Joe Polish:                   Hello everyone it’s Joe Polish.

Dan Sullivan:               And this is Dan Sullivan.

Joe Polish:                   And here we are 10xTalk and we just got done with a wonderful genius network 25k meeting and Dan you’re back in… where you at right now? Your in Toronto or Chicago right now?

Dan Sullivan:               No, I’m in Toronto yeah, I came back Fahrenheit there was like 65 degree difference leaving Phoenix and getting back to Toronto so you know its always bracing living in a four season climate and we just had a wonderfully bracing winter in Toronto, so anyway but I love it and I love the change, change of all kinds, climate’s one of them or as I should say weather…shouldn’t we talk about climate change?  You know, it’s weather change.

Joe Polish:                   Right that’s funny, so something happened before, during and after the 25k meeting and you are a very unique individual and I of course have said that for years, I mean, I think even the creation of 10xTalk is a byproduct of capturing the ideas, the philosophies, the strategy, the methods, the thinking of great thinking and how it’s applied in the way to help a person grow a company 10 times. So you showed up for Genius Network in you actually created 2 impact filters and and impact filter’s a tool that you use in strategic coach, you actually teach strategic coach clients multipliers how to actually use this tool to think and you created a couple of them, one of them had to do with things that you’re grateful for, for your participation in Genius Network and then another one, which we’re going to talk about on today’s episode which is creating 8 things to be grateful for, from my 2 days of Genius Network that you just came back from and from my perspective you’re literally laying out all of the things that you got out of the meeting…

Dan Sullivan:               Yes.

Joe Polish:                   That you’re grateful for that made it successful but there’s a big lesson in this for people listening of how Dan squeezes the most juice out of your experiences, I’ve always loved the saying “is the juice worth the squeeze” and you just know how to squeeze really well but you also know how to pick out things that are worth squeezing because you can’t manufacture value out of environments or  things or books, courses, trainings, events, meetings, where there is none but when there is value you just have a really unique and I think, very useful way of making sure you get value and that you also communicat it to, and my particular case here me, so I’d love to have you create some context about what we’re going to talk about and just go through it because I think it’s awesome.

Dan Sullivan:               Well this particular meeting was the 4th anniversary since I started a 25k and along the way I keep working to make each of the meetings more valuable and I just go back to the original thing that you said when I first walked in the room back 4 years ago and you said, ” look everybody in room here is paying me $25,000 dollars per year to be in this particular experience and I just want to tell you if you can’t turn at least one idea that you get there in the next year into $250,000 dollar return I don’t really want you back for a second year and you know I take that seriously because I run my own coaching program and I’m trying to get across to people that if you consider something a cost then you’ll be lucky to get your money back but if you consider something an investment then you can get a multiple, you can actually get an exponential back.

So first of all Joe, I think there’s just a mind set of not treating anything in your life as a cost but just treating it as an investment. Yeah, I mean, you can make bad investments and you want to get out of them as fast as you can but if you treat an experience like 25k, not that you’re paying $25,000 dollars but you’re investing time and you’re investing energy but most of all investing your intelligence. So what I came into this meeting with was a specific goal that I was gonna get 8 specific things out of it that we’re going to be able to be multiplied more than 10 times and so I sent you a thank you note, really about what had happen last Thursday and Friday, I mean we’re sitting here a couple days away from that and I just wanted to communicate to this and I knew we had this recording coming up, so I just wanted to make this one of the subjects of the current one that we’re actually doing right now and I’d like to talk to people through it because I’m a big promoter of 25k but lots of times it’s if you’re away from the meeting a month or two people will say, ” well what actually goes on in the meeting and what do you get out of it? ” it’s a little harder to say but since I’m so close and I had a specific strategy there, I’d like to just spend about 15 or 20 minutes just going through point by point of my 8 takeaways to actually express the value that I see out of this and perhaps to role model how other people could approach 25k, but approach almost anything that they do in life.

Joe Polish:                   Yeah and that’s the thinking I want to really capture here too because I learned so much, I mean when I saw you do this, when I got this it made me think, ” Wow, I mean, think about all the applications in different areas of my life that this sort of thinking can be applied to so that I could really go into everything, every experience and have a much different, much deeper, more valuable experience and a much greater awareness of what to pull out of it and where to place my energies because it’s just how much do you actually get out of something has everything to do with where your mind is at and you made that statement to me before we started recording, you know, your eyes only see and your ears only hear what they’re looking for.

