If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track.
On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode:
So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car. But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast.
Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party.
So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited.
So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap.
So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event.
So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people.
So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event.
So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that.
So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party?
So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and….
Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach.
So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing.
We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts.
I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out.
We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts.
Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling?
I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product. They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth.
Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal.
So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing.
Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something.
So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come.
When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion.
So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world.
Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive.
Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks.
With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful.
So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun.
But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids.
So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it.
So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help.
So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.”
Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one.
Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to.
So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast.
When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state.
So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that.
When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you.
People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane.
So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well.
But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane.
He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression.
Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy.
So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body?
Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well.
There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark.
The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up.
That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.”
It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology.
I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good.
When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works.
So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one.
Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up.
I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them.
That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state.
What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on.
Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.”
So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out.
Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.”
And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure.
Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done. A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played.
Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong.
Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back.
Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you.
I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing.
But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful.
Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did.
If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite.
I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation.
And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation.
But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?”
I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything.
I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting.
So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk.
I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth.
So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development.
So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.
I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people.
Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing.
I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys.
When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value.
Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go.
I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important.
Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling. Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life.
Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know.
But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it.
The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you.
Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion.
So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced.
In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing.
And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress.
I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up.
And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening.
That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually.
But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago.
The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.”
My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out.
All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again.
I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff.
They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money. My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me.
I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid.
Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money.
So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me?
Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what?
So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing.
I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I’m like I don’t want people to think I’m drinking, so I ordered a milk.
So I’m holding a milk and I’m at the bar and everyone’s drinking and they’re like, “Why do you got a milk?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Mormon, Mormon’s don’t drink so I’m drinking milk.” They’re like, “that’s weird.” And then they’re kind of drunk and the coolest thing about drunk people, drunk people don’t have any filters. They lose the inhibition to filter stuff or whatever. So I’m drinking milk, totally sober, they’re completely drunk and I’m like, “Hey so, what’s the biggest thing you’ve figured out?” and they’re like, “Oh man, okay so we did this thing on our squeeze page where we did blah blah blah.” I’m like, what? He just told me that. I would spend four or five hours in the bar drinking milk, asking people questions and getting nugget, after nugget, after nugget. I’d go back and add it and sure enough I’d add this little thing and it’s like Russell, you gave yourself a three thousand dollar a day raise by doing this one little thing. That’s a million dollar a year raise.
How do average humans get a million dollar a year raise? They don’t, they can’t. It’s physically impossible to do that. How did I do it? Some dude at a bar who is drunk off his butt told me this little thing and then I did it. Where do you guys think I got the Perfect Webinar from? I am not a genius, but guess what? I went to all of these events and saw speaker, after speaker, after speaker pitching and maybe what they said sucked, but I heard how they did a close, I heard how they did a trial. That guy said that thing. All of the differences…it’s funny because Stephen’s always like, he always talks about the Russellisms, the things Russell says that are so cool in my presentations. I didn’t make most of those things up, most things I heard another speaker say it and I’m like, that’s amazing, wrote it down and it was worth everything.
It would make me laugh, I’d go to an event and I would get one or two little nuggets like that and I’d come back and it would give me a two to three, maybe four thousand dollar a year raise and I hear someone online complain, “It was a pitch fest. All they do is sales stuff.” I’m like, “You went to that event to try to learn how to sell things. Why do you hate money so bad? I saw the same thing you did. I gave myself a four thousand dollar a day raise.” I don’t know what else to do.
It’s because they haven’t figured it out yet. It’s like they’re going to school and they’re pissed because the professor bored them to death. It’s like, when you go with this different lens, when you’ve got something you are so insanely passionate about, that all you care about, you don’t care about making money, spending money. All you care about is figuring out how you can get this to more people and when you get one little nugget after five days of information and that one thing does this huge thing, that’s worth it.
