve got to carve out an hour of time from all of my other projects.

An hour of focused time working towards Click Funnels or an hour towards something else, will make me a lot of money. It’s hard, because what he is asking for and what people like that are asking for – they don’t understand what they’re asking for. They’re asking for an hour of your time. An hour of your time, literally, on the low end, is $2,500. I was trying to be nice to this guy, but because he was willing to respect the value of my time, I was willing to do it for $2,500, but the reality is an hour of time that’s focused on your own business is worth so much more than that.

I just wanted to share. It’s been on my mind. I may send him this podcast, and I hope it doesn’t hurt his feelings. That’s not my intention, but more so just to help him understand the value of other people’s time, and if you want to get someone’s attention, you’ve got to look at things differently.

When I first got into this business, I remember I went to this event, and there was this guy that was at the event. He was in this Mastermind group, and he was in four or five others, and I was like, “How in the world did you get in all of these groups?” and he said, “I learned something early on in life, Russell. I learned I can either work my way in, or I can buy my way in. It’s way easier just to buy your way in.” He had spent tons of money in to getting in to these different clubs.

I said, “How in the world do you afford that?” I think he had spent almost a hundred grand in these Masterminds. He said, “Well, I couldn’t afford it, so instead of complaining about the fact that I didn’t have the resources to afford it, I tried to get resourceful. I went out to a bunch of Internet marketing forums, and I found a bunch of people who were in similar situations like me. They couldn’t afford it, but they wanted the information, and so I said, “Look. This is the deal. I’m going to invest in these five Mastermind groups, and my total cost is going to be X amount of dollars. I can’t afford it right now, but if you will pay X amount of dollars into it, I will go to these events, and I will learn. I will do everything, and when I come back from these events, I will bring back and break down everything I learned, all the notes, give you everything, and you’ll get a chance, at a fraction of the cost, to go to all of these events with me, basically, to get all of the information I extract from these.” This guy literally got ten people to give him $10,000. He had $100,000 in cash to go out and join the best Masterminds in the world. I was just like, “Wow.” – resourcefulness, right? He didn’t have the resources, but he figured out a way to make it happen.

I always think about one of my favorite people I ever met in my entire life, and this is in the business, or out of the business, but it’s a guy named Stu McLaren. Before I even met Stu, I was putting on this workshop called “Affiliate Boot Camp”, and Stu paid $1,000 to be part of this boot camp. He’s one of the smartest people I have ever met. It was a life-training series that I did, and I’d do a teleseminar. Every teleseminar, I’d open it up for questions at the end, and the first person to pop on was Stu, saying, “Hey, Russell, that was amazing. I’m Stu McLaren. That session you gave was amazing. It just totally built me up,” and he talked about why it was so great. He’d ask me some questions, and then he’d thank me, and, “Boom.” Literally, for ten sessions in a row, Stu was the first one asking questions, the first one thanking me, all of that kind of stuff, and it was awesome. Then at the end of the event, he called me up one day, and he was like, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We should work on this project together.” I knew who Stu was, and I knew he’d given me so much value from that side. Me, as an educator and a teacher – to have somebody invest in my business and thank me and all of these things along the way, it changes it. Where now, just like the dude who paid the twenty-five hundred bucks, I have a vested interest in him. I want him to be successful. I want him to take the advice. Yeah, I’m going to pick up the phone, and I’m going to return the call.

The other interesting thing is, in my Mastermind group, in our inner circle, we have a couple of different levels – anywhere from $8,000 up to $25,000 in our coaching program, and inside the programs, all of our members are able to ask me questions each week. They can submit video clips and write questions to me, and we can chat back and forth. It’s a cool process. What’s interesting is that the majority of people who ask me questions will jump on and ask me a question, and that’s it. We move on. Sometimes, they’ll say, “Hey, thanks,” but that’s it. There’re not many people that say, “Thanks,” and I’m fine with that.

I’m not looking for thanks, but there’s one guy whose name is Simon Cryer, and Simon signs up for the coaching program, goes in there, studies a bunch of stuff, and then he jumps into this thing where he can message me, and makes me this video, and all the video said was, “You know, Russell, thank you. This was one of the most amazing things in the world. It was awesome. It was...,” and all of this stuff. I watched the video, and then I was waiting for him to ask me a favor, a question, or whatever, and he never did. He just thanked me, and I was like, “Dude, that guy’s awesome.” Simon’s name, I remembered.

A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed me a question, and because I knew Simon’s name, and because he’d given me value, I literally sat up that night while my wife was angry at me, because she wanted me to go to bed [laughs]. I spent almost an hour on the computer making videos for him, mapping out the whole game process, showed him what he was doing right, showed him what he was doing wrong, sent him all of my files. I literally gave him a years’ worth of my research. I gave it all to him, one hundred percent, and I just said, “Hey, here you go, Simon.” He told me when he got that that he started crying, because he couldn’t believe that I would give him that. I told him afterwards, “You know what, Simon? You’re the first person that ever thanked me.”

It was interesting how that works, and so the reason for this, you guys, is I would just say – I don’t know what I’m trying to say, to be honest, but when you want things in life, there’s the right way and the wrong way to do it. The right way is to figure out how you can provide as much value as possible to other people, and if you do that, it’s amazing what they’ll do back in return for you.

Sometimes that is paying people, right? I pay coaches all of the time. I wrote Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher a check for $25,000 in January, because I wanted some of their help. I’m friends with them. I could text them. I could call them, but I wanted to show them that I have respect for them and what they do, so I wrote them a check. I asked them one or two little questions here and there, and those things have transformed my business.

