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Should You Pay Attention?

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 23rd, 2011 7 Comments

Very Good News: You can finally, completely stop worrying about Al Gore’s global warming. We are all destined to die of something else instead.

A front page headline on USA TODAY read:

90% of the ocean’s edible species may be gone by 2048, study finds

Having North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc. isn’t enough. They have to devote half their front page to scaring us about the potential scarcity of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks forty-two years from now.

Since I will either be dead or eating mush, this matters little to me. For many of you, though, it’s permission to cease all worry about global warming. The lack of crab cakes will kill you first. Hooray!

It might interest the boneheads behind this survey and those reporting on it as fatalistic gospel at USA TODAY that I have, in my files, news reports of academic studies projecting the end of seafood by the year 1967…..the melting of the polar ice caps and drowning of us all by 1959…..and, well, you get the idea.

Scientists, psychics, cult leaders, politicians and ignorant, irresponsible journalists have frequently predicted the end of life as we know it – via over-population (a scare popular in the 60’s), under-population, starvation and famine, flood, asteroid attack, the earth veering from its axis, killer bees, or – the latest – mad cow disease, etc. – and they have all been wrong.

Eventually ONE will get to say “See, I Told You So.” But this is a charlatan’s game, and nothing more.

For some, it gets taxpayer monies to support all manner of silly research. For others, it sells books or newspapers.

It’s hard to tell Stanford’s much hyped ‘doom research’ from the plot of an old Star Trek episode. One is no more credible than the other.

Why should you pay attention to any of this? That’s the point – you shouldn’t. In fact, you should be pretty rigorous about NOT paying attention to anything that doesn’t advance you toward your goals, enhance your important skills, or inspire and motivate you to be your best self and achieve your greatest ambitions.

Unless it is your hobby, be that golf, football, gardening, or ulcer assured, politics.

All else ought be filtered out. Blocked. Ignored. Just because USA TODAY feels compelled to fill its front page with silly, decidedly unscientific drivel, with scary stuff about the future-without-fish, does NOT mean you must swallow it.

I even choose most of my pure entertainment with some purpose, to extract from it some useful ideas or content or examples, in addition to being amused or entertained. I don’t need distractions provided by silly soothsayers looking 40 to 400 years into the future.

I’m perfectly capable of manufacturing sufficient distractions of my own! Success requires FOCUS. You have to guard the gates of your mind. You have to ask: what will I gain by paying attention to this?

Are You Too Jaded?

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 16th, 2011 8 Comments

This is one I am writing for myself. You can read it if you want to, but it’s really for me. (I’m toying with starting to write all these for myself. I need a lot of counseling, so it seems like a clever and efficient way to use this time.)

Many moons ago – a phrase I find appropriate with frightening frequency – I took one year nearly off from business and made a living betting on horses . To bet horses at multiple tracks or at the big-handle New York tracks, you had to go there physically; this was before simulcast.

So, every Saturday and some weekdays I flew from Cleveland to New York in the morning, drove to Belmont or Aqueduct, bet the thoroughbreds there until I won $1,500.00, then immediately left – even if after just one race, flew home, and most nights got to Northfield in time to do the same thing there with harness races.

I did just fine, I made over $50,000.00 that year, and that was in the early 1970’s, and I was young. But it took all the fun out of it. Losses were of monumental importance because too many in a row would wipe out the bankroll, and it is impossible to make money gambling without money and the courage that comes with it.

The wins came devoid of joy or satisfaction because they were a necessity. It was a grind. Doing anything to make money – or doing anything else, for that matter – without frequent celebration makes Jack a very, very dull boy.

And I do not celebrate enough. Maybe you don’t, maybe you do, I don’t know. But I know it’s easy to start taking all your successes and achievements and victories for granted, as just what you do.

For me, making $100,000.00 delivering a speech or closing a $100,000.00 copywriting contract or contemplating taking or rejecting a proposed arrangement to conduct a coaching program for a client for $750,000.00 or seeing my book on a shelf or a bestseller list or giving somebody strategies and copy that brings in $500,000.00 from a zero start in 90 days – well, that’s just what I do.

The other night it briefly occurred to me this deserved some recognition and a toast. A few days before Bill reported on a new product promotion that topped $500,000.00. Same thing. Days later, I thought – gee, maybe that ought to be celebrated.

So, my advice is: don’t become too impressed with yourself, but don’t become too jaded either. Recognize the amazing nature of your progress and accomplishments. Celebrate your victories with whoever’s in your life that matters. Be more cognizant of others’ accomplishments and generous with recognition and praise. Celebrate good times, c’mon.

Practical Solutions

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 13th, 2011 3 Comments

For years I had a cartoon up in my office showing a bunch of guys struggling mightily to carry on their shoulders this huge wooden boat – full of wheels.

The entire time I was at the racetrack as a kid, everybody shoveled the manure from the stalls into big plastic tubs with handles, hoisted and carried them the length of the barn to the big manure wagons outside, then had to lift them up over the sides of the wagon to dump them – about 50 pounds to near shoulder height. Finally, today, they put ramps on the wagons and we use wheelbarrows. Well, why do practical solutions prove so elusive to so many?

No matter how smart you are, when whatever you do becomes routine, and you develop both ingrained belief systems and habits of thought and behavior about it, when you become emotionally invested in “your way”, when you do the same things in the same order the same way day after day, you develop SCOTOMA: essentially, inability to see anything but what you expect to see.

It’s why it’s so hard to proofread and spot typographical errors in your own work that you’ve labored over for hours or days; your eyes now see what’s supposed to be there; they actually see wrong as right!

It’s simplistic to say that working insulated in a business makes you stupid. I don’t think your I.Q. actually goes down. But your ability to apply it to the too-familiar situation does.

Are there cures? No. No cures. But effective treatments, yes. Like: not doing the same job or business or sport for more than a decade. Enough’s enough. Move on. Like: getting out of the business and day-to-day routine at least once a month, to go somewhere enlightening or inspiring or mentally challenging – like coaching/mastermind meetings. To bring in “fresh eyes” however you can, often. To read, a lot. To ask yourself a lot of questions. To catch yourself clinging to something just because it’s your way. To have somebody who can call you on your b.s., challenge your thinking, play devil’s advocate – with some credibility.

There’s a soothing balm too, and it doesn’t come in a jar either. It is simply remembering that we are ALL frequently Stooges

How Do You Say It Is IMPORTANT?

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 12th, 2011 1 Comment

From Larry The Cable Guy:

“I was more frustrated than a starving Ethiopian with no legs watching a doughnut roll down a hill.”

Yeah, it’s tasteless. But it is funny. And, more importantly, it creates a vivid mental picture. I don’t talk about this much, but I think a ‘secret’ to persuasion in print, especially in print where there are no voice inflections or gestures or body language – but in other venues as well – is the crafting and delivery of vivid mental pictures.

We just went back to print another 25,000 ‘Why Do I Always Have To Sit Next To the Farting Cat?’ books to fill orders – and we’ve sold over 200,000 of the things, in part, because they work for the marketers using them, but also in part because the title conjures up a vivid mental picture.

Fiction writers are better at this than most of us are, which is why I’ve always studied good, popular, successful fiction writers to improve my skill as a sales writer.

Comedy writers are good at this too. I’ve been a joke writer almost all my life – in fact, I wrote comedy for a disc jockey and his nationally syndicated comedy newsletter when I was 17, 18 and 19. I can take a bad or ordinary joke and enhance it a