Donald Miller - How To Attract Others To Your Mission | The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

[Music] [Applause] what are the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time [Music] don to start the 10 characteristics of a value-driven professional this part really jumped out to me as i was preparing for our time together reading your latest book and i want to hit a few of those and ask you to expand on them if you're cool with it i'd love that so number one really impacted me especially when i selfishly at least thought about my career but then thought about anybody who may be listening that this is a great approach to your life to your career and that is when you ask the question how do most successful people see themselves you said they see themselves as an economic product on the open market meaning they want to be a good investment to attract further investment they are obsessed with getting people a strong return on the investment made in them and so that part i thought i like viewing your career in that manner and if so i feel like the the ability to make things happen and to get things done to provide value to other people that's going to go up so can you share more about successful people who see themselves as an economic product on the open market yeah you know in some ways it's a little bit offensive right to say that uh that there's a number floating above your head that you're worth 15 bucks an hour and this person over here is worth 30 and i literally have a buddy who's worth 10 000 an hour that's what he's paid for his consulting services and he's worth it because those people need very specific information about specific things that that really only he knows and maybe a few other people but but it also makes it sound like some people are worth a lot and some people are not and what i want to emphasize in the book is that it is true i mean if you have skill sets that where you can drop some potatoes into some grease for three minutes and pull them out on time you're worth about 12 bucks an hour on the open market the reality is though you can actually control the number floating above your head so if you're somebody who just knows how to drop french fries into greece you're worth x but if you can actually unite a team around a common mission you're worth twice that and if you could create a sales funnel you're worth three times that and if you can read a p l statement or understand how to keep overhead low uh while while you know increasing marketing and and sales budgets well now you're worth 100 bucks an hour so the the downside is on the open market there is actually a number floating above your head the upside is you get to control it and so the idea is only offensive when you can no longer control that number that somebody else is putting that number above your head and so what i wanted this book to do and it's just a 20 book i wanted it to help you control the number above your head i wanted to give leverage back to the people let me be really clear though there's not a number floating above your head or i hope there's not with your spouse with your kids with your friends with god at your church this is just an economic reality which is not what life is really about it's just a part of life but we all want to make more money we all want to be worth more we all want to walk into a company and uh and and you know and negotiate a higher salary and the only way to do that is to actually increase your skill sets and your skill sets do increase that number in fact there are people at my company who have learned so much that i've literally before we do our annual raises i've had to call them in three and four months before and give them a raise before i give them their raise because i see the number floating above their head go up and what that means is that number's floating above their head is going up somebody else could pick them off and i've got to compete so this is a great way to say look instead of you competing for a job why not make a job compete to get you right and the only way to do that is to make that number above your head go up so hopefully it's a it's a liberating idea rather than a burdensome idea i love it and and and you say in business your boss may really like you but in large part they see you as an economic investment and there's nothing wrong with that so how do we become ridiculously successful by making other people absurdly successful and if you think about your career and how you work with that mindset i feel like the the odds of you adding value to the lives of your boss your customers the people you work with dramatically will go up right oh it absolutely does people tend to invest more money in stocks that are doing well why because they get a great return they divest themselves with stocks that are not doing well so if you know how to make people money you will make lots of money and people ask me all the time don what's the secret you know we have a five-year-old company we're at 16 and a half million this year we have a 50 profit no debt no partners no equity that's a lot of money it's actually it's more like a 64 profit margin and you say what's the key to making that money well the key to me making 16.5 million is to make somebody else 160 million that's how you do it and there's really no way around it you're not taking money from people you're taking an investment from people and getting them more money in return so even when i do one day consulting which i don't do very often anymore but you know it i charge a lot of money for that day of consulting but i guarantee a 10x return on whatever they pay me now i'll only go to companies in which that 10x return can be made but i i tell them look we're going to talk in three six eight months if you haven't made a 10x return on what you paid me i'm gonna write you a check back really and absolutely i promise it wow and you know what i've never written a check back and the reason what do you charge for a day of consulting yeah i hate to say it's fifty thousand dollars they have to make why do you have to hate to say it man because it sounds so selfish right but but unless they make five hundred thousand dollars back i will give them their fifty thousand dollars back so that also determines which companies i'm working for right if they're making 25 or 30 million if they're launching a new product uh if they have a product that should be doing well but it's not i do my research and when they they pay me the money they make their money back usually within days because they were they were talking about their product wrong or they were structuring production wrong or they were doing something that they didn't know they were doing wrong and another company will come to me and say hey we got this great product we're doing extremely well with it i look at their messaging their messaging is great i look at their production their production is great and i say i can't help you i i might be able to help you make 100 000 more dollars but i can't keep my guarantee of a 10x return because you're already doing so well but the idea the principle behind that is if you learn how to make people money you will make money yourself even as a team member on a team if you're getting you know a hundred thousand dollar or seventy five thousand dollar paycheck you really want to try to figure out how you can make that company 750. now you said tom why would i make somebody 750 i only get 75. well