Dan Sullivan:               What your brain is looking for.

Joe Polish:                   Yeah.

Dan Sullivan:               You’ve got to tell your brain upfront what to look for, any experience that you go into, your brain will look for anything, it doesn’t really care it just wants to be busy with something so you better tell your brain what you want it to be busy about, you know? there’s an old saying that nobody ever got seduced who wasn’t looking for sex. People say I was seduced, you weren’t seduced you were actually looking for it. Nobody gets seduced if their brain didn’t already set up the possibility.

Joe Polish:                   That is funny.

Dan Sullivan:               No, it is, I mean poeple are always saying, well this happened to me and I say, ” Well why’d you write the program that way, I mean, we just set up the program to have that bad thing happen to you.

Joe Polish:                   Right, right.

Dan Sullivan:               So I just try to program my brain to have only good thing happen to me, and one of the things is the impact filter is this tool from Strategic Coach that we use, it kind of tells you, this are my check off points, by the time I’m finished on Friday night in Phoenix at the end of 2 days of 25k I’m going to have 8 boxes filled in here and then during the course of the 2 days I actually had about 15 candidates that I could have written down and this were the finalist and I mean, they’re terrific so I’d just like to go through 1 of them Joe. First of all you had a real champion there and that was Parris, he’s got…

Joe Polish:                   Lampropoulos, he’s got the craziest name.

Dan Sullivan:               Lampropoulos, yeah. Parris, who’s both in Strategic Coach. In your experience Joe, I know you’ve had some phenomenal writers in your network of great marketers but Parris is right there at the top, isn’t he?

Joe Polish:                   Yeah, yeah , totally. He’s one of the greatest copywriters in the world, he’s written campaigns and promotions that have brought, I’m sure, in the billions of dollars range and he’s just a really smart guy who has spent most of his adult life understanding how to enter a conversation that’s existing in the person’s mind that he’s writing to and he’s a student of marketing, of words, of copy, of psychology and knowing how to apply it with persuasive, compelling language.

Dan Sullivan:               Well the first one that I was really grateful for, it was a conversation between Parris and Richard Rossi, you know who’s a great friend of ours and he has this great new company call FutureDocs where he introduces young people to career either as a physician or a medical scientist and Richard is just an amazing direct mail marketer but the idea was that if you’re going to start a business initiative, so we got a lot of people out there who are involved in business initiatives Joe and what Richard said, ” before you do anything write a great sales letter on what the value creation proposition is for someone who’s actually going to use the services or the products of the business and don’t do anything else until you got a great sales letter ” and I said, ” what an amazing simple way to think about business development is that you show it to people and they said this is just an amazing sales letter, I would buy this and then you form your company to fulfill the promise of the letter ” and I just said that is so amazing you know? Because often times poeple create everything before they get around to say well how are you going to sell this?

We only have 1 company but we introduce new projects and we introduce new programs inside strategic coach so I said, you know, ” before we do anything, we’re going to write the sales letter for the new initiative ” so with each one of these I said, ” what’s the potential value of this one idea? ” and I put down a million dollars plus, that starting right now in 2014 and going forward into the future in strategic coach that before we do anything we always write the sales letter first, I said that’ll be worth a million dollar to us and that would be on a fairly short period of time because we bring in some big numbers inside our programs.

Joe Polish:                   Right and the other thing too is not only is the smartest way to start anything because it gets you completely in tune with not only what it is you’re selling and why someone should buy it, could buy it, would buy it, but it also can save you an enormous amount of unnecessary spinning of the wheels and attempting to go down a path offering something that nobody is going to buy and if you put your focus and emphasis on the sales letter which could also be a video, which could also be an audio, you know, it doesn’t always need to be paper and ink but it’s really words, it’s the message.

