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- No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules (Part II)
No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules (Part II)
Matt Karamazov
October 29, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 51 minutes
#19: Beware of "Other People's Money" (OPM)
“The biggest problem with OPM is that it encourages waste, misplaced priorities, and complacency. The end result of this is the same as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism: ‘Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.’”
Speaking of unfair advantages, it isn't always a blessing to have large reserves of money or capital at your disposal, as it causes laziness, carelessness, and apathy, and can lead you to make stupid mistakes and walk straight into a disaster.
You see this in the children of ultra-wealthy people all the time (not all of them, of course, but an astonishingly large number) who end up depressed, adrift, and sometimes crippled by addictions because they have more cash than wisdom, more money than emotional maturity. Don't let this happen to you!
Even if you do have access to OPM (Other People's Money), it may not be the best move to take it. If you're just given unfair advantages like this, someone else might come along whose unfair advantage is that they didn't have access to the same money or other resources. They may have had to develop these money-making qualities they're now using to demolish you in business. They could simply be hungrier than you, and this will be the very thing that helps them beat you.
That being the case, money (or lack of money) is no excuse, and can even be a hindrance to your success if it causes you to leave certain essential entrepreneurial characteristics underdeveloped. Take the money if you want, of course, just be damn sure what you're doing, and have protections in place to ensure that the extra cash doesn't leave you weaker and more vulnerable.
#20: "Supposed To" is For Other People
“Nobody in the herd would dream of working for free for a year. You will have no competition. This same principle applies to a lot of things other than getting a job. Certainly, to getting a desired client or account or customer. To getting a book published. To solving a problem.
Not hearing ‘no,’ doing what others won’t do, showing up differently, demonstrating tenacity have near universal application. In many such cases, you will be breaking the rules of how that situation is supposed to be handled and how you are supposed to behave. But ‘supposed to’ is for other people - not me, not you.”
To get what most people will never get, you have to do things they won't, can't, and refuse to do. You have to become someone they will never become, and you have to move through the world differently. "Supposed to" stopped applying to you the very minute you decide to become an entrepreneur.
Ignore the advice of anyone who doesn't have what you want, too, by the way. You're going to have lots of people tell you that something you're doing "isn't how it's done," or some variation of that refrain. Don't listen. Sure, take input and advice from others. Seek out wisdom and knowledge. Pursue excellence and never-ending improvement. Always! And read! Learn! Constantly! But at the end of the day, you have to return to yourself and decide what YOU think! What's right for YOU!
At this point, it's safe to assume that you won't go far wrong if you'll just do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. They are quite literally The Herd, and most people do not have what you want. Think differently! Act differently! Live differently! Be different!
Question everything, even and especially what I say and write. Always think for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Of course, it's a little bit trickier because sometimes the herd is actually right! This is an idea worth exploring. For example, do you want to buy a house?
Plenty of people would absolutely love to own their own home, and they structure their lives and make decisions around the pursuit of that goal, at least unconsciously. But whose idea was it that the be-all, end-all of human existence is to own a house? Do you actually want that? Some people do, and that's perfectly fine! That could very well be the right answer for them, and I'll never try to convince them to abandon their own ideas of what they want for themselves. But at the end of the day, you have to realize that most of the people who preach on and on about "the dream of home ownership" are actually realtors.
Go to college if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Get married if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a car if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a house if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). But don't do it because you're supposed to. You're an entrepreneur. A critical thinker and a massive doer. Your days as an unthinking member of The Herd are now over.
“Reading this book is easy. Living it is hard.”
“We are a people in search of rules. It might have stopped when Moses came down from the mountain and announced: ‘Good news - I got Him down to ten.’ But even though few people manage to live by those, everybody wants more.”
“When you meet the Buddha of Conventional Wisdom on the road, aim for him and push the gas pedal to the floor.”
“Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”
“Early on, I was not motivated to ‘get rich’ or inspired by positive visions of some grand and glorious future of fame and fortune. I was, instead, motivated by my HATRED for being poor.
A lot of people seem to resign themselves to being poor and get comfortable with poverty and failure. Not me. I absolutely HATED everything about it and every minute of it. I lived for a while with very ‘dark’ thoughts about my predicament, fueling a fierce determination to escape it and rise above it somehow, no matter what it took.