they're paying for the building they're paying for health insurance they're paying for all sorts of other insurance they're paying for the product at the end of the day they're probably only making a 1x return on your paycheck so you've got to make them a lot more money in order to be worth more money but when you do that you find that you get raises you get promotions you basically understand how business works you say dom are you just saying that because you're the business owner well i have the same relationship with my customers my customers are my boss and if i don't make the money they drop me like a hot rock right they are not interested so i'm under the same pressure that we're all under the pressure gets taken off quite a bit when you know what you're doing and so that's why i wrote this book i wanted to teach people what they don't teach in college and that's how to actually grow a business when i i remember i recently recorded with jim collins don it was awesome and he walked me through what it's like when he works with businesses or with ceos and leaders and i like hearing his process for asking questions and i'm curious when somebody hires you and they pay you 50 grand in order to make 10x on that return what are some of the initial questions and or thoughts your framework that that that jumpstart the conversation for one day with don miller i i would love to go inside the room i know each situation is unique i know each company is different i knew each leader is different but you probably have some sort of framework or ideas you bring to that consulting engagement what are what how do they start i guess is my question yeah you know it does it takes one hour to really understand okay what's wrong and i ask a series of questions about how you make money that's really it tell me how you make money and uh they start diagramming the company now i have in my mind that the magic is i have in my mind a picture of what a company should look like and as they're describing their company i'm comparing the perfect company to their company and seeing the flaws and the way i do that is through the metaphor of an airplane and i teach that in the book uh a business really works like an airplane the cockpit is your leadership team the body of the airplane is your overhead that's your building your health insurance all those costs that you you have that are necessary in running a business the wings of the airplane are your products and your products need to be both in demand and profitable or they won't work and and the airplane wings need to be very large and very light and very strong the ride engine is your marketing the left engine is your sales and then the fuselage is your cash flow so you can have a perfectly designed airplane but if you don't have any cash it's going to crash you can have a really great design airplane but if your engines are too small it's not going to get off the ground if your wings are too small i.e your products are not profitable the airplane's going to crash so you and i could walk up to an airplane and see it and and the body of the airplane is really giant the wings are really tiny and it's got two little propellers of uh of engines and you would know intuitively do not get on that airplane that airplane is not going to fly well in about an hour you can figure that out with a business and you can say okay i see your problem the problem is you doubled down on a product three years ago because one big customer wanted it they ordered one unit of it and you realized really quickly that nobody else wants this so now you have wings that are too small you are running a a you're you're spending 50 000 a month with an advertising firm but you never clarified your message so what i see is a massive ad spend on that ride engine which is marketing but no thrust coming out of that ride engine so we're going to overhaul that ride engine your sales team is not appropriately compensated which is a fresh affecting the thrust of your sales engine or and this is the number one mistake you are really trying to look like a successful business without being a successful business so you got a really fancy office lots of great furniture uh and uh you can't afford it so you've got a giant belly of the airplane that's massive overhead and it's too heavy for the products and the marketing and the sales to lift another problem is your cockpit just doesn't know where it's going the leadership has does not have the the checklist to go down to understand what our mission is why it's important and why it would get a team invigorated and customers interested so we got to deal with your cockpit so it's going to be one of those areas the cockpit the overhead the wings the right and left engine or the fuselage those are the things that can go wrong in a business but you get those right and it flies far and it flies fast is there a difference between or i guess i should say what is the difference between let's say a service based business versus a business that has an actual physical product well there are lots in terms of overhead because you can have inventory especially if it's something like a restaurant inventory is actually always expiring and so that's why restaurant overhead is so big and profit margins are so small you know service industries you're dealing with with people and so in the service industry you want that cockpit to understand the mission of the organization be able to communicate that mission so that everybody is is uh is unified around that mission but honestly there's not that much of a change your management and execution system has to be just about the same uh your service industry is probably going to have a lot more people involved uh and and the the product industry may have less people so there are pros and cons on each side but the general basics of business of running that airplane are exactly the same don i want to talk a little bit about you uh personally in relation to one of the characteristics of being a value driven professional and that is um people who are value german professionals see themselves as a hero and not a victim and i want to share a little bit of background on that because everyone grows up differently everyone has different levels of privilege everyone has different challenges they're dealing with and i fully understand that and i fully understand the the luck that i have personally been born into with great parents and and great brothers that have supported me and loved me continually to this day in your case you grew up poor your dad left and never came back your mom had to work really long hours to keep you alive and so because of that i would imagine and i think you mentioned that you did do this you could have played the victim role the victim card basically for your life if you chose instead you chose something differently i'd love for you to share your mindset around being a victim versus being a hero and why that's so important for people to be a value driven professional well you know in stories there are really four major characters four major roles there's the victim the villain the hero and the guide those four roles exist in almost every story and and the reason they exist in stories is because they exist not just in life they exist in you they exist in me we have within us a victim a villain a hero and a god uh and we play those different roles the the key is to understand what happens in stories to each of those characters the victim