I hear people complain, they go to forums, “That event sucked, it was a pitch fest. I heard that stuff before, they didn’t teach me anything new.” It’s because they’re not real entrepreneurs. They haven’t fall in love with the marketing of the thing. If you’ve fallen in love, this is how you know you’ve fallen in love with the marketing of your thing, it’s when you literally stop watching TV for the shows and you watch for the commercials. That’s how you know. It’s when you’re listening to the radio and you’re waiting for the songs to end so you can hopefully hear a really good direct response radio ad. It’s when you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed looking for ads. It’s when you’re like weird crap that you know you don’t care about, but you’re praying that they will start re-targeting you with their ads.
It’s when you log into your wife’s Facebook account, not because you give a crap about what she’s doing, or care what she’s talking about, but you know that she is seeing different ads than you are and you want to see what those ads look like. That’s when you know that you’re passionate about marketing. That’s when you know that you’re so obsessed with getting your message out that it’s become, that’s the level you gotta be at.
But I think I’ve come to grips now, I think it used to piss me off when people weren’t obsessed about marketing, but now I think I get it. It’s like, I don’t think you can be obsessed about marketing at first, until you have first gone through the growth phase for yourself. You’ve got to become ridiculously obsessed initially with your thing, because that’s the first phase. You’ve got to immerse yourself there and after you’ve done that, then when you start shifting the entrepreneurship side, the growth, to the contribution and sharing it. That’s when you will become obsessed with the marketing. That’s when copywriting became alive for me. That’s when split testing became alive. That’s when all the geeky crap that I shouldn’t care about, none of us should care about, that’s when I started caring about it, that’s when it became alive.
Does that make sense you guys? That’s when I can sit there for five days and watch sales pitch after sales pitch after sales pitch and hear a single word about what they said, but just watch their hands, their hand motions, how they’re anchoring the stage, what they’re pointing to, why, when and how and be excited.
One of my buddies, Darin Stevens, he literally went to a Tony Robbins event, he went to the entire thing. I can’t remember if he told me if he watched the recordings of it or if he did when he was there, but he watched an entire week long Tony Robbins event with no audio on. No audio. Why would somebody do that? Because Darin wants to be the best person in the world at controlling the stage. Understanding how your physiology and stage presence and how you’re anchoring the stage, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, why it works. What did he do? He took the best person in the world, Tony Robbins, and he watched him and took out all of the audio because the audio distracts you from he’s actually doing.
I can’t tell you guys this enough. Funnel hacking is not just about looking at the outside, it’s about really understanding what people are doing and why they’re doing it. Yes, I’m selling products and services to you guys, but at the same time watch how I’m doing it. So Darin went and watched Tony Robbins because he wanted to see Tony’s hand motions, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, how he’s doing it, and he wrote this huge write-up for me, he sent me, it’s insane. It’s about all the stuff that Tony is doing, the reason why Tony’s pounding his chest at times, why he’s going like this, why he’s doing the ‘whoa, yes!’, why he’s pointing to different directions while he’s anchoring and seating and all those things are not accidental. They’re real and they’re purposely done.
When I’m on stage and talking about stuff, when I’m walking on different parts of the stage, sometimes its accidental. But for the most part, I’m doing things on purpose. I’m anchoring the stage, I’m taking you on timelines, I’m trying to bring you back to different places so you get emotionally impacted based on things that are happening. Same things happening in a webinar, tele-seminar, not podcasts because I’m just driving and talking, but maybe I am, who knows.
But I want you guys to understand, all of these things are there for you. I spent 14 hours yesterday, 14 hours going through every email I have ever sent with swipe files, squeeze pages, templates. I found every template I ever had paid for, designed because every template I designed I went and had all these people, the examples, a decade of funnel hacking. I went through yesterday and archived all of it into trello boards based on page type, based on funnel type, based on all sorts of stuff. And I’ll probably never use those pages again, but I wanted to be able see them and categorize and be like, the reason why that page was awesome was because of this.
There’s actually this one little block, there’s a dude that figured it out, on these squeeze pages, I’m not going to ruin the surprise for you, but if you type in squeeze page warning, those who are in the know will know that there’s this dude who had a squeeze page and at the very top he had this warning block that says, “Warning: Blah, blah, blah” That increased conversions on squeeze pages by insane amounts and most people never knew about it. Then he mentioned it, I think he’s in the dating market, he mentioned it at a mastermind and then dozens and dozens of people have done it, but most people have never seen it before. If you were to do it on your pages right now, it’s insane.