When I applied for my first job as a territory sales rep for a publishing company - offering a base salary, bonuses, and a company car that would make me NOT broke - I was rejected for being too young and too inexperienced by the national sales manager in town conducting interviews.
I was first depressed but quickly ANGRY. ‘I’ll be damned,’ I told myself, ‘if I’m going to let this bozo stop me from getting this.’ And the next morning, when he opened his hotel room door to grab the newspaper, he was quite surprised to see me sitting there, blocking his exit.”
“Who is to say what should motivate you? I say: whatever works.”
“In brief, Dr. Maltz became convinced that no amount of conscious positive thinking or attempts at willpower and self-discipline can overcome a negative self-image. Another way to say this is that whenever resolution is incongruent with the self-image, the resolution fails.”
“This is why, incidentally, for 40 years, I refused any speaking engagement where I was prohibited from selling my ‘tool kits’ from the platform. To get people all jazzed up about my ideas and then send them home without the tools they needed to make real changes and without securing their commitment to doing so is just one giant waste of everybody’s time.”
“You are not limited in business by what you know or can do - only by what capabilities you can organize. Nothing is really ‘beyond’ you if you go beyond yourself as is necessary for your goals.”
“I don’t need to know that - I have a button on my desk to push, to bring someone who does running into my office.”
“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.”
“Relying on academic theories and textbook case histories for your success blueprint in business is somewhat like relying on advice from poets on succeeding in the publishing business.”
“The only real financial security is your ability to produce.”
“And that’s the key: getting ‘education’ however you get it, that is relevant to your ambitions - and avoiding education not relevant to your ambitions.”
“An old friend of mine, James Tolleson, used to include in his speeches his story of graduating from high school in Boaz, Alabama, and being eager to get into the University of Alabama, where Bear Bryant coached, until he called up, asked for their course in becoming a millionaire, and discovered they didn’t have one.
Then he called around to a dozen other universities and, to his utter amazement, found that they didn’t offer such a course either. That ended his interest in attending college.
To this day, incidentally, you can get all the way through high school and college without taking a single course in basic financial literacy, let alone how you get and stay rich as an entrepreneur.
There is even a pervasive negative attitude about success ambition perversely flourishing at universities. A desire to get rich is considered crude and unenlightened by faculty, despite facts that their university is hoarding wealth in its endowment funds and that most of the facilities on campus as well as their salaries came and come from wealth.”
“I have nothing against college, incidentally, as long as the person going understands what it is and what it isn’t. For some careers, such as doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, it’s essential. They have these rules about self-taught brain surgeons. But as I said, for most it is at best preparation only to work for and thus, be dependent on someone else.”
“When I make a bank deposit, they don’t deduct 10 percent because I made all that money without going to college.”
“Some individual or some short list of individuals can serve as your ‘college.’ Even without direct, personal contact, you can pick a few worthy models to make a deep, thorough study of.
For myself and my interests in writing and publishing to be a person of influence on certain philosophies to certain audiences, I’ve made Hugh Hefner, Ayn Rand, Napoleon Hill, Martin Luther, and several others subjects of my thorough, serious study. I own every book written on Hefner, a bookcase full of years of Ayn Rand’s newsletters, and the same for the others. As a self-promoter, I’ve done the same with Houdini. They have been my ‘professors.’
I guarantee that I have a better-than-a-Ph.D. education in advertising in the wall of books I have collected on the subject, from ancient masters to contemporary figures.
You can also go to work in the field you wish to exploit, in a company where you can learn a great deal by observation. Try to work in every job within the business. Consider working free if necessary. Be a sponge. Soak up everything you can. The individual who pays attention for a purpose every minute can gain 10 years of synthetic experience in ten months.”
“YOU can be as ordinary as toast but decide to be extraordinary and to do extraordinary things. Please do. Go out and accomplish something extraordinary, that commoners are not supposed to be able to do - America needs the examples.”
“The meek shall inherit the earth…but not in our lifetimes.”