is rescued by the hero uh they do not transform the story is not about them they do not get a reward the the role of the victim the job of the victim is to make the hero look good and the villain look bad that's it it's actually a bit part but sometimes in life we're tempted to play the victim because it does a couple things for us it uh it helps us out of the responsibility that is ours so if we're a victim we don't have to do our work we don't have to clean our room we don't have to file taxes we don't have to because we're a victim so it's a very tempting role to play because it gets you out of some responsibilities also playing the victim actually attracts a rescuer somebody to come in and do the work for you so you will find people who play the victim or they have learned victim mentality and you know i grew up really poor uh mom worked extremely hard but we still had to stand in line for government cheese she never made a living wage made terrible grades because i wasn't very i didn't apply myself and also just didn't have any help and life was chaotic at home you know i could have stayed that victim for a really long time and uh instead i i learned i i somehow got into an honors psychology class when i was in high school as a college level class i know how i did it i convinced the counseling office to let me get in even though my grades weren't good enough to get in and um i got a 99 in the class and i learned that i was actually intelligent i i really didn't until i was a senior in high school know that i had any sort of intelligence at all i thought i was dumb that's a learn victim mentality and when that happened i transformed i began the process of transforming it really took all my 20s to transform into more of a heroic mentality so a hero faces challenges they are focused uh they overcome uh hard obstacles they take action they take down a villain they fight for justice they fight to accomplish their goals my own identity in my 20s began to change from victim to hero and that began to change the trajectory of my life heroes are rewarded uh heroes are respected heroes accomplish things and have things because they've accomplished things that's what heroes do there's also a villain mentality and and villains and heroes are very similar heroes and villains both have a backstory of pain that's why you'll see in movies you'll see the villain with uh a limp or a scar on their face it's the writer's way of saying hey something painful happened heroes also have painful backstories they just choose to do different things with that pain the hero says i don't want this pain to happen to anybody else i'm going to go fight so it doesn't happen to anybody else and the villain says i'm going to seek vengeance and it we can fall into villain mentality somebody cut me off in a parking lot the other day or actually i cut somebody else off in a parking lot and they just dramatically threw up their hands and made a big deal out of it and i rolled down my window after they got out of the car and said oh man i'm i'm so sorry and he goes oh don't worry about it i go no i mean i'm sorry sorry that i really hurt you so badly can i find you a victim support group i mean i just laid into the guy and he was just out there was no question in my mind i was absolutely playing the villain at that point right the very calm calculated vengeful villain you know i drove away and of course i felt embarrassed and ashamed and what if that guy recognizes me and tells his friends and i was just you know but we fall into these emotional states sometimes where we we're tempted to play the victim the hero the villain and then the guide is the older sage character who's played the hero for so long they can now help other heroes win and of course as we get older you play that role on your show you help other heroes win that's your role on this on this podcast and that's why it's a popular podcast so those four roles are within us we play all four probably every single day uh you know if i don't eat if i skip lunch i'm definitely the victim at about two o'clock one to take a nap and saying another life is too hard you know just depends but that the reality is the more you play the hero the better life is going to go the more you play the victim the less you're going to grow as a human being the more you play the villain the more likely you are to end up in jail or or shot right i mean that's what we do with villains we take them down uh and if i would have kept that up in the parking lot for another week i'd probably be in jail right now right you got to stop that mentality uh the more you play the guide the more you'll be respected and adored so what i teach in the book is that these value-driven professionals and listen i spent time with presidents of the united states first ladies members of the judiciary members of the presidential cabinet nfl coaches i spent a lot of time with really successful people in order to come up with these 10 characteristics and one thing that they do not do is see themselves as a victim they just don't do it under any circumstances it's like a gear shift in a car you see yourself in a victim you're grinding to a halt you see yourself as a hero the car can actually take off that's what happens in our lives don i sense you you've you have a very high level of self-awareness and when i every single person listening right now can picture a victim that they know yeah that has a victim mentality the issue is the people who are those victims never think they are in their own mind right right they have low levels of self-awareness so i i don't really know the answer i guess that's why i'm asking you the sage wisdom-filled guide for me how what do we do about those people who may be friends or family members who have a victim mentality yet they're listening to this saying oh that's definitely not me i don't have that never i'm never a victim i never play that role what do you what do you think about that dynamic in life you know it's really hard to hear criticism and accept criticism it's hard for me it's hard for anybody else because our defense mechanisms believe that if we are criticized we will have less resources in order to survive so not being self-aware is in some ways a perverted survival mechanism what i found was that being self-aware actually helps you get a true assessment of who you are so that you can improve which is another survival mechanism so self-awareness and not being self-aware are two survival mechanisms one works and one doesn't one thing there's two things that really help me be more self-aware one is when i stop judging myself people who don't want to criticize themselves or change they are probably guilty of really judging themselves too harshly and so instead of saying don you're acting like a villain you don't ever do that again and you try to control yourself i say don you acted like a villain just be self-aware no judgment human beings do that no fault but let's be aware of that and when you when you're aware you find that you stop doing it especially with victim mentality uh i think when we go into ourselves saying you're being a victim and you're such a loser and you'll never amount to anything if you keep this up you wouldn't say that to another person and i don't think we should say those things to ourselves we just want to say hey you're doing that victim thing remember that costs you you have the choice to do it the freedom to do it if you want to do it but just