I apologize in advance, but on this one I get a liiiiiittle bit violent.
On this episode Russell talks about reading the Amazon reviews of his first book and getting angry about the few negative reviews and relates it to an experience he had during his wrestling days.
Here are some of the other interesting things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out what one and two star reviews have to do with wrestling.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I am leaving my house for the first time and it’s almost 4:00. I’m actually leaving my house and heading over to my buddies gym because I’m going to do something that nobody wants to do. It’s going to force me to be accountable to myself and to other people. I’m going to get fat rolls pinched; it’s called a pinch test.
He pinches me and says, “Russell, this is your body fat percentage.” And as much as I do not want to know that, because I assume in my mind it’s 7% like I was back when I was wrestling, when I find out that I’m probably at 20, 21, 22 I gotta admit I’m gonna cry a little bit. But then I’ll at least have a standard to know where I’m at and then I’ll have something to work against.
A lot of us I think, our biggest problem in life is we just are winging it. We’re like, “I feel like I’m doing good. I don’t know.” But we don’t have something to measure it against. Not gonna lie, I’m one of those people. In fact, that’s probably why it’s easier to cheat a lot of the time. Whether you’re cheating on eating or exercise or whatever. You’re like, “I’m not really measuring against anything, so I have no idea if I’m getting better or worse, therefore I might as well just eat this candy, because who really knows.” So this is gonna hold me accountable.
I’m gonna do this right now, then I’m going to party it up all through Christmas vacation and then on Monday, the day after Christmas it begins. And I’m gonna be strict and it’s gonna be awesome. So that’s kind of my game plan of what I’m doing right now.
But the reason I’m leaving today at 4:00 is because I’m in book writing mode. I literally, if you saw me right now, you would laugh. I look like a hermit, I have not shaved, I’m in my sweats/jammies. I’ve been in my room just writing, writing, writing and I got three chapters done today which is a lot of work, but it’s turning out awesome, which means I probably have 5 left and I’ll be done with this book. We’ll have it over to the editors, actually the editors’ editing while I’m writing. I finish a chapter and send it to the editor, because I’m not gonna lie, way beyond my deadline. I had to be extra to be like, “Hey do you mind just doing this weirdly, as I get them done.” So I sent her three chapters today and keep on moving forward.
Hopefully I can get two more done tonight, that’s my goal. Then I get out of being grounded. I’m literally grounded. I told my kids….they’re like, “Dad, why aren’t you going to your office.” “Because I’m grounded. I’m not allowed to leave. Too many friends at the office, they just talk. I have to be in this room locked down.” So that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s funny, as I’m writing this book, and one thing that inspires me to write this book is the response I got with the first book. How many people have told me so many good things? People, even my peer and mentors.
I was so scared for some of friends to read my book. In fact, the person I was most scared of to read my book was, Rich Schefren, someone I totally look up to and respect. He’s probably read more marketing books than anyone on Earth. In fact, if you Google Rich Schefren, book reading process….you will see a dude who is insane. He has a video on YouTube, 20 minutes long, totally worth the watch, but basically he reads the book and speed highlights it all. Then he goes and cuts the binding off the book. After the binding is done, he scans the book and sends it to the Philippians and the Filipinos’ go and transcribe the highlighted portion because that’s the only portion that he cares about.
From there they make this other book file that he takes that book file and puts it on his iPad, and he’s done that for the last ten years. So he’s got like 50 thousand books like that. Then what he’ll do, in the morning he’ll be like, “Hey, I’m going to be giving a presentation on sales today. What are the top 10 sales books in the world. The top 20, top 50 sales books. So then he’ll go and pull his notes from the top 50 sales books, load them into his iPad and then reads it in ten times speed. He’ll sit there on his treadmill for an hour or more in the morning and re-read the 25 top sales books in the history of the world, that morning. At two or three times, and then he goes out and knows everything on earth about sales. It’s the coolest thing ever.
I wish I could just hang out with Rich for a week and do that. It would be so cool. But I can’t because I just am not that structured, but I wish I was. I remember when I sent him my book, actually I didn’t send him one. I sent it to a bunch of my friends and I specifically didn’t send it to Rich because I was like, he’s gonna read this and he might not like it. He’s read everything so I was so scared. So I saw him a couple of months later at a Traffic Conversion event before we launched the book. He’s like, “Everyone keeps talking about your book. I want to get a copy.” I’m like, “I’m scared of you reading it, not gonna lie. If you don’t like it I’m gonna be crushed.” So he’s like, “Give me the book.” So I gave it to him and he read it on his flight home and he loved it, which was cool. He sent me a cool video of him in a smoke lounge talking about it and it was, for me, validation from my peers that I did something good. Which for me, is harder.