I totally forgot about it until I’m looking at my swipe files right now and I’m like, oh yeah. There’s so many things. I think so many people get bogged down in this other stuff that they forget about that. Become obsessed with the marketing. Go through all this stuff and legitimately do and it’s going to make it so much fun, it’s going to make it alive for you guys and I want to give you that gift. But that’s the transition.
So anyway you guys, this has been a long one. I hope you got a lot out of it. I just want you guys, I know that you have something inside of you. I know that you have the ability to change people’s lives. I believe that, probably more so than you do at this period in your life. If I didn’t believe that I would not be doing this stuff. I make plenty of money running a software company. I don’t have to do all this stuff. I don’t have to talk or write books, but I’m in a spot in my life now where my contribution is to get you off your butt so you contribute as well.
I am trying my best to touch as many people’s lives as possible through the things that I do, but I just know that the clearest path for me to have impact on the world is to touch you as an entrepreneur because you have the ability to affect more people. You may not, some of you guys know this. Some of you guys know that we have people that literally have hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people a year that they are touching and affecting. If I could magnify what you’re doing just a little bit, it amplifies that. If I can show you something that gets you to convert more people and gives you more money so you can actually serve people at a higher level, that’s huge.
And some of you guys are at the beginning of this journey now and you’re like, “I don’t have anything Russell. I’m not that passionate yet. Or I don’t have a voice, I’m nervous, I’m awkward.” Whatever, I promise you, I wish I would have been podcasting and blogging 12, 13, 14 years when I got started. The Russell you see today was the most awkward, nervous, weird person on planet earth 14 years ago. I couldn’t carry on a conversation with a human being, let alone with a camera for an hour and 8 minutes now. That comes with a lot of practice.
It’s kind of what we talked about at the beginning. Unbalancing your life and becoming obsessed with something. I don’t care what that is for you. But you need to do it, find something that fires you up. Right now if you’re not that passionate about anything, that’s okay. Find something that gives you a little spark, because initially it’s a spark. I wasn’t that passionate about marketing at first, but there was a spark. Once you have a spark it’s like, okay now let’s throw some kindling on the fire. There’s a spark of something, go find other people who are obsessed. You have a lower vibration right now, they have a higher vibration, we talked about this earlier. Go find people who are obsessed and get around them. Listen to their podcast, read their book, if they have an event, finance your house if you have to, finance that event and plug into their vibrations so they will bring you to the excitement level that they are at.
I am trying to do that every day with my marketing, if you have not noticed. Most of you guys, when you came into this world, you did not know about marketing, you didn’t care about marketing. You didn’t care about funnels, that was not, you didn’t get into this world saying, I’m going to build funnels. You either had a spark saying I want to make money, or you had a spark saying I want to share something. You had a spark and for some reason you bumped into me because I’m so loud and obnoxious and annoying and everywhere.
You probably saw a YouTube video and you’re like, “Stop targeting me on YouTube, Russell.” But I’m trying to take your spark and ignite it. I’m trying to give you as much waves of excitement and passion and vibration as I can muster up, so that your vibration will rise to my level.
So for you, where do you have a spark? Find that spark and then find the people around you in that market who are on fire and plug into them. Give them any amount of money that they need. I’m serious about this. If you’re broke it does not matter, you’re going to be more broke. I don’t know how to get that, I was at Grant Cardone’s event, I think there were like 2500 people in this long room and you were seated based on how much money you spent. People in the front spent 15 grand to be there and in the back they spent like 500 bucks. The further back you got, the less money you spent.
What’s crazy to me, is when I pitched my product, the people in the front ran to the side of the room and bought. And the further back you went, the less and less people ran to the back. You may say, “Russell, it’s because the people in the back didn’t have as much money, therefore they did not run to the side.” I would argue with you that you are wrong. The people in the front have money because they have invested money. They’re used to spending money in investing and then they have more success. The people in the back are broke because they’ve never invested in themselves. That’s it. That’s honestly it.