remember it costs you and when you remove that judgment self-awareness becomes a lot easier and of course i try to take that judgment off of people that i work with too the other thing that really helped me and maybe somebody needs to hear this i remember a point in time where where the most evolution or transformation took place in my life moving from victim to hero i had learned as an overweight kid i had learned to play the victim especially in relationships especially in relationships with girls when i was dating i would almost attract girls by being sort of a victim and i would attract of course girls who wanted to be a rescuer and it would it always created the most chaotic relationship terrible chemistry it doesn't work and i finally looked in the mirror and said you know what i don't think women are attracted to victims i think they're attracted to strong capable competent men and uh as soon as i realized that i was no longer going to be rewarded by the opposite sex by playing the victim i stopped i mean it just stopped it in its tracks just you know that's as primitive as that is when i realized that it was one of the most helpful healthy realizations i've ever had and i ended up losing over almost 150 pounds i used to be over 150 pounds heavier than i am now and it's a whole mentality that you can get into of woe is me i'm helpless i can't do anything and uh you got to understand and i don't even know you in terms of listening to the listeners on this podcast there are thousands of people listening so we haven't met so this is i mean no personal judgment but let me tell you what your friends and family and maybe some people who are close to your thinking this is unattractive it's unattractive and you're not going to get what you want and the main reason it's unattractive is people get tired of carrying your load they have their own load to carry we're attracted to people who can come in and carry some of our suitcases we're not attracted to people who hand us their suitcases to carry along with our own so victim mentality i just want you to know you may be attracting a rescuer that's going to be a a really dysfunctional relationship uh you may be shirking your own responsibilities but there's there's a point at which it just is no longer attractive and if you want to be attractive play the hero not the victim okay there is one thing every successful person has in common this is in your study and that is they have a bias towards action they don't let ideas die on the vine they take action to make those ideas happen and i was don last night preparing for this talking with my wife miranda and i said this this quote is really jumping out at me it's it's simple yet when i started we we started literally naming people in our lives friends co-workers people that we've worked with in the past and said the people who are making it happen sustaining it over time are the ones don says has a bias towards action and i thought that is so true they may not be the most intelligent they may not have the best education they may not have gone to the best college and yet though they're the ones they're hustling they're working hard they're taking action and so you point this out and i'd love for you to share more about the importance and why more of us need to have a bias towards taking action well you know it came out of so many relationships so many friends so many people that i've met literally flying on their private jets and i've thought to myself i don't get it this person really isn't that intelligent they're not dumb by any stretch of imagination but they're just not college scholar professor level intelligence and that that's where i i you know i love those people i tend to i tend to surround myself with people who are great thinkers but what i found was the magic wasn't in the thinking it was in the doing that somehow this person figured out you know i can read a bunch of books about an idea or i can just go do something and going and doing something is what got them the private jet in fact it really changed my life in the sense that i i still study i'm still a nerd but i take a lot of action i mean when i have an idea i move let's go and i've been richly rewarded for that so you know i i i want to be careful because i don't want to be insulting but i think that taking action is a superpower that you can sit and you know if you sit in and talk to somebody like lance armstrong not the most intelligent guy in the world i mean i'll just use a public figure who's kind of screwed up in many many ways uh not intelligent i mean just really not self-aware not intelligent doesn't read a lot of books uh but the man takes action he gets stuff done and it led to a lot of success and a lot of other things that weren't so great uh you know that's a an example i can use but there are so many more of people who just you know while you're thinking about it they're doing it and you can sit and think about uh something all day but the guy is doing is going to beat you and so have a strong bias toward action let's you know at some point in my company we'll sit we'll talk about something for about 10 or 15 minutes and then i'll say okay what are we going to do are we doing this or not and i make the team go if we're if we're going to go we're not going to go uh and they say wait but you know something bad could happen we got to think it through you know what we're really great at dealing with problems on the run but we're going to run we're not going to sit here and calculate every problem that could possibly happen everything that could possibly go wrong we're going to go we're going to run we're smart people we'll figure it out on the go we're gonna we're gonna move and that's what's made a huge difference in my company one of the one of i think the ideas that uh as a as a brother to that is they are relentlessly optimistic and by staying optimistic you dramatically increase the chances that at some point you will succeed it's not necessarily the fact that they don't fail or that they don't mess up or they don't make mistakes it's the fact the difference in these types of people is their willingness to keep going to keep trying to keep taking action and they believe with their optimism and optimistic mindset that it will work out and so that that is the difference too between the ones who are not making it happen and the ones who are who are is that they have this willingness to to keep going in the midst of mistakes failure screw-ups whatever it may be yeah i would even say delusionally optimistic not just relentlessly delusionally optimistic people have a strategic advantage there was a study uh business insider reported on recently and they basically studied a group of people some were pessimists some were cynics and some were delusionally optimistic and what they found was that the cynics and the pessimistic people were much more accurate in what they in their assessment of what they could do and could not do they were actually accurate the delusionally optimistic people believed they could do things that they could not do but the difference is and they did this in the form of a puzzle the the cynic said i can't work this puzzle and they were right the delusionally optimistic people said i can do this puzzle and they were wrong so why do we want to be wrong well what they found was that the delusionally optimistic people were 70 percent more likely to finish the puzzle they just didn't do it in the amount of