“The poorly paid and average paid people in our field are all in the copywriting business. I’m not and you aren’t. I’m in the Gary Halbert business and you are in the Dan Kennedy business, and we have, as our deliverable, copywriting work. But we are in the self-aggrandizement and self-promotion business. Never forget it.”
“Don’t undervalue what is ‘common knowledge’ to you but very uncommon knowledge to the other guy.”
“If they show up, bill ‘em.”
“I’ll bet that occasionally you mentally convert your paycheck into dollars per hour as sort of a checkup on how well you are doing. This is deeply ingrained in many people. It is also very limiting.”
“If you are going to achieve exceptional success, especially exceptional financial success, you have to break completely free of wage-earner thinking.”
“Until you take control of your own life, someone else will.”
“I suppose we have all been raised with the ‘politeness ethic.’ I know that I was. And I have often been chided and cautioned about being too aggressive, abrasive, arrogant. Warned about losing my temper. Urged to avoid offending others at any cost. I am now 69 years old. I’ve had a 50+-year career. From that, I can assure you that this is terrible advice.”
“My own experiences with Gerry Spence, limited though they may be, have been fascinating to me. When he came into ‘the greenroom,’ the speakers’ waiting room backstage at a seminar, his presence took over the room. He is larger than life. In keeping with every criticism I’ve ever read of him, his ego seemed larger than life, too.
Backstage he is attention commanding and attention greedy. Onstage, while holding an audience of 15,000 in his hand, and coming across as most humble, there is still also arrogance - the first time we were on a program together, he deliberately ignored the meeting planner’s instructions and the huge blinking digital timer and went a whopping 20 minutes over his allotted time.
The second time, given stern instructions, the flashing timer, and a staff person pacing in front of the stage at his cutoff time, he did wind up, but he let the audience know he was being ‘forced’ to cut his remarks short and that he wasn’t pleased about it.
Yet, he has personally been very courteous and gracious to me. And I must tell you: He delivers the goods. His speech was excellent and meaningful. His book How to Argue and Win Every Time is so good, I bought copies for my clients. If I were in big legal trouble, I’d want Gerry Spence, insufferable ego be damned.
Things like this cause many to view him as arrogant: Showing off his huge, Architectural Digest-featured home, he told a Playboy interviewer, ‘You see this house and whatever else I have. It all comes from insurance companies. That’s like an Indian hangin’ out his scalps. These are my f-ing scalps.’
Spence is gentle when playing to an audience in person, to 12 or 12,000, or on TV. But in individual relationships, in conducting business behind the scenes, he is anything but gentle. I cannot imagine anybody intimidating Gerry Spence. I can imagine Spence intimidating a lot of people.”
“When I started in speaking, I was told by many never to tell a joke that might offend anybody and never to talk about politics, religion, or sex.
After a very short time, it dawned on me there wasn’t anything of importance left to talk about and, if you never risked telling a joke that might offend somebody, you can’t tell a joke, period. If I stuck with that advice, I’d be so bland I’d be invisible.”
“The risks of timidity are greater, though: no attention, no interest, no affinity, no magnetism.”
“You may win some temporary victories with this approach, but after changing your colors so many times, will you have any true colors left? The contrarian approach: presenting a consistent personality, being yourself, saying what you mean, meaning what you say, and having everybody know it is more likely to lead to lasting, satisfying success.”
“Rush Limbaugh was fired in 1984 from a Kansas City radio station for delivering overly controversial, conservative commentaries. He got hired by a Sacramento station to replace Morton Downey Jr., and was told by management, ‘We’re not afraid of controversy here. But we will not back you up if you say things you don’t believe. If you can convince us why you believe something, no matter how outrageous it seems, we’ll back you up all day long. But we will not have controversy just for the sake of it.’”
“More fortunes are made by implementation than by invention.”
“The truth is, nothing needs to be original to you because most people have lots of ideas, including some good ones, but are very poor at implementation and follow-through. You can succeed by doing what they never get done.”
“He did fundamental things very well. And he got rich doing them.”
“You need only one creative thought to get rich; two just about guarantees it.”
“Ideas alone are like unplanted seeds.”