They’re already broke. Grant Cardone said this to me backstage, he’s like, “Don’t the people in the back understand, if you’re already broke it doesn’t hurt you to be more broke.” It doesn’t. I don’t know if that’s financially irresponsible. But I did a whole podcast on this called entrepreneurial scars, our founding fathers who I believe were inspired from God, who created the constitution of the United States, they gave us this thing. Because in this country we needed to give the entrepreneurs the ability to risk everything and be okay with that.
If entrepreneurs didn’t have that ability, this country would have stagnated and died. I am a huge believer in that. Capitalism 101. If entrepreneurs don’t have the ability to risk everything, everything stops growing. But if entrepreneurs have an out, then guess what? They can risk everything.
So it’s scary at first, but I promise you it’s a lot less scary to risk everything now, then it is when you have a whole bunch of stuff. So now is the time for you guys to risk everything because you don’t have that much. I don’t want to be a jerk, but it’s true. Now is the time to risk things. It gets harder and scarier when you have people and money and all these kind of things.
I always tell people, for you, you have to figure out what is the worst case scenario if you fail? It gets people to look at that thing straight in the eyes and say, I’m okay with that. That is the key to be able to risk stuff. Because a lot of times there’s this fear of, the worst case scenario, something bad is going to happen and they can’t be successful. You gotta stop and write down for you right now, if you were to fail, if you were to go and get a bunch of credit cards and blow it on mastering your craft and getting around the best people in the world and raising your vibration, everything, what’s the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario, you go bankrupt.
You go bankrupt, what happens? You can’t get a credit card for like a day or two maybe. You can’t get a home loan. Okay, well you’re going to have to rent. Can you rent? I don’t know, hopefully. There’s programs, the country….I know I’ve rented to people who, there are things. Anyway, maybe it’s financially responsible. I’m not a financial planner, don’t listen to me. I’m just saying that if I was in that same situation and I was starting all over again, I wouldn’t worry about that. I would not worry about that.
I have built and lost everything twice now, and guess what? It was alright. It’s okay, but the biggest thing is if you don’t build something, you don’t try something, if you don’t go deep on something, then you’ll never know, you’ll never know. Anyway, make sure you clear it with your spouse first to get their buy in, I’m just saying. Those people in the back of the room at Grant Cardone, if they had run to the back and invested I think it was $2,000, that’s not that much. If they would have invested $2,000 they would have gotten the exact same thing that Brandon and Kaelin got.
Those of you who listen to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about them. Brandon and Kaelin were down to their last money. The network marketing company they were in ended up kind of falling apart, they stepped away from it. They had zero dollars left in their account. They had a credit card and a couple of other things and they saw my pitch for funnel hacks, it was $1,000. They watched it and they were like, “We have to buy it, we have to buy it. We don’t have a thousand bucks.” They were freaking out and finally decided, “We’re going to buy it.” I wish they were on here right now to tell this story because it’s awesome.
So they said they were going to buy it and then Brandon was going to buy it, and going to buy it and then he wussed out. He’s like, “I’m not going to do it.” So he didn’t buy it. Instead he went to Clickfunnels.com and paid $100 for Clickfunnels. He went back to Kaelin and said, “I didn’t do it. I just bought the $100 thing.” And she’s like, “We said we were going to buy it.” And he’s like, “I know. We don’t have any money.” And she’s like, “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any money anyway. Who cares if we buy something with it. We don’t have any money.” Zero and negative $1000 is pretty much the same thing. It’s not changing the quality of your life.
So they went back and ended up buying the $1000 thing and she was pissed because now they were $1100 in debt as opposed to $100 and then guess what they did? They had something they were really passionate about. She had lost, I don’t know, 60 pounds. She was in weight, she was already passionate about something, she’d already gone through the growth. She had already filled that. Now she was transitioning, they were transitioning to need to share this with other people.
So what did they do? They did similar to what I did. For them, they did it a little different, this is what I recommend for you guys though. They bought the Funnel Hacks training and then they watched video number one. They started watching it and as soon as they got into it, they paused it and they did that thing. They pushed play again, they started doing, they did that thing. They implemented what I said. Paused it. Did that thing. Pushed play, pause, play, pause. And for two or three months or weeks, I can’t remember how long it was. That’s all they did.