time that they thought they could do it and they thought they could do it in five minutes but they did it in five hours and there's something about a delusionally optimistic person that keeps forgetting their failures and they keep saying oh i didn't do it in five minutes let me give you another five minutes well give me another five minutes give me another five minutes where the pessimist says look it's impossible the delusionally optimistic person says so optimistic that they keep going so it's actually you're tricking yourself into doing a hard thing i've said to um i've just realized this and i'm 49 i'll be 50 uh this summer i've written eight eight or nine books now and i realized something just a month ago i realized you know what i keep tricking myself into thinking the next book is going to be easy i've done it now nine times i keep thinking you know i could probably write that in about three months well a year and a half later i wrap up the book and turn it in so if i were realistic and pessimistic even about writing books i would have never written a single one but because i'm delusionally optimistic about how easy this thing is going to be i trick myself into doing it and virtually rewarded for it so it's a bit of a a weird dynamic but it is true delusionally optimistic people tend to succeed is there is that a learned trait or is that something you're born with i i i i i don't know let's take it to you like what do you think is that something you had to learn did did you have a guide that helped you see like in my case i i did like that's how my you're describing my dad he is just overly optimistic about literally everything everything when it comes to just life hey every day is a holiday every meal is a banquet that type of mentality and so i grew up with it and so maybe i was born with it too i don't know but i'm curious what do you think about that can somebody listening now who is maybe more cynical and realist not doesn't have any like no delusion in their mindset what do you think well i think it can be learned because i spent my entire high school years thinking that the world was terrible and i was doomed to failure and it was you know and again weighed 150 more pounds than i do now and made terrible grades and girls weren't attracted to me and so on and so on so i think you can't switch but i would say the root of delusional optimism is that transformation from victim to hero once you that what cynics and pessimists what they're really saying is it can't happen for me you know it would be like winning the lottery and i would say no it's not like winning the lottery you control much much more of the percentages than you think and heroes tend to forget their failures pretty quickly or learn from them and move on where victims tend to live in them so i think you can learn it but i also think it's a rational series of thoughts when you say well look you know if if only 10 of the opportunities work out all i have to do is try 10 times and i'm guaranteed you know and but the cynics would say well 90 of time it doesn't work so let's not try and i'm sitting there going you're crazy if you do it 10 times you're guaranteed a success let's go right and you might even hit your success on the fourth try then you can start over with the next success and you know so to me it's just it it it just makes complete sense of life yeah um i i would imagine though i guess i'm i'm curious of people's motivations towards those who doubt them or maybe project their negativity on them how much of that has happened in your life and if so does that fuel you at all i don't know that it fuels me but maybe it does uh but you know when you grow up in the home that i grew up in and you grew up as poor as we did you grew up making as bad grades as i made and you're 150 pounds heavier you're twice the weight that you should be i remember sitting down during this transformation after this honors psychology class and writing down i lived in texas i wrote down that i wanted to live in oregon by the time i was 35 i wanted to be a millionaire and i wanted to be a new york times best-selling author now i made the mistake of telling a few people that and they looked at me like i was absolutely crazy like like i believed in magic well by the time i was 30 i lived in oregon i was a millionaire and i had a book on the new york times bestsellers list for about a year and uh i was a different person i was a completely different human being so i think there are people who you know i i i'm reading uh barack obama's book about life in the white house and one of the comments that he made that i sort of chuckled at was he said he's positive that he had many many friends who after he became president thought to themselves really that guy right and so you tend to think great successes uh happen to other people and when you know somebody and you've seen their quirks and you've seen them uh you know spill ketchup on their shirt you just don't think that person is gonna be able to succeed and uh i give people a lot of grace that uh you know moving on uh when i was a best-selling author i was an artist i mean i hung out in coffee shops i didn't even balance my checkbook and i a buddy of mine invited me on his private jet to a seattle seahawks game and then we went skiing up in montana and i'm sitting there looking at his private jet and i'm thinking you know i want one of these this is really nice i think i'll start a business you know if i would have said that out loud that guy would have said don you're an artist you're not a business guy give me a break anybody would have said that to me because they were exactly right i was an artist but the truth is business is not hard to learn and i learned it and i don't have a private jet i'll never have a private jet because i think they're a giant waste of money but uh i could if i wanted to and so that was unbelievable and now i'm starting a political advocacy group to help build the middle class and i want to lobby congress and i want to get behind an independent candidate who will uh help change the country instead of these democrats and republicans who i think waste our money and waste our time with a bunch of theatrics and people would say don an independent candidate can't get elected president and i would say well we'll see right we're going to do we're going to have fun trying we're going to be delusionally optimistic you know and 10 years from now let's talk again maybe something has happened where we've gotten somebody elected who who is not part of these political parties could that be you i don't think i i don't think i'm actually that interested i really like my life betsy's pregnant with our first kid uh i've been in the white house it's not it doesn't seem like a fun place to be uh and uh so i i don't think so i think there's there's plenty of other candidates but i would like to be a i would like to participate in helping change the country um another thing you write about is is having personal guiding principles and i i really dug into this section and i want to share yours and then talk more about why they are yours and what others could create for themselves because we're trying to be the guide here right um and your personal guiding principles you have three repeatable critical actions that is you get up early you write and you say after you that's right why are those your three critical actions and can you share a little bit more about the the background in each of