I assume my customers will like my stuff, but a lot of times my peers…it’s scares me because I want them to like me. We all have the same fears. We want to be liked, and I want them to like me. So that was the big thing. And then I put it out there and people liked it and it transformed people’s lives, which is cool. So cool. It just makes me so happy. So today I was like to give me motivation to keep reading, I’m going to go to Amazon and look at my reviews and read it. And it’s like 4.9 stars or whatever. I’m like, “yeah, everybody loves me.” And I’m reading them all. And there’s a little graph, it’s like 5 stars, 4 stars, 3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star.
And there was a little percentage that clicked on 1 star. I was like, “What? Who doesn’t like my book?” So I clicked on the 1 star and it went there and I was like, these people, I’m glad that Amazon doesn’t give you their address because I’d be in the car and drive to their house. People were like, “That book was a 250 page sales pitch.” I’m like, are you kidding me? Literally there is a page and a half in the very back where I mention Clickfunnels, that’s it. This is…..I’ve read books that are 150, 200 page sales pitches. This was not, in fact I specifically I don’t want this to be a sales pitch. I’m going to write an amazing book and hopefully if I’ve earned it after 250 pages I can mention one cool thing I do in a page and a half.
And all the thing I was mentioning was, “by the way, these funnels I’m talking about, you can do it really easily in Clickfunnels, you should go get an account for free.” I saw a couple of those, people who were like, “This book is full of fluff.” I’m like, “Fluff? Are you kidding me? That was twelve years of my life, reading over a quarter of a million dollars in books and courses. And then breaking them down and putting them into an actual, logical step by step system. The time it took me to write that book, was ten years of trial and error and like a year of writing to give this book to you. And it was like, it was all fluff. I wanted to just jump at that person. If they were in my wrestling room right now, it would be…..
Okay I probably shouldn’t tell this story, some of you guys will lose respect for me. But it must be told because this is what would happen to the person had they been here with me. So there was this guy that used to wrestle with us and he was unfortunately a good wrestler. In fact, he beat me one time and I can’t stand that guy and I won’t mention his name, but for those of you guys who are in my wrestling world, his initials are WW. So I’ll leave that for the few people who will know what I’m talking about. So he was this guy, super annoying wrestler. Nobody liked him. But unfortunately he was kind of good so he beat people.
Like I was saying, he beat me once in a Greco match where I was cutting weight and it was just a fluke, but he beat me. And then I beat him like a little girl every time after that, including in college when I had a chance to beat him. I was wrestling in a college match, he was in a different college and I started wrestling him and in the first period he went and did a two on one arm bar on me on our feet…..what’s it called? Baseball grip, he hid my hand under his stomach so the ref couldn’t see and started trying to break my wrist, pushing my wrist in towards me.
So I reached back and punched him in the head and shoved him off, to get him off my wrist. He was literally trying to break my wrist. The ref’s like, “Whoa, what are you doing? You can’t punch him in the head.” I’m like, “He’s trying to break my wrist.” So then I went ape on this dude, I ended up in that period getting up by 14 points and then I pinned him because I wanted to humiliate him and pin him just so it was a double humiliation. I digress, the initial story, this is years of my life beating this guy but he deserved it, so it was fun.
So anyway, we were at a wrestling camp, and if you knew him, some of you guys will think, Russell you’re so mean. I’m really not mean. If you understood the situation, who he was and how he treated people. And there was only a couple of guys who were better than him so we had to make sure that he, oh man, I can’t believe I’m telling this story, we would humble him. So at the freestyle and Greco wrestling camp he was at with us, our goal was to pick him up and slam him down on the ground over and over and over again so that he knew that we were all better than him.
So three of us guys and him and we were wrestling… and I’m not saying we were doing this against a defenseless guy, he was a good guy, we were just better. We just made sure he knew and he’d feel it. Anyway, that’s what I would do to these guys if they were here. I’d pick them up and slam them down and as they get back up I’d pick them up and slam them down again and just keep doing that until my, like my friend WW, wasn’t able to walk off the mats because he was so sore. Anyway, he recovered and is probably why 5 years later in college he tried to break my wrist, if I think about it. Maybe Karma was coming back to get me. There you go, I was doing the wrong thing as a high school thing. Anyway, my wrist didn’t break, so it all ended up good and I won that match.