“In my experience, for every marketing challenge, for every entrepreneurial objective, for every personal desire, there is somewhere at least one successful model that already has plenty of answers available to anybody willing to pay attention. Solving problems does not require creative invention. It requires solutions.”
“The last truly original idea to come out of Hollywood may have been the big sign up on the hill overlooking the city. And that’s okay. It’s a business. About sales, ad revenue, viewer numbers, streaming subscription revenue. About profit.
Trying to raise the likelihood of a success by greatly borrowing from prior successes is just good business. Why risk creating from scratch when there are so many fantastic models to copy from?”
“Never underestimate the value and power of the ordinary implemented with extraordinary zeal and diligence.”
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”
“The sales manager’s most frequent answer to the frustrated salesman is, ‘Make more calls.’ The parent’s answer to the struggling student is, ‘Study harder.’ But there’s a flaw in all this. Once I said to a golf expert, ‘Maybe I just need to practice more.’ ‘Not is you practice THAT swing,’ he said.”
“Speed of getting through noes automatically guarantees more yeses.”
“Raising questions about ‘persisting at what?’ complicates what dogma demands be a simple, bumper sticker-length commandment. I tell people: Don’t step in dogma! Success requires a more sophisticated navigation. Persistence has to be applied where it can do good but cast aside where it does harm.”
“Certainly, having a vision of where you want to go in life is important. But too often, people get too nitpicky in micro-defining how they’ll get there, thus excluding all sorts of great opportunities and sticking themselves with having to summon up huge amounts of persistence to get a goal the hard way even if an easier path presents itself.”
“You’ve got to place a bet every day; otherwise, you might be walking around lucky and not know it.”
“Decide who your ideal client is, then focus all your efforts on attracting that client, and no efforts on any other clients.”
“Through work, you can put yourself in positions where you can get lucky. I think you can learn the art of constantly putting yourself into situations where good luck can occur.”
“Steve Jobs said that if you are succeeding or leading you have to remember there are two kids in a garage staying up all night working on the idea they’ll use to take everything away from you. It’s a lot truer now than when he said it.”
“He says that his commitment to high speed and mega-growth created its own kind of momentum and magnetic attraction. This has been my experience with countless clients over many years.
What my friend Jim Rohn called the secret of MASSIVE action attracts people, capital, media attention, and excited customers like nothing else. When you are doing big things fast, the world notices.”
“As I write this, he’s on his way at a brisk pace to $200 million. All ignited by one Trigger: a multiplicity of offsets to new customer acquisition cost, not just the industry norm of one.”
“Why not get rich quick? There’s no good reason - only past negative conditioning - prohibiting you from taking a quantum leap, from triggering THE PHENOMENON.”
“Rather than advertising your product, service, or business, advertise FOR the customers or clients you want. The sooner you determine who your ‘perfect match customer’ is and target that person AND deliberately repel those who do not fit that description, the better. Not only isn’t the customer always right, but every customer isn’t always right for your business.”
“Resourcefulness is more powerful than resources.”
“If you can’t make money without money, you won’t make money with money either.”
“You are entitled to nothing but opportunity.”
“Walk through ANY open door.”
“When I called, I was told the position had been filled a week ago. I still asked to speak to this entrepreneur, but I was brushed off. He was too busy and was not available. But I called every day, sometimes twice a day, for two solid weeks. Finally, he invited me in.
We subsequently did millions of dollars of business together; he was, in many respects, my best mentor, and without that relationship it is very doubtful that I would be doing what I’m doing today. What would have happened had I accepted that first brush-off?”
“Zig Ziglar tells the story of the saleswoman who couldn’t hear ‘No’ if it was shouted in her ear but could hear a ‘Yes’ whispered 50 feet away. If you want to fight through the crowd and gain entry to the career field you want, in the company you want, starting out with the attention of top leaders in that company, you need to be deaf to the ‘no.’”
“I wonder how many job applicants call back 50 times? Or send a new letter every month for 12 months, discussing different reasons why they want to get started in that particular company?
I wonder how many applicants are so determined to break into a particular firm that they will continue to try to sell themselves week after week, month after month, for a year or more?”