I believe it really should start in print, handwritten or typed, I mean even handwritten which is a whole other issue that I know you’re going to speak to. But when you do that you really get out of your own head and your own ego thinking about what you sow and you have to start thinking about what’s in it for the person that’s going to buy it and if you understand the mindset of the person that you’re actually selling something to and you can weave that into your initial sales letter and someone, if someone’s never written before and they’re brand new to marketing and they don’t feel like they can write, writing to sale vs writing to teach are 2 different types of writing styles and you said this many times Dan, that your number 1 job as an entrepreneurs in the beginning is to go out and get checks, I mean you have to sell, everybody needs to do this, has to do it if they’re ever going to have a successful company so you have a great advantage being the founder of a particular company or being a believer of an idea where you’re building company around it, which is nobody knows and understand what it is you’re selling at the level that you do and even if they do understand it, your commitment to it because you started a company built around, it’s huge so a lot of people don’t even give themselves credit and they think they can’t write something, it’s like, ” well it’s your company, you started it, it’s your blood sweat and tears that you put into, sit down and put that on paper, write down why it matters? who cares? why should someone care? And if you get that down first, I’ve seen people…

Let me just make this point then I’ll let you continue on with the other points, there’s a famous, old school copywriter marketer by the name of Ted Nicholas I interviewed him years ago and he had sold over 200 million dollars worth of information products and I remember when I was talking with Ted he said that he would spend some times 10 to 20 times the amount of time writing a one page ad for 200 and 300 page manual that he had written that he spent writing the 200 to 300 page manual, because he needed to get the sales promotion right and he also had another rule in his company were if some was to bring him and idea he said, ” don’t bring me an idea, bring me an ad because if you’re going to try to sell me on an idea write the promotion for it because if you can’t convince me that we should implement or start this new thing and you can’t write an ad that convinces me then what are likely to that we’re going to be able to sale the idea to someone else but if you actually write the promotion first and you bring it to me and it sells me on it then we may have already simultaneously created what we’re going to need to sell it to other people ” and I just thought it was a great idea ” don’t bring me ideas, bring me promotions ” and you do the same thing with your tools, impact filters with strategy circles, you already do this and you train and coach how to do this.

Dan Sullivan:               I mean each impact filter could very easily become a sales letter, in the last year I did 368 impact filters on anything I wanted done in the company but just along the lines because you brought it up, how do you become a good writer? And this was one of Parris’s ideas and he said, ” If you come across apiece of copy that you think it’s just really really great, get that piece of copy, put it on the table in front of you get out of sheet of paper and with your pen word by word go through and actually, in your handwriting, copy out what’s great ” and he said, ” if you have a really great ad and you write it out 10 times and let’s say you do it once a day for 10 days ” he said, ” at the end of 10 days you’re writing ability will have improved immensely because your brain really really takes seriously what you write there’s a real power in connection between your writing hand and your brain which is proven neurologically there’s a lot of proof about the immense importance of writing, not with a keyboard but with your hand. So I immediately and I said, well who is the greatest copywriter I’ve ever met? And I said, well it was William Shakespeare.

I think Shakespeare is the smartest human being who ever existed, he wrote this 400 years ago and every idea is as cleared today as it was back then and what’s amazing about him, he tends to use just one syllable words if you get 20 Shakespeare words 15 of them will just be one syllable, he doesn’t use big words and so there’s a very famous speech out of Shakespeare from the play Henry the Fifth, it’s call the St Crispin’s day speech and that’s the King exhorting his troops to fight a really great battle which they won but its very short, really you can write it on one page and I just started writing at night and writing after 3 days now and I’m just amazed that when I sit down to write something how simpler my speech has become, I’ve just decided, you know, for as long as I can into the future everyday I’m going to take a piece of Shakespeare, and I’m going to write it out by hand and just watch the impact that it has on my brain and since I’m one of the main writer gel in the company, you know that I can really, something I believe in I can really write a great sales letter for you or for Peter or for other people so I just wanna have the genius of William Shakespeare kind of taking over my writing, my writing style, but it’s not just his writing style, it’s actually his way of thinking his way through a sale because virtually everything Shakespeare’s doing is he’s selling something and you can really see the sale, so that is easily a million dollar idea.

So, here I am, I paid $25,000 to be in your workshop and already, this happened in the first morning, this happen like in the first 2 hours and I said, ” bingo, bingo ” I got two of them and I’m just sitting there and I’m just… I got a cash register and I said, ” there’s a million, there’s a million ” and that’s just how I approach it, the $25,000 is just the token of membership, it doesn’t mean anything, the value is so great and here again is that I’m bringing a certain attitude to the experience.