They put it all in place and when it was done, they launched their business. They’re initial launch, I think it was Thanksgiving or Christmas, they were driving to their families and they told me that they had enough gas money to get there, but no gas money to get back. So they filled the gas in their car, started driving, they got down to their families house, they were staying in a room and they started going through it and they launched this thing and luckily for them they rolled it out and made $20,000, that paid for gas money to get back.
And then they started geeking out, started plugging in, they started doing what I did. Again, I didn’t want to learn copywriting, but when I found out you change a headline you change 13 words and you give yourself a thousand dollar a day raise, it suddenly becomes really interesting. So they plugged in the podcast and I watched these guys over the next year, over the next two years and it was crazy.
I would do something, I remember I did a podcast where I was on a webinar with Jason Flatlien, who is one of the best webinar performers on this planet, at the end of the webinar Jason did this weird thing for 90 minutes. I was so pissed at him because I thought he was going to kill webinar sales. Turns out he doubled our webinar sales, on the drive home I was doing the podcast and I’m like, “Holy crap! Flatlien pulled this thing out of his butt. He did this thing, I never even heard of it, doubled, literally 2x’d our sales.” The podcast went live the next day.
Brandon and Kaelin listened to the podcast, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson.” Which is the same thing I used to say when I’d be like, “Freaking Dan Kennedy. Freaking Michael Thornton. Freaking John Carl.” All the guys I studied. They’d some little nugget and I’d try it.
So they said that, they went back and added the same thing to the end of their webinar and they messaged me back, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson. We did it to our webinar. Doubled sales.” I was like are you kidding me? And every single thing, they listened to my podcast and they’d tell me every time I’d say something, they’d take it and try it and Brandon said, “We’re like a week behind you on your implementation. You do it, we implement it a week later and we’re doing it, and doing it.”
And I want you guys to understand, that’s when this game becomes fun. It’s when you realize that man, listening to Russell rant about this stupid thing, if I add this one little piece, all the sudden I go from helping 100 people a day to 120 people a day, that’s pretty cool. My bank account goes from $1200 a day to $1300 a day. You gave yourself a $100 raise today, are you kidding me? People don’t do that.
We used to have a big mantra in our old office, we’d always say, we’d come in and be like, “How can we give ourselves a raise today? How can we give ourselves a raise today?” And it was like looking for that gold nugget. Looking for that little thing. Looking for that headline, split test, that tweak that I did, that little nugget. What could we do that’d different? That’s how the 108 split tests book was born.
I was able to do a lot more split testing before Todd Dickerson, my partner in crime in CLickfunnels, we used to build the best sales funnel we could, we’d get it out there live, pre-clickfunnels, it was a pain in the butt. We’d build the whole thing out, and get it live. Todd would login, he’d use visual website optimizer, it was our split test tool at the time, he’d split up like a thousand different tests and try to beat my control. And he always did, pretty much every time.
And that was the goal, I made the best version we can, Todd let’s see if you can beat it? And he would test, test, test, test and he beat it, beat it, beat it again, beat it again. And it was like every day, how do we give ourselves a raise today? That was the game we played and that’s how the 108 split tests book was born. That’s how half of what I know about funnels was born at that time. We were just testing every funnel variation idea, planning pages, template, idea, everything we could we dream of for a 2 ½ 3 year period of time, it’s how I became who I am today. It’s how I became the dude who probably knows more about funnels than any human being on earth because I hacked more funnels, tested more funnels, we did more than anybody.
And during that time of growth, that was the growth time for us, we were doing it on 12 companies we owned. We were doing it for a whole bunch of other people, which by the way, that’s a story for another podcast, don’t do 12 companies at once. But that’s what we were doing, that’s how we mastered this craft. That’s how I know more about funnel psychology, I believe, than anyone on earth. Because I did it. I did more of it. We tested so many thing. I was like, holy crap. I thought for sure this would have won. But this won, and this didn’t win. This helped on page one, but it made page three conversion go down. I got my gift because of the insane amounts of work that Todd and I did during that time.