“Neither your college diploma nor your resume has even a penny of value, in and of itself. To get going, you must begin. To get ahead, you must begin. You must get a foot in the door and a hand on some rung on the ladder somehow, somewhere, the sooner the better.
A key to success is doing even the lowliest, least desirable job better and with greater zeal than anyone has ever seen anybody tackle that job. Learn to stand out from the crowd in every positive way possible, but most of all, in your willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work.
However, another key to success is leaping, NOT ladder-climbing. You must be alert for such opportunities, recognized or created.”
In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
"When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I find it's because I've forgotten to fin“The multiple demands on an entrepreneur’s time are extraordinary. I am here to tell you that you need to take extraordinary measures to match those demands. Measures so radical and extreme that others may question your sanity.
This is no ordinary time management book for the deskbound or the person doing just one job.
This book is expressly for the wearer of many hats, the inventive, opportunistic entrepreneur who can’t resist piling more and more responsibility onto his own shoulders, who has many more great ideas than time and resources to take advantage of them, and who runs (not walks) through each day. I’m you, and this is our book.”
“There’s a reason why you can’t find a wall clock in a casino to save your life - those folks stealing your money do not want you to be aware of the passing of time.
And that tells you something useful right there: you want to be very aware, all the time, of the passing of time. It is to your advantage to be very conscious of the passage and usage of minutes and hours.”
“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive - and, often, poor.”
Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy
Doing well in school has very little to do with how successful you become. In this new economy, the biggest factor in your success will not be abstract, academic learning but whether you develop the real-life success skills evinced by the people on these pages, and how early you do.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”
“You are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.”
“The wealthiest people are not the ones who are hoarding the most value – they’re the ones who have the most value flowing in and out of their lives.”
Read the Full Breakdown: The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg
What if the human story is just getting started? What if there's a future techno-utopia just waiting for the right group of smart, ambitious, optimistic thinkers to come along and help make it real? What if there was a book that laid out a grounded yet exciting roadmap to get to that bright future?
Sample Quotes from the Book:
"Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can't be. Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn't."
"As a guiding philosophy, 'win and help win' will always outcompete 'live and let live.'"
“It’s not just about free speech. It's about the cost of speech. If you're jailed by the state for speech, you may not speak out. But if you're fired by an employer for speech, that is costly too - a cost greater than most can pay. Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely."
Read the Full Breakdown: The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson
By wanting to become rich, you are also saying that you want to accept the challenge to be better at making money than 99 percent of the people on this planet. Just by attempting this, you are going to have to accept the fact that you must not just be good, you must be incredible. Are you ready?
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“It’s impossible to think that you could become a billionaire without believing that money is abundant.”
“In order to make as much money as possible, every moment of our time should be spent focusing on what gets us paid.”
“If you decide to follow through no matter what and never give up, becoming rich will not be a matter of if, if it will be a matter of when.”
Read the Full Breakdown: The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker
No one's ideas are beyond questioning. In this section, I argue the case for the opposition and raise some points you might wish to evaluate for yourself while reading this book.
#1: Know the Rules Before You Break Them
As we've discussed, many of the rules you're likely to encounter exist simply to serve the interests of those who created them. The world is ruled by incentives, which is why you have to look at things like who benefits from which arrangement. This will make a whole lot more about this world make sense. Trust me.
Some of the rules, however, exist for a very good reason, and you need to understand why they exist before you go around breaking them. This mostly comes about through time and experience, but in every industry there are rules and best practices that you'd be wise to adopt.
For example, ripping off somebody else's YouTube video and making your own version that's exactly the same as theirs, with the same script, the same graphics, the same title, the same thumbnail...Seriously, people do that!
It's crazy, especially since it's sooo easy to tell, but people will blatantly steal everything about a popular video and or a viral tweet and pass it off as their own. That's wrong. But then there are people who take inspiration from those earlier creations and put their own spin on them. That's okay, and you'll need to understand the difference.
Take going to college, for another example. Why is there a "rule" that all successful people go to college? Because the college system makes stupid amounts of money perpetuating that message and making as many people as possible believe it! That's a rule you can break, and depending on what you want out of life, you probably should.