Joe Polish:                   Right, right. You are and I love that; you’re bringing a certain attitude to the experience and when someone can sit in the same room and experience something completely different, is it because of what’s being shared or is it because of their listening or is it because of their attitude, I mean it’s probably a combination of things but the attitude has everything to do with it. So yeah, continue on.

Dan Sullivan:               The end of the next one and this is Joel Weldon who is the such a treat, just for those who are listening. Joel brought in an impact coach and Joel is 72 years old, lives in the Phoenix area, has been associated with main platform speaking for half a century and this man probably had more impact on my thinking about how I present myself in public than anyone else in 40 years and I sent him a note, I actually told him, I said, ” Joel I have to tell you just what I’ve learned from the last 2 days is greater in terms of my thinking than anything I’ve experienced in the last 40 years and in about 15 minutes he came up and he had all written out and he says, ” is that what you said? ” and I said, ” Yes it is what I said ” and he said, “can I use it? ” and I said ” absolutely you can use it ” but he just talked a little bit about some of his philosophy of life and one of them, that when he engages anyone like a contractor, anybody who’s going to do something for him at a certain point there going to name their price and the Joel’s respond is, ” I won’t pay it ” and the personal is a little bit taken back and says, ” You won’t pay? ” and he says, ” No unless you charge me 10 percent more ” and you know, it leads to a conversation and the person says, ” well why should I charge you 10 percent more? ”  he says ” because then you’ll own it ” and he says ” if you just do it for your price you might bump me for somebody else in front of the line but if I pay a 10 percent more, you’ll really own the project ” and he says that whenever he does this and he does it consistently, he always says that the person knocks himself out and part of the reason, I think, isn’t so much for the 10 percent extra money it’s just the recognition, you’re send a message right up front, ” look I’m willing to pay more than your asking price but I’m not paying for any greater skill, I’m just paying for greater dedication and greater seriousness about what you’re going to do ” and he says it works like a charm and I said, ” boy how many people out have hired somebody and then it took 3 times longer than it was supposed to take and there were always delays because they were competing with everybody else in this person’s life, were as if you say upfront, ” look I’m going to pay you 10 percent more ” immediately you go to the front of the line and I’m just thinking about the natural tendencies, that was funny when I talked to Joel because  I signed up for his coaching program and I think it’s going to be one of the best investment that I make and you name the price and I said, ” actually I want to give you twice as much because I’ve already got that much value just from talking to you ” and he said, ” No, no, no, no, no, it’s the price ” and I said, ” Joel you’ve got to be consistent here ”

Joe Polish:                   That is funny as hell.

Dan Sullivan:               Yeah, well it is. I mean, and I would’ve, I mean I got more than his asking price just from interacting for 2 days but, I just found it really funny and maybe I should just said ” I’ll give you 10 percent more or maybe is doesn’t.

Joe Polish:                   Right maybe he wouldn’t have been so freaked out.

Dan Sullivan:               Maybe doubled doesn’t work for his system, but just think about Joel, your involved in a big construction project, I’m involved in a really big construction project, there’s probably going to be about 10 or 15 opportunities to do this and I’m just really thinking about it in terms of adapting this as a policy of saying whatever you’re asking price is I’m going to pay you 10 percent more but I want you to pour yourself into this with total dedication.

Joe Polish:                   Yeah and it goes back to what you say Dan, about don’t treat anything as a cause but as an investment and until you can flip that switch in your mind, people would have a hard time because all they’re going to see is they’re going to spend 10 percent more vs they’re going to get a much greater investment because of the way that you expressed it here on the impact fielder was the strategy you pay everyone who works for us 10 percent more than the asking price and you put in parenthesis 10 times greater quality.

Dan Sullivan:               Yeah.

Joe Polish:                   Ad its just your way of assuring and creating a mechanism where people just put more of themselves into it because when you appreciate people at a level greater than everything that their quote on quote prices is rewarding them financially for it is totally game changer but what happens is it’s not the money although that’s the mechanism that flips the switch, what happens all of a sudden the appreciation goes up, so the appreciation of relationship is far greater when you express that its just a greater way of saying, thank you in advance to ensure that people are going to treat it like their own.

Dan Sullivan:               Yeah and the interesting thing is, I go to a tailor that I’ve talk to you about a lot here in this city, a guy named in Harry Rosen who’s one of the great tailors in the world and I’ve been going for about 10 years and they have a record of all my purchases and one day it wasn’t Harry but it was one of the sales people there said, ” I just noticed something you never buy anything on sale here, we’ve got some great sales here ” and I said ” yes you do ” and they said, ” you can get 40 percent off on really top notch stuff ” and I said ” you know something? I wouldn’t feel good about wearing it and the reason I wouldn’t feel good about wearing it is that great craftsmanship went into this, great fabrics when into the this, this beautiful design, why shouldn’t I pay full price for this? ” and he said ” if all our customers were like you, we wouldn’t have to have any sales ” and I said ” yeah but I said I’d never discounted in my life, the only time my sales team came and asked me if I was going to discount, was during a downturn and I said to them no I won’t discount but I might double the price because I have a feeling there’s some people out there waiting to pay me twice as much as I’m charging right now ” So this whole pricing thing and quality is a very very interesting psychological game and it’s very much bound up in what we’ve been talking about throughout this entire series Joe about what is 10 times thinking. Well, the first thing is you just eliminate completely the whole concept of cost and I think that’s the doorway that gets you into 10 times thinking, if you’re thinking cost you’re never going to get anywhere near 10 times thinking…

Joe Polish:                   Yeah, yeah. That’s a great point, well that is the big lessons for a one of them for this episode.

Dan Sullivan:               You know I’m just going to finish off with another one of Parris’s straight lines and this has to do with copyrighting and he says, ” when you’re writing, write about actions, don’t write about abstractions ” and you know Joe, we’ve often  talked about the difference between the world of the entrepreneur in the marketplace and the world of the academic or the intellectual and the intellectuals write in abstraction and entrepreneurs, the really good entrepreneurs write in action and human beings really really related to actions they don’t really related to abstractions. So an abstraction is kind of like an idea and usually an abstraction is always expressed in a word that has 4 syllables and actions usually are not more than 1 syllable, 1 or 2 syllables. I just thought about it and I said, you know, watching Parris as he interacted during the 2 days and I said, ” Malcolm Gladwell has this great look it think it’s blink and he talks about the 10,000 hours that when you put in 10,000 hours at something you’re really great at you begin thinking very very simply and I said ” Parris you probably put in 30 or 40,000 hours ” but just think, write to actions, don’t write to abstractions. And I said, ” I’m writing a book right now ” and I went back and look at a whole section of copy that I had written. I had about 5 or 6 abstractions in there and I just got rid of them, I just found an action word and immediately the copy popped off the page, well again, that’s me as a writer. I have 5 writers who are in coach, in our company here, and I said, ” look, this is going to be a rule, just don’t talk about abstractions, just find and action way of expressing everything, I said ” what’s that worth from a sale standpoint? what’s that word from a coach stand point? If you projected over 10 years or 25 years of coach, what’s the value of that? ” and I said, ” Well that’s easily a million dollars ”

So I just went through this and the general principle here isn’t so much what my specific are but I think we had to talk about them just so people have an idea what I’m talking about but I think the big thing here is that 1. If your going into an experience, set out a strategy of 8 things or 5 things whatever the number is, that you want to get out of the experience so that you’re actually getting a return on investment, you’re not sitting there saying, ” was it worth the cost? ” shifting away of the anything that you pay for in life, stop thinking about it as a cost think about it as an investment and then when someone’s doing something for you if you add 10 percent you change totally, you transform the quality of the relationship just by doing that right up front, there’s so many wonderful lessons that came out for me and I was going to ask you a question just to finish off, you receive this this afternoon before we were going into the recording studio, what was it like for you to get the impact fielder? Were I said Joe this are the 8 things and I’m very grateful that I got them out of 25K.

Joe Polish:                   Well it was immediate gratitude since what you expressed was gratitude and when you give gratitude it’s like a boomerang, it comes back and I immediately saw how you interpreted and experienced my 25k meeting so I felt aknowledged, I felt edified, I felt awesome, I was like wow you not only expressed appreciation and what you get out of something and you know how important utilizing what it is that I offer is… to me it’s an important aspect of why I do what it is I do, I want people to use it and it gave me a whole criteria of what you’re getting out of it and you are what I would consider the ideal person that I want in 25k you know a person who takes it seriously, a person that utilizes it, a person that refers other people into my program, I mean you’re not just one of my closest relationships and friends, you’re my coach, getting this from you, I mean, it’s like golden. I almost have to pinch myself when I see stuff like this is like ” wow! you know Dan took the time to write this out, which is great for me but here’s what he’s getting out of it, simultaneously ” I was like, ” Wow! ” and it just makes me better and it allows me to see the value that 25k is providing and I think if all humans operated this way, anyone listening, if they did the same sort of thing with any sort of experience it would make the experience greater for them and I know one of the reasons you do this, it solidifies what it is that you do, I mean if there’s one thing by observing you that I’ve watched, part of the your ability to go back to my juice analogy, is that you actually take the time to recount you experience, to really slow down, see a lot of people think like ” you know, I’m going to run for book to book, seminar to seminar, meeting to meeting and I’m not even going to think about it before, I’m not going to think about it after and I mean, you approach life with a tremendous amount of thinking before you go into something, you go into it and because you did the thinking prior to it, you get a heck of a lot more out of it than most people and then you recount it afterwards, so you capture the action steps and you just know how to plow a field of experiences better than anyone I know and that is why I think so many people want the life that you live, you’ve got this great Four Seasons life because you’re so damn clear on how to set it up and you have all this conditions.

I think one of the biggest reasons people join strategic coach, stay in strategic coach is that they just admire a the way that you live but here you are as laying out the blueprint of what you do and how you do it, if someone reads between the lines here, which isn’t really all that sneaky, I mean your kind of laying out what you do and how you do it, so when I got it I just felt awesome, so much so that you know, we’re talking about it here on a episode and wanting to share this with other people people so that hopefully they can take the same thing, which is why I think on the next episode we should continue on with this because what I would like to say to everybody listening is, if you just take this episode be at the idea of starting every business initiative with a sales letter, writing by hand, great writing so that it integrates it into your thinking, paying someone 10 percent more, speaking in actions not in abstractions, if you just take those concepts and say, ” okay, how am I going to apply that? what am I going to do with this? ” and you stop for 2 or 3 minutes and jot down what are some actions? and some applications of this? Guess what? you know, this time you just spent listening to me and Dan will be incredibly valuable but if you just listen to this and off to the next thing, you’re going to get that out of it.

Dan Sullivan:               You know in all of these 10xTalk things we’re getting down to some currently fundamental concepts about… look, it’s your experience, you’re the only one responsible for it, you get a lot of it, if you live a long life, you get a lot of experience but is any of it of any value, and my feeling is that you can literally take any experience in your life, set it up properly and it can be almost like going to school, I mean, quite frankly I had school years in grade school where I got more out of your 2 days then I got out of 9 month of sitting in a classroom, but the differences is who’ve I become since I was 8 years old, I just realized that is not up to anyone else to make my life meaningful, it’s not up to anyone else to make my life interesting, it’s my deal and I have to learn certain skills and set up certain structures to have a life that really has purpose and meaning to it I did and these tools like impact fielders are some of the means by which I’ve trained myself and introduced the whole concept to other people so… It’s great talk and I think you know Joe, 1 of the things that would lend itself to another podcast here is maybe the reverse of this, what are the attitude that people have which are the reverse of what we’re talking about here, where people cut themselves off from actually getting value and that might be a very useful topic on a future recording.

Joe Polish:                   Yeah, I agree, love it.  So thank you Dan, and so for everyone listen to this, I want to do a shout out because I’m starting to get messages on Facebook and I’ve had a couple cards that have been sent into my office saying that you listen to every episode of 10xTalk that I do with Dan and we appreciate the people that have started with us from the very beginning, that are sharing this, there’s several people even from another parts of the world that listen to every episode and are sharing them on Facebook and different social media, so I want to just thank all those people and know that we really appreciate it, that’s one of the reasons were doing this and some of you we may never meet in person but the fact that we’re able to reach you and share this with you and help you and your businesses and your thinking makes both me and Dan feel great and so I want to thank you for that and give us your comments on 10xTalk.com and until the next episode have an awesome day, awesome week and we’ll talk to you next time. Thank you.

Dan Sullivan:               Thank you.