Todd and I and my entire team, by the way. We didn’t have it nice like you guys have now days. I went on a little rant to someone on my team the other day, we get people now to come to Clickfunnels who first off, they don’t use Clickfunnels the way it’s made. So those of you guys who are having bugs, I want you to hear this. Because if you have bugs, it’s because you’re trying to do crap that Clickfunnels is not made to do. You’re hacking things and you’re doing stuff. If you use Clickfunnels the way it works, there’s not bugs. I don’t have bugs in my funnels. I don’t know why everyone’s got these bugs.
It’s because you’re trying to do things that you think are going to be better and they’re not. It’s because you’ve been listening to the Confusion Soft guru’s explaining why you need 55,000 different variations of funnels. If you just learn how to sell, all that crap would go away. Every time people say, “There’s all these bugs in Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I’m not seeing them man, because I build funnels on it every single freaking day and I’m not seeing the bugs.”
There are little things here and there and we fix them as they pop up. But for the most part, you are creating bugs by trying to do stuff that does not matter. So that’s number one. Number two, you’re paying between $100-300 a month for the software. We had a really, really bad competitor come out, which we’ve had I’d say probably at least 30-40 Clickfunnels killers who have come out in the last 3 years since we launched Clickfunnels. They all come and go and they all try to undercut us in pricing.
I always get all these people like, “So and so cut you out.” And maybe someday we’ll have a big competitor, I mean who knows. I’m excited for that day, I actually enjoy competition. Some of you may probably have noticed. I got no problems with that. When I was wrestling, all I tried to do was fly around the country to find the best in the world so I could learn to beat them so I’m game. Anyone wants to step up legitimately, please do. But please don’t come in here disguised like, “We’re going to beat them by undercutting their price” Everyone’s coming out like, “You’re losing all your customers because they’re undercutting your price.”
I’m like, “Are you kidding me? The people who complain about spending $100 a month to run their entire company, I don’t want them as customers.” In fact, we’re honestly thinking about doubling or tripling our prices just to show, to give the virtual finger to everyone who’s trying to undercut us. We don’t want those customers. You can go there. If you can’t spend $100 to run your company, you should not be running a business at this point and time. Honestly, that’s how I feel.
I want to walk you through a walk down memory lane at how we used to build funnels because this is the reality of how it used to work. We would have an idea, I would then have to go funnel hack dozens of people to see what would be the best thing, so I’d probably spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars funnel hacking a bunch of people’s things. Because I didn’t have a way to mock up templates. So I’d funnel hack and take tons of screen shots of all these templates of all these different pages and then I’d have to go to one of my designers, I had a bunch through the years. I’d show them, “This is the process I think would be best. I think I want a landing page here, and this, this, this. I want this from this guys funnel. I like this over from this one. I want this from here.”
So I’d map out the funnel process I wanted to test. But I want this guys design but this over here…..it was a nightmare. So our designers would go and try to create a page but I’d be like, “No, but this and that…” and it would literally be 6-8 weeks of us going back and forth just getting the design and the funnel structure right. They’d have to hand code everything. So we’d get all this done. Then we’d have to go and after we got all the pages done, so it looked good, we’d go back to our developers and say, “okay, here are all the pages, here’s the order forms, here’s everything. Now you gotta actually make this work.” So they’d have to go and custom and go into PHP and coding and sequel database to build up so the order form would actually work. We actually went to a database, they’d have to set up the security certificates, they’d have to set up all the API’s to go to the 20 or 30 different things that we would need.
And it would take the developers on average, probably another 30 days to hook up all of those things. So my cost just in salaries at that point and time were probably at $15, maybe $20 grand in salaries just to get all these things done to that point. Then we still had to write the copy, which eventually I started liking copy, so I did a lot more of that myself. But prior, I started having a lot of copywriters. I would spend on average between 10-15 grand for every sales letter we would write. Whether it was somebody else, or it would be my own time, which would take me probably 6 weeks or so to write all the copy for a funnel.
We would then plug all those things in, and we’d be 3 months, conservatively 3 months and usually a little more than that, and conservatively about $30 grand per funnel in. Before we could test it. Before we could test it.