That goes for every rule, regulation, guideline, and "common sense" principle you can think of. You need to approach these things from all angles: ask why they exist, who enforces them, and why. What's their motivation for getting you to believe this? Why does such and such rule exist, and who is it designed to stop?
In the same way that to make the most money possible you'll have to know your customers' needs and desires even better than they do, you'll need to understand society's rules and who benefits from them if you ever want to discover for yourself which walls are made of stone and which ones are made of paper.
#2: Don't Romanticize the Rule-Breakers
Being a rebel is all fun and games until they hang you from your neck in the middle of the town square. Often, it's a better strategy to be seen following the rules, even if on the inside you know they're just paper walls. Why create unnecessary opposition to yourself? Outwardly observe the rules, and move in silence.
Some people break all the rules because they hate being confined by any rules, no matter how sensible and necessary. These people just go around making a big show of how they're different and "special," with no consideration of how they're being perceived by others.
Again, you want to be seen following the rules (usually), and seen fitting in, so your movements are less obvious and your strategies can run in the background unopposed. Don't call unnecessary attention to yourself.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:
You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.
Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...
#1: "Why would you ever take advice from someone who doesn't have the life you want?"
#2: "What incentives are in place that result in people giving you bad business advice, and about success in general? Why do they believe things that are so clearly wrong?"
#3: "Were you ever told that it was wrong or morally questionable to pursue wealth? Who implanted that idea in your mind?"
#4: "How many of your current goals and dreams are actually yours, and how many of them were simply placed there by others?"
#5: "What is one thing you've always thought of as a disadvantage that you could actually turn into an unfair advantage of your own?"
#6: “What if everything you’ve been told about speed has come from slow people? And is wrong?”
#7: "What 3-5 things can you do in your business (or stop doing) that will fuel your forward momentum and help you reach escape velocity?"
#8: "What are 3-5 untapped forms of leverage - like Other People's Money (OPM), Other People's Resources (OPR), etc. - you can cultivate that will help you achieve your business objectives even faster?"
#9: "Where has your former conditioning come from? How have you been able to recognize it, and what are you doing now to prevent yourself from succumbing to "average thinking" in the future?"
#10: "What's your deepest belief that you've never thought to question?"
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Observe the Masses
Look around you. Most people simply aren't thriving. A quick glance at the mass of people within your society and you'll see that they're in worse shape than they want to be (physically, financially, mentally), they're less happy than they want to be; they have fewer friends than they want to have; more problems, more worries, more emergencies and distractions.
They are miserable, complaining, excuse-making, pessimistic shells of their true selves, and you will become like them if you don't make a sincere, concerted effort to avoid a similar fate. And it is an avoidable fate, by the way. You're not destined to be like them. You can change. You can change right now.
Simply observe what you don't want - the characteristics and circumstances you don't wish to reflect the conditions of your life - and find models for what you do want. Find the people who are thriving, and determine to be more like them in any and every way that's important to you.
Now's the time and place to point out that you and I are not somehow "better" than those unfortunate people we observed in the first paragraph here. We are no better and no worse. We and they simply are.
Every single human being on this planet possesses infinite worth, dignity, and human value simply by virtue of the fact that they are human. We are more like them than we are different. But that doesn't mean we have to live like them!
So you really do have to keep two (seemingly) conflicting thoughts in your head at the exact same time: most people don't have the life you want, and if you allow yourself to slip into apathy and despair like they have, you will be desperately unhappy for the rest of your life. And also, you are no "better" than they are.
You're just choosing to make different, more life-affirming choices, and by so doing, opportunities will become available to you to achieve success and fulfillment that the great masses of humanity would never be able to dream of in their common hours.
#2: Cultivate Radical Self-Awareness
Nothing that you learn about yourself could ever be a bad thing. No matter what it is, at least you'll know, you'll gain valuable self-knowledge and self-awareness, and no matter what's revealed to you, those qualities are everything in life.
So hold nothing back. Hold everything about yourself up to the light, and make a faithful commitment to radical transparency as it concerns yourself, who you are, what motivates you, and what you're capable of and interested in doing. Your limitations, what holds you back, your weaknesses...inspect it all, fearlessly. As James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
It's about boldly committing to the kind of self-awareness and inner searching that most people are simply too afraid and weak and lazy to do. There, I said it. Just don't be weak and lazy! Commit yourself, fully and totally. You will find things out about yourself that will astonish you, that will teach you more than any four-year degree, any course, any "program." It's all within.