So there you go. Holy cow, there’s my Russell tangent for the day, so sorry. Anyway, I repented for that, I’m a nice person now and I don’t beat people up. But if I wasn’t and I could see these one star people, that’s what I would do. One and two stars, both. They were just like, one guys’ like, “I got no value. In fact, I stopped reading the book after the first ten pages.” I’m like, “It’s because you stopped reading the book after the first ten pages. Read page eleven, there’s some amazing stuff on that page. And thirteen and fourteen and all the rest of the pages. I don’t know what else I can give you. The book was free, you covered shipping and handling. Or you went to Amazon, it was $10. Seriously.” It made me go crazy.
It reminded me of something Tony Robbins taught me. So this is for me, I’m mostly telling myself this to get me, make me feel okay with continuing writing my book. But he was talking about how high maintenance human beings are in today’s day and age. And what will happen is that people will go out there and risk tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie for you. They’ll hire the best actors and screen writers and script writers and spend two or three years of their lives and hundreds of millions of dollars to go and to write a story, create it, build an environment and a fantasy and make this thing amazing and produce this movie, and then they give us this movie and they ask us $10. That’s all, $10 for you to go watch this movie, and look at 2 or 3 years of these guys’ life and hundreds of millions of dollars risked on their side and all their asking is $10. And then they come and entertain you for 2 or 3 hours of a movie.
And Tony talked about how, if you look at that, kings back in the day would have Court Jesters and things like to be able to be entertained. They didn’t have a fraction of what we can get for $10 today. Yet we’ll be so pompous and arrogant as to go to a movie that, I’m just going to use this as an example because I really liked this movie and a lot of people didn’t. But the Batman vs Superman, we pay our $10, we go there and at the end we say, “That movie sucked. It was a waste of my money, a waste of my time.” Are you kidding me, these people risked hundreds of millions of dollars to entertain you and it cost you $10 and two hours of your time and you’re complaining it was a waste of your time and money? Oh people.
With that said, I want something for all of you. First off, is when you got people like that who come back to your amazing-ness that you create, that you are putting out there, risking your time and energy and your time away from your family to create and to do, there’s gonna morons out there who complain and say, “Look, it was a waste of my ten bucks.” And for those people, guess what you should do to them, you should freaking WW them. Pick them up, that’s kind of funny. WW Wrestling…but that’s not what I’m talking about. You pick them up and slam them down in your mind over and over again until they can’t walk and then you move on with your life because they don’t really matter. Then you go back to the people you’re serving and worry about them because that’s who does matter.
This is like the worst moral of the story ever. So that’s half of it. Just forget about those people that are gonna be the complainers. The second half is don’t be that person that complains. The people that do that, you’re not a good person. Somebody is risking all this stuff to give you a gift. Don’t complain about it. If you don’t want to go to the movie, and if you didn’t like the movie, it wasn’t……but don’t complain about it. The thing that they are giving you and the return of what they’re asking you for, is insanely low and we should be grateful. I’m grateful for people who risk and do these things for us. I’m grateful, after writing now my second book, I’m grateful for anyone who’s written a book, it is not easy.
The time, the stress, the headache, pressure that goes into that, I’m grateful. Even if I didn’t like your book or agree with your beliefs or point, it doesn’t matter. I’m grateful that you put the energy and effort into it and gave it somebody because you believe it’ll change their life for $10 or $5, whatever a book cost. I just want everyone to be thinking it that way. Because I think that makes all of us better people and makes the world better and gives the creators less fear to go and create. Because that’s it’s. If you’re not creating then what’s the point.
So I hope that helps somebody, I don’t know. At least it’ll help me to forget about those one and two stars. And hopefully no one lost respect for me because of what I did to my buddy, WW. But he totally deserved it, so it’s all cool. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t do anything that was outside of the bounds of what someone should do in a wrestling room. So it was all good. Anyway, with that said, appreciate you all, I’m about two minutes away from my pinch test, pray that I’m not over 25% body fat. If I am though, it’s okay. I’ll get back to work and get back to where I need to be. Thanks everybody. Talk to you all again soon.