I look at Bill Glaser. I was in his Mastermind group for six years. I spoke on his stage tons of times, and one day I had a question. Instead of calling him and saying, “Hey, Bill, I have a question for you,” I called his assistant, and I sent him, I think, fifteen hundred bucks for an hour of his time. We got on the phone, and we talked through it. It’s just you understanding that people are busy, and yes, they may have time, and they’re there for their buddies or whatever, but if you’re going to pick their brains or you’re going to do whatever, understand that that’s not a small thing.

I have people all the time that are like, “Hey, man, let me take you to lunch and pick your brain.” In my life, I have not had the luxury of having lunch for months. I don’t have time for lunch. I eat while I’m working, because I don’t have time to break away and go to lunch. I have too many projects and too many things that are happening. If I were to go to lunch, I would miss time with my family, so I don’t eat lunch. So for them to say, “Hey, Russell, I want to take you to lunch and pick your brain,” it seems like in their mind, they’re thinking it’s such a small thing –“Hey, I’m going to buy you lunch,” but for me to pull away and go to lunch, it’s like, “You don’t understand the opportunity cost of that. That will cost me on the lowest end, $2,500, and on the high end, I’m losing $10,000 to $15,000 or more by letting you take me to lunch to pick my brain.”

I think that it’s important to understand that, especially with people you’re trying to get to, trying to get access to and need information from. Figure out ways that you can provide value first. Coming to someone and saying, “Hey, I’ll give you half of my business,” or, “Hey, if you do this, I could make a lot of money, and I’ll give you part of it back,” that’s the same pitch everyone is giving them.

It’s funny. I had a guy – this is another one. I get these all of the time, so I apologize for the rant here, but I had a guy the other day who came up to me and said, “Hey, Russell, this is the deal. I pitch you. You’re the one I want to work with on this project. This project’s awesome. What I want you to do is I want you to work with me to set the entire thing up. We’ll do this, this, and this. Help me launch and help me do everything and from that I’ll give you a percentage of the profits.” I wrote him back, and I was like, “Dude, for the effort that it would take for me to go and do what you just asked me to do, <em> </em>I could do the exact same thing on my own project and keep all of the money. I don’t think you understand that. You’re not providing me value by giving me half of your company and letting me do all of the work. There’s no value for me in that, all right?”

And so it’s just an understanding of you looking at the people that you want information from and figuring out, “How can I serve them first?” Stu McLaren was smart. He did not come to me, day one, and say, “Russell, I need this. I need this. I need this.” He said, “How can I serve Russell first? I’m going to join his coaching program and ask him questions. I’m going to edify him, and I’m going to do all of this stuff, and I’m going to build a relationship,” and now, when Stu calls, I will drop anything. When Stu says, “Russell, I need this,” I will. To this day, if Stu was to call me at three in the morning and tell me that he needs an accountant, I’d be there. That’s how much rapport he’s built with me.

I look at somebody like Simon. After that whole thing happened, I happened to be in Dallas one day, and I think Simon’s from Dallas. We e-mailed, and an hour later, we’re hanging out. We spent the whole day together, and I consider him a close friend. He came out to Boise. We went to the fights together. All of this stuff came from him saying, “Thanks,” from him figuring out what I needed in my life to help me. Because of that now, I have this reciprocity, where I want to make sure he’s successful, and he’s going to be successful, because he played his cards right.

This guy that came to me first and said, “Hey, I’m going to pay you twenty-five hundred bucks for an hour of your time because that’s what it’s worth to you right now,” I’ve probably answered fifteen questions for him since then, because he respected my time. It helped me to feel that value first, and so, yes, I want to help him back out in the other direction.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears. In all aspects of your life, whether it’s relationships, whether it’s business or whatever it is, this advice is important. It’s key, and you need to understand it.

I don’t want to admit this, but one of my favorite shows on TV is “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette”. I watch this show, and I cringe every single time, because these guys get two minutes with the bachelor or the bachelorette to get to know them, and the ones that always blow it are the ones that get on there and go, “Okay, so my name is Joe, and this is what I do, and this is what I love,” and they just start talking about themselves, and just dump all of this garbage on the person that they’re on this date with. The girl gets done and walks away, and they’re like, “Wow. I know everything about that guy, but he didn’t ask me a single question about myself.” The guys who are successful are the ones who sit down and ask the girl questions. –“Tell me about you. Tell me about this.” Those are the ones that succeed. The ones that fall in love are the ones who are not talking about themselves and telling them why they’re great. It’s the ones who go on the dates and ask questions to the other person.

When I was in college, I had a roommate. He was one of the most fascinating people ever, and I say that because I always thought that. I remember always thinking that this guy – John Merritt was his name. I thought, “This guy’s just fascinating.” He was one of the coolest people. I just thought he was awesome.

One day, I came home from something, and I sat down, and I was talking to him, and he literally asked me questions directly for probably an hour straight – just question after question. Everything he had to say, he seemed more fascinated by what I said, and I was like, “Man,” and all of the sudden, in the middle of this I remember pausing and thinking, “Oh, wow. I think he’s so fascinating, but I’ve never asked him a single question. I’m like that guy – I’m the bad date, but he’s the most amazing person in the world.” He just kept asking me question after question after question. Everything I said, he seemed fascinated by, and that’s what he gave me. That’s why I always wanted to be around John. Everyone wanted to be around John. He was one of the neatest people ever.

So anyway, there’s some stuff for all of you guys to think about. I have no idea if this went the right direction or not, but I hope that you guys got some value out of it.

I am at the bank grabbing some money, so I’m going to jump off for now, and I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all soon.