There are many ways to pursue self-knowledge, of course, including, paradoxically, through engaging with the external world and witnessing your reactions and subsequent evolution! Solitude also works. Reading books. Therapy. These and more are all pathways to vital self-knowledge.
But one thing is more important than virtually anything else: the one thing you must never, ever, EVER do is lie to yourself. To thine own self be true, and trust that whatever truths you uncover during this process will always lead eventually to your benefit.
#3: Test and Track Everything, Relentlessly
Alright, switching gears here, back towards achieving business success, which is the point of this book after all! And speaking of uncovering truths about yourself, tracking your progress, your experiments, your results - everything - will put you so far ahead of your competition that isn't doing these things...it's not even fair.
You'll never know what's working if you don't have a record of what you've tried, and tracking your activities and results will help you stick to your strategy as well. One of the first things I get all my personal coaching clients to do is start tracking everything. It's the foundation of most of their future success - and yours.
What, specifically, you end up tracking is always going to depend on your goals and what you're seeking to improve. In a business context, you're going to want to track key metrics like LTV (Lifetime Customer Value), Revenue, Expenses, CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), and many, many more. If you're looking to grow your YouTube channel, you'll want to look at your CTR (Click-Through Rate), AVD (Average View Duration), etc. And if you simply want to get into better shape, you'll want to track your sleep, calories in/out, your workouts, and things of that nature.
But the thread running through all these different examples is that you have to know what you're doing currently, if you want to find out what's working, and once you find something that's working, double down on it.
If, for example, you notice that Instagram is bringing in the majority of your most profitable customers, you'll want to put more time, money, and effort into maximizing your Instagram presence. But if you didn't track where your customers were coming from in the first place, how much you're spending to attract and acquire them, etc., then you'd never have the information required to make these kinds of intelligent, data-driven decisions.
You should also be tracking your inputs, and establishing a baseline for the kind and quality of effort you're putting into various endeavors. For example, something I've spoken about and taught many times is the Rule of 100, which requires that you do 100 primary actions each day to move you towards your goal. Whether that's 100 phone calls, 100 cold emails, 100 social media comments, etc.
The end result of all this testing and experimentation is that you'll be able to confirm that what you're doing is working (or not), and you'll be able to take your success out of the hands of fortune and back into your own. Complete your primary actions enough times so that you remove all doubt that you will be successful (next Action Step), and gain the necessary insight to be able to formulate a better strategy for next time.
#4: Stack the Probabilities in Your Favor
Dan Kennedy's book will help bring to light the many ways that we get in our own way, and it'll help you realize that the way "things are done" isn't necessarily the way that you need to do them. In fact, "business as usual" is usually synonymous with stagnation, if not downright poverty.
Again, most people are poorer than they want to be, and they've reached that sorry state because they've faithfully lapped up advice and opinions from people who've never even achieved success in the first place.
Instead, what you need to do is start finding things that work, and then double down on those things. Find your native advantages, develop others, and secure assistance from other people and add that weight to your side of the scale too. Basically, what you want to do is stack up every single advantage you can, and take ruthless advantage of those advantages until they stop working.
You start stacking the probabilities in your favor by eliminating negative, fruitless behaviors, and adopting as many positive, success-oriented, money-getting behaviors as you possibly can. You embark on a sincere search for the best way to win, the highest-leverage actions you can take to become successful, and then you relentlessly hammer away at those things until you do win.
Perhaps most importantly, you can't stop doing things once they start working, either! If a particular traffic channel, say, YouTube, has been insanely profitable for you, don't all of a sudden turn around and coast on YouTube while starting at zero with Facebook ads or partnerships. YouTube was working! You were doing great! You were winning! Why would you just throw that away and chase after the next shiny object? It makes zero sense!