So for you guys to be like, “That’s $100 and I could only build 30 funnels. I still have to get an SMTP mailer to send my emails out.” I have no empathy for that. None, zero. I want you to leave us and go to the competitors. Please, for the love. Leave us, go for the $37 option. I want you to be their nightmare clients, I do not want you to be using Clickfunnels. I don’t have any empathy. Zero. Not one iota of empathy for you if you cannot pay $100 or even $300…..if you cannot pay $300 to run your company, you are not an entrepreneur, you should leave this business. Honestly, you should just stay as an artist and go to the beach and do your thing and have a hat out there to get tips. That is your level of being an entrepreneur. I don’t know what else to tell you. Please leave. You can go, you have my permission. I don’t not want or need your money.
But if you were trying to freaking change the world and sell stuff and make a business, that’s what we’ve given you. If you wanted super insane, complex stuff, you may have outgrown Clickfunnels. That’s fine, if you’ve outgrown Clickfunnels, go hire people to custom code stuff, I’m okay with that. You’re going to be like, “Oh your software’s buggy.” It’s like you’re trying to customize crap that your should be spending 20 or 30 grand on, like we used to. You can do that. Go for it. You have my permission to leave. I do not need your $297 that bad. I promise you that.
The headaches that go to some people who are trying to, who are complaining to me about the bug they find when they try to add the 47th upsell on the 13th email sequence if somebody clicks yes versus no, twice instead of once. That’s not what we’re made to do. And the reason why, after freaking testing a million things when you go back and do it the way I had to do it, those three months and that $30 grand was for the initial test. Then Todd would have to go split test a whole bunch of things and then guess what we found out? Half the time we’d get the pages to convert but the funnel wasn’t profitable.
So then we’d have to come back and say okay, this entire funnel didn’t work so we have to rebuild the upsell, downsell sequence. I had to go back to the drawing board and it’s not me spending 15 minutes in Clickfunnels, cloning the page and doing a split test. No. It was me hiring another copywriter to write a new version of the video sales letter. It was me figuring out new layouts and designs and functionality and trying to re-custom freaking code all that crap from the ground up, then we’d have to go re-build the entire funnel, then re-launch it, drive new traffic. If the funnel didn’t work we’re into another $10-15 grand in for the second test. “Oh my. $300 costs so much. I can only do 400 split tests at once.” I’ve got no mercy for you okay.
Sorry for the rant, but this freaking important. Alright, so the reason why my funnels are simple, and I want you guys to understand this, is because your funnels need to be simple. I learned this from having to custom code stuff. If I made these complex freaking funnels that everyone thinks are so cool now days, because of Confusion Soft and others, they draw these little diagrams and they try to impress their clients by how complex their funnels can be, that’s not going to serve you at all.
I want you to understand this, that will not serve you. It will screw you up and you’ll be finding bugs in Clickfunnels because it’s not build to do what you’re trying to do. With the design hack-a-thon happening next week, we are building out 30 types of funnels. These are the funnel structures you should use. You should work to plug the crap you are selling into these funnel structures, not the other way around. You should not try to say, “oh I got this good idea, I’m going to do 14 upsells and then I’m going to have a mini survey on upsell number two and then I’ll sell them this.” No, just plug the crap you have into the existing stuff.
The tiny potential maybe incremental sales you could get by tweaking this thing, is not worth….I promise you that if you put the same effort and same time and money and energy into hiring a better copywriter or mastering….there’s a dude who I pay $100 to write each headline for me. When we have an offer I’ll give him a thousand bucks and say, “Write me ten headlines.” That’s a better investment of your time than trying to have 16 different upsells. Because having a different headline can change your conversion. That will do more for you than the complexity that you’re trying to do.
My rant is over. I think it’s over. Should it be over? I just want you guys to understand that. Clickfunnels is built for customers like me, who want to get a message out quickly. They want to take the best proven practices, and they want to focus on the stuff they can control. If you want a cheaper option because you feel like $100 is too much to invest in the entire background and infrastructure of your business, you have my permission to go. I hope you enjoy it. And when your business makes enough money that you can switch, we will gladly welcome you back. Or you can do what the wise man did and built his foundation on a rock.
I don’t know if you guys remember that song from Sunday school but the wise man built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built his house upon the sand. And when the rains came tumbling down, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up and the man on the sand washed. And the man on the rocks stood still. This is primary songs 101, guys.