those three yeah you know i have core values i have a mission statement and i have these critical actions and and the critical actions are really important they're all part of guiding the guiding principle package that i teach you in the book but one of them is critical actions and they are i get up early i write and i say after you what i was looking for were three things that i could do every day that would pretty much guarantee success three easy things so you're looking for the lead domino that makes a lot of other dominoes fall so you know yesterday i got up at 4am i got some meditation done and some reading done uh at six i called the president of my company we talked until about seven and at seven i was sitting outside of a coffee shop it opened at seven they know me i walked in the door with my laptop from seven to nine i worked so let's say that i get up at seven well by 10 30 i've got somebody calling me for a meeting i don't get any writing done that day if i don't get writing done i don't put a book on the best seller's life i don't put a book on the best sellers list i don't get leads if i don't get leads i can't convert them to customers so by getting up early every day i'm virtually guaranteeing that the way i've structured my life that i'm going to do really well financially and i'm going to be able to impact a lot of lives i write i've recognized that of all the things i do i speak i'm in meetings i make decisions i counsel others but it's the writing that is really the foundation of everything i do so i've got to write every day then the other one is i say after you and that sounds like a goofy one but literally like if you and i met at a door i would hopefully open the door and say after you and that's just my way of saying hey put other people first i'm i'm i'm not a selfish person i don't believe but i'm extremely goal oriented and i get tunnel vision and so i will not see others when i get so driven and it's just those words after you after you after you that wakes me up from that tunnel vision says hey don you're not the only one on the planet there are other people there's your wife there's the people that you work with there's your clients there's your good friends let's see these people and help them get where they need to go with a with a good chunk of our time rather than getting in my life and saying i would hate to go to my funeral and everybody say you know he was so goal-oriented and accomplished that just feels so empty doesn't it instead i want them to say you know what he helped me win over and over and over he helped me win he dropped what he was doing and he helped me win and so i've got a we've gotta act put that in action every day or they're not gonna say that about me and i won't and what what will happen is i'll get to the end of my life and it won't have felt very meaningful um i know i'm bounced around the book here because there's there's a ton here but one of i think story brand is when i where i first heard of you right and um the the the marketing aspects of it and how to do that and i encourage people to listen to the first time we talked which is more than four and a half years ago july of 2016. it's episode uh 142 for those and now we're well over 400 um and we talked a lot about story brand there but but i i do want to focus on telling your story because when i say you are i mean people in general because there are there are people listening down who are going for interviews who want to get who are trying to get promoted who own a business and are trying to do a better job of telling their story so there's a wide variety of people that i'm trying to help and i'm and and i also obviously this is my own curiosity conversation so i want to get better at doing this and you've written about the fact that you need to know how to attract people to your mission by telling your story and that one of the biggest mistakes we make in doing this is we just tell our boring bullet point history of our story how can those of us who tell our story that way stop making that mistake and get better at attracting others to our mission whether we're trying to get promoted or trying to hire a superstar to work with us or trying to get a great client how do we attract people to our mission by telling our story better well i'll give you a formula your history is just things that have happened in your past but don't be confused your history is not your story story is structured it's it's it's it's formulaic and in order to entice people into a story you need to use the formula so let me give you one a character that overcomes conflict in order to accomplish something important that's really it a character that overcomes conflict in order to accomplish something important so let's say that you're trying to grow your business or whatever you do you can invite people into a story using that formula so let's say you're at a cocktail party you meet two different people they do the same thing they're both at home you meet the first person and you say what do you do and they say well i'm an at-home chef and you might have questions you know what's your favorite thing to cook what are your favorite restaurants you ever cooked for anybody famous you know you're just making conversation you meet the next person and instead of telling you what they do they invite you into a story so you say what do you do and they say well you know how most families don't uh have time to eat together anymore and when they do they don't eat healthy i'm an at-home chef i come to your house i cook a meal so that you and your family can sit around the table look each other in the eye and connect and when you're done with that meal you don't feel guilty about what you fed them now who's going to get the business chef water chef too if they're the same chef the same quality the same price point chef who's getting all of the business and the reason is they invited the customer into a story in which they could overcome an obstacle and solve a problem to have a better life so let's say you're doing an interview and you're interviewing for a job and somebody says why should we hire you well you should say well in the job application and in our conversation here i've noticed that you guys are struggling with this problem i want you to know i love solving that problem and when i solved that problem for this company this happened and when i saw the problem for this company this happened when i saw a problem for this company this happened now if you hire me i'll work to solve the problem for you and if you do i think this will happen i'd love to hear from you you're going to get that job because the only reason you're in there is because they have a problem and what they're trying to figure out is can you solve it and none of the other applicants are going to sit there and so articulately say here's why we're having this conversation it's because you have a problem here's something i want you to know i'm really good at solving that problem and i can solve it for you then they're they're gonna go you're gonna walk out of the room and they're gonna go okay look we got one person who can solve a problem these other people are really nice let's let's get the problem solved they're gonna realize that's why we interviewed these people in the first place and you're the only one who actually has the confidence to say you can do it well and and remember what that applicant is focusing on they're focusing on what the