Once something starts working, you double down on it. You get damn good at it, and you leverage it for all it's worth. If your YouTube channel is starting to gain traction, you can stack the probabilities in your favor by hiring advanced video editors, paying top-notch designers to create epic thumbnails, maybe employ a scriptwriter to take your message to the next level...you have plenty of ways forward there. Take acting classes! Anything you can do to improve.
After every little bit of success you experience, you also have to ask yourself, Why did that work? What did we do right? What should we keep doing? Then do more of that! More of what's already working! This is the way.
There's virtually no limit to the advantages you can give yourself and the ways in which you can level up. Whether that's investing in books, courses, and mentors for yourself, expanding your team, increasing your ad spend, etc. Every single thing you can do will give you an advantage over your competition.
A final, enlightening question you can ask yourself is this: If you had to live your life over again 1,000 times, and could only do the same things you're doing now, would you be happy and successful in at least 999 of them?
#5: Trigger "THE PHENOMENON"
We touched on this earlier in the Key Ideas above, but THE PHENOMENON is Dan's word for the massive, meteoric, mysterious momentum that he's been able to ride at several different points during his career. THE PHENOMENON isn't really something you can "control" per se, but it's very hard to stop once it starts happening. It's the golden wave that you want to catch and hold onto for dear life.
As it happens, I'm living through this period now, at the time of this writing. I'm now experiencing THE PHENOMENON in my own life, and it's manifesting as a seemingly never-ending stream of epic opportunities and chances for profit and growth. After going through something of a "dark night of the soul" last year, everything's finally coming together, and my one task right now is to ride this current momentum right to the finish line.
The point is that you can't always control when THE PHENOMENON shows up, but you always have to be ready for it, and there are also things you can do to make it more likely that it does show. Stacking the probabilities in your favor is one of those things, for sure. Create the conditions for THE PHENOMENON to appear and begin acting in your life, and you make it more likely to appear.
Part of this means capturing and relentlessly executing on every single opportunity that comes your way, until your calendar is completely full and you can't possibly expend one additional muscle fiber in service of creating your success.
If you have a prospect that says "Maybe call me back next month," you damn well call them back on the first of the month. If you got decent results with your latest Google Ads campaign and you have a spare $100 kicking around, invest it into running more Google Ads to grow your business. You can handle posting 3 times per day on Instagram instead of just 2? An extra YouTube video on Wednesday instead of just Monday and Friday? You damn well do it. Everything you possibly can. Whatever it takes. Always. All the time. Relentlessly. Until you make it happen. Until you reach escape velocity.
In celestial mechanics, escape velocity or escape speed is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape from contact with or orbit of a primary body - in the case of a rocket, this would mean the earth. It's the momentum required to take off, smash through the gravitational resistance, and maintain propulsion toward the objective. THE PHENOMENON shows up when you reach escape velocity in your work. It graces your life when you've done everything possible to set yourself up for victory. And if you want to make your entrepreneurial vision a reality, you'd better do whatever it takes to be there when that rocket ship takes off.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
Dan S. Kennedy is the provocative, truth-telling author of seven popular No B.S. books, thirteen business books total; a serial, successful, multi-millionaire entrepreneur; trusted marketing advisor, consultant and coach to hundreds of private entrepreneurial clients running businesses from $1-million to $1-billion in size; and he influences well over 1-million independent business owners annually through his newsletters, tele-coaching programs, local Chapters and Kennedy Study Groups meeting in over 100 cities, and a network of top niched consultants in nearly 150 different business and industry categories and professions.
As a speaker Dan, has repeatedly appeared with four former U.S. Presidents; business celebrities like Donald Trump and Gene Simmons (KISS, Family Jewels on A&E); legendary entrepreneurs including Jim McCann (1-800-Flowers), Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields Cookies), and Nido Qubein (Great Harvest Bread Co.); famous business speakers including Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Tom Hopkins, and Tony Robbins and countless sports and Hollywood celebrities. Dan has addressed audiences as large as 35,000, and for more than ten consecutive years, he averaged speaking to more than 250,000 people per year.
Dan lives in Ohio and in northern Virginia, with his wife, Carla, and their Million Dollar Dog. He owns, races and drives professionally in about 100 harness races a year at Northfield Park near Cleveland, Ohio.
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