So if you want to build your house upon the sand, go the cheap option you should. You definitely should. And if and when you want to get super complex, if there’s reasons and cases, Clickfunnels wasn’t built for, don’t feel bad you guys. I’m okay with that. You can outgrow us. Clickfunnels is a company that’s built for businesses in this certain range and I understand that and I respect that. That’s who we want to serve. If we try to serve everybody, we will not succeed either.
So a lot of times if you guys come to us and you’re like, “Oh, this is a bug, this is a bug.” A lot of times we’ll hear that and say, “It’s not a bug. It’s the limitation that we have put on our software because that’s not something that we want our users doing.” Because if we open that to everybody then it adds a whole other level of complexity. Clickfunnels is already complex, I don’t want to add more complexity. I want to make more simplicity.
I honestly, if I wouldn’t have uproarings and riots in the streets right now, I would take away some of our features. I would pull things out, I would simplify a lot of stuff. And you will notice over the next year or so, we have a bunch of new UI people and new teams coming in and our goal is simplification. Trying to make things more simple and easier, not more complex. Like, “Russell, what’s the newest feature coming to Clickfunnels?” There are some cool new things coming out, but at the same time a lot of its simplification.
At Funnel Hacking Live we opened up Actionetics and someone messaged me the other day, “you had this cool feature in Actionetics, it was the best thing you have and then you guys pulled it away two weeks later. Why did you guys do that?” I’m like, “Two reasons, number one: What people were doing was making smart lists that have literally 800 different things in there. I understand you guys want to be segmented, but I promise you that level of segmentation, it hurts you more than it will ever help you. And number two: It destroys our database. It’s not good. If you want that kind of complexity, please go and build that on your own. But this is for, Clickfunnels is built for entrepreneurs to move quickly.” The opportunity, you being able to launch two funnels instead of one is the difference. That’s the goal of it.
I’ve been going for a long time you guys. I don’t even know where I’m at. I hope I haven’t passed where I’m going. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope you guys actually listened to the whole thing. There were a lot of really, really cool stuff that I really wanted to share with you guys in here. I hope you got a lot of value out of it.
To recap, don’t be a bleh, build your empire, become unbalanced and focus on becoming who you need to be, and then after you’ve done that and you’re ready to transition to contribution then shift your balance and be obsessed with the marketing of it, have fun with it. This game is fun you guys. Every day I wake up and I’m like, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I had a two hour drive today and I can’t believe I get to hang out with you guys and share and talk and based on my stats, between YouTube and our podcasts, we’ll have between 15 and 20,000 people who will listen to this whole entire thing. It’s crazy.
20,000 people and if each of you got one little nugget out of that thing and I gave 20,000 of you guys the ability to affect an extra 10 people, that’s 200,000 people that we affected. And if you’re able to get an extra 100 people, that’s 2 million people I was able to affect. If you get an extra thousand that’s 20 million people. It’s insane the ripple effect. I hope that I didn’t waste any of your time and you guys got something, one or two or three little nuggets.
But look at these things that way. Go into this, go into everything, go into your study time, go into your podcast, I’m putting out a lot of content and I’m hopefully making it entertaining and fun for you guys, but you’re always looking for that one little thing, “oh, that’s how Russell….” I had probably a dozen people message me when they saw how I do my….One of the Funnel Hacker TV episodes I had my Expert Secrets board and I finished the Expert Secrets book and I closed the board and they saw that. That’s how you manage your projects. Now I see how you get so much stuff done. Everything’s compartmentalized. You have your teams, different projects, and trello’s the way you do it. That little thing was huge for people. One little nugget, and you never know where they’re going to be picked up. You never know when gold’s going to be dropped and you can grab it.
So plug in, immerse yourself in this stuff you guys. My goal is to get your vibration up to mine so you can be as passionate as I am, because if you are, that’s how you’re going to change the world. That’s how I’m going to change the world. I can’t do it without you. So I need you guys there. So step in, plug in, have fun, enjoy the process, simplify your funnels, and build your company upon a rock. With that said you guys, I appreciate you all and I will see you guys soon. Bye everybody.