employer cares about which is that's what that's which is they that most people in general uh again this is a conversation that that happens probably in most houses you know how do i look how does how do my how do these pants fit how is it well in all actuality people are more worried about how their pants fit not how your pants fit right it's the same thing with an employer if you're going to interview to be a leader or interview to be an entry-level person or whatever it may be for a company or let's say you're interviewing with someone who wants to hire you yes i guess they care some about your your your background and those are table stakes just probably to get into the room but what they most care about is how is this person going to help me when i when i work with managers who are working to get hired to get promoted and and the person they're going to promote i'm sorry report to as an svp level so they have a bunch of vps reporting to them i say how can you prove to that svp that you're going to make her or his life easier because that's exactly that person has so much they have so much to deal with and so many problems if you can prove to them that you're not going to be a problem in fact you're going to solve problems and make their life easier in this one division you'll probably get hired more so than other people and i think that's the mindset of be others focus be focused on them that that is how you earn whatever the job or the businesses that you want that's right the president of our company has a son he's in college he has no work experience but he got a hold of the material that's in this book business made simple and he went in to apply for a job he did and uh they just said to him look you're underqualified uh we'd love to talk to you in a few years after you out of college you get some experience and he said well you know i know i'm under qualified but my guess is i think i can bring skill sets to this job that maybe some of the people who are you think are qualified can't bring for instance i can help you clarify your message which is what we teach in the book i can help you clarify your message you guys are saying this but if you said it this way i think you'd make more money also i'm seeing gaps in your marketing sales funnel uh the other thing is i think your mission statement needs to be clarified i think you can get everybody in this room around and the the person interviewing literally said stop stop stop hold on where did you learn this stuff he said well i learned a business made simple he literally the interviewee the interviewer said can you hold on went and got their boss and brought their boss into the room they sat there for another two hours talking about all the stuff they needed to do at this company and they hired him on the spot they probably called you too yeah probably i hope so yeah because because because you're right what people are looking for is somebody to make their life easier somebody to help them realize what they're doing wrong so they can be more successful and if you're going in saying look i'm a really great person and uh you know i comb my hair every day and i brush my teeth and i show up on time no that stuff solves my problem what do you know how to do that will solve a problem if somebody asked me the other day they said don i've got an 18 year old and a 19 year old two sons what's one piece of advice that you can give them i said be known for solving a problem be known for solving a problem if you're known for solving a problem you will always be wanted and people will always pay you now the problem can change as you develop as a professional it can get more complex and people will pay you more to solve that problem but right out of the gate be known for solving a problem how did you i think people love that advice but they then they start thinking and when i say they i'm obviously projecting because i start thinking about myself how did you develop the problem that you were going to solve and then how did you solve it i mean that's there's two parts it's like wait what problem am i going to solve and then how can i solve it how did you come up with that because i think you've done a great job with this when it comes to story brand and helping people clarify their message right that's the problem that you solve how did you come up with it and then how did you find the formula or the answer to solve that problem well it all comes from story it all comes from understanding what engages the human brain and that's a problem that needs to be solved and once the problem is solved you roll the credits so a story is just a person with a problem that takes about 90 minutes to solve it that's all it is every movie you watch is a person with a series of problems that take about 90 minutes to solve maybe two hours right uh you know kevin is home alone he's got two burglars trying to get into the house he's got a problem and he's going to solve it with swinging cans of paint down the staircase and so on and so forth that's a movie and so when when you go into a an interview you're basically inviting them into a story i see that you can you have this problem it is unresolved let's resolve it every human being moves toward the resolution of a problem now figuring out what problem is that you solve uh is probably difficult for a different reason than everybody thinks the real the reality is you probably solve a lot of problems the problem is you need to choose one you can really only be known for one now you can solve a bunch of other problems while you're at it but you want to solve a really valuable problem so my book business made simple it's 60 days you pour yourself a cup of coffee you read each daily entry and you get a video in a drip campaign for about a 10 minute video and in 60 days you know more than anybody who just got an mba i guarantee you you're going to be able to make people money if you know how to do this what is the problem that i solve well it could be that you don't know how to grow a business that's a nice one but you know i recognize that college debt is a massive controversial problem and so i said you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna position my book to tackle an even bigger problem and therefore my book will be more attractive on the open market i can say you don't know how to grow a business but i can teach you how with this book or college has screwed you over you have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt or hundred or fifty thousand dollars that whatever you graduate from college with that debt you still don't know how to grow a business because you didn't learn how to grow a business so they taught you they gave you a certificate that will get you an interview but they did nothing to help you climb the ladder because you have that debt you can now not buy a house you cannot put a down payment on a house because you don't have the money that means it's not just costing you 50 000 in debt it's costing you the equity that you would accrue in that house over the next 10 years so now you're a hundred thousand dollars behind you finally get into that house and then you get hit with medical debt right medical coverage and all the stuff we have to pay for our medical bills then you cannot pass on wealth to your child so now the second generation that college debt is causing is people who didn't have their dad and their mom pay for their house and now they're they're triple in debt than they were three generations ago because that's what's happening by the way to the middle class what is one thing that we can do to solve that problem you can take everything that it costs to go to college put it in one book and charge 20 for it skip college which amazon is now no longer asking for bachelor's degrees made google is now longer no longer asking for bachelor's degrees because they see it they see this is the problem the problem is we're requiring people to go get into debt and ruin their lives and not learn anything in order to work here my book solves that problem and it costs twenty dollars i think we're on to something good don you write about the 10 core competencies that will immediately make or save the company money number six is something you're doing right now that i highly respect because it was my first ever job when i got done playing football after college and a little bit after college i got a job as an inside sales professional smile and dial 70 80 calls a day most the time they hang up or say no some days you would have a zero some weeks you'd have a zero but if you keep kept after it you could make something happen in your case you're not afraid to sell no um and selling is about introducing products to qualified leads and this is a way this is i think a core competency of anyone who's going to work in a business or anything we are all selling at all times to all people whether it's a product an idea a service sales is what makes the world work as my dad told me that the world would literally come to a grinding screeching halt if there weren't sales professionals everything in this room has been sold everything in your room has been sold you're selling right now can you talk more about why every person listening to this needs to become better at the profession of selling well let me tell you what happens when you're not good at selling what you're communicating is that you do not believe in your product you do not believe in yourself you do not believe your product can solve a problem and if you're working at a company and you're selling a product that you don't believe in leave go go do something you believe in and you know twice in this past two weeks uh delivery people have come here one was delivering an outdoor piece of furniture that my wife ordered the other was delivering a couch that we ordered we got off facebook marketplace and we had a company move the couch uh two different times two different guys four different guys came to our house and uh i helped them put the couch in told them where it goes and you know we struck up a conversation one had been in the military wanted dropped out of college i went and got my book and i said listen i didn't go i didn't go to college either they're looking at my house going you didn't go to college i go no i didn't go to college i learned what was in this book i'm going to give this book to you i want you to learn what is in this book if you learn what is in this book you can really grow a business if you're provided the right opportunity i gave the book to them when you when you are selling things that you believe so much in that you really just want to give them away you found the right thing to sell what what i tell my sales people is selling is simply the clear articulation of how you can solve somebody's problem that's it it is not convincing somebody to give me their money or tricking them into giving their money it's clearly articulating what you have created and the problem that it solves and then if people want to buy it they buy it if they don't want to buy it they don't want to buy it i really don't care what i care about is whether i clearly articulate the problem that it solves if you don't sell you do not believe you can solve problems you don't you don't or or you don't believe that the problem you solve is actually worth bothering somebody and let me tell you something if you don't believe that your idea is worth bothering somebody for you will work for somebody who thinks their idea is worth it guaranteed so get over it let's get out there and solve people's problems some of my favorite sales professionals i've worked with literally would say i i feel so strongly about this that i would be doing you a disservice to not bring this up to you i i thought and they they meant it to their core they made it i can tell you and i'll tell you i haven't felt that way about some of my books you know it's it's a spiritual memoir it's a great story i think it's well written it's kind of fun entertaining but i don't want to bother you about it right this book your kid's going to go 50 000 in debt i want you to just know about this stuff before they choose to do it before you choose to do this your family just read this maybe there's a way around it i agree it's a disservice not to tell somebody that's a big burden and i don't think you got to lift it love it don just just so people know i have um probably three and a half more pages of notes that we did not cover so sometimes oh they covered the book and there no we did we covered a fraction of of your book in this conversation yeah there we covered we covered uh some of 10 entries they're actually 60 right yeah yeah so there's there's a lot in there there's a lot in there so i just want to say thank you one for writing it and and for your team to to send it over so i could prepare for this i i love our conversations i've been a big follower of your work now since since since uh i started researching for our first conversation which was four and a half years ago so don brian i'm grateful i'm really really grateful i i hope i congrats on your success thank you i have a number of friends in nashville i just spoke with one a week ago i can't wait to get down there i'd love to let me know down betsy and i built a house and then we were building a big barn event space behind the house and building a guest house on a hill you get your own golf cart stay with us all right man i appreciate that and i'll take you up on that and uh the book again is called business made simple 60 days to master leadership sales marketing execution and more highly recommend people get it's really good like like like the things that don puts out so don thanks again man and certainly i i plan to continue our dialogue as we both progress man i love it thanks ryan all right thanks don bye now bye-bye uh awesome man thanks that was fun dude i i mean i literally we could go for three or four hours i know that's not what's not we're gonna do i'd love to to keep this role man because i i just love the way you're able to tell your story not surprisingly it brings each point to life and it's it makes it i think great for audio well thanks and i'm serious about that invitation let me know about a week in advance yeah and and if you write a book release a book we'd love to do a little book release gathering at the barn that's what we built it for yeah uh i again that's that's happening too my second one actually i'm working working on right now so definitely well good luck i hope it i hope it tricks you into finishing it it will i gotta get it done all right all right man thanks dawn see you later all right bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Ryan Hawk

Views: 2,548

Rating: 4.9384613 out of 5

Keywords: Leadership, Learning, The Learning Leader Show, Learning Leader, Business, Entrepreneur

Id: 0_8dCYCYegU

Length: 59min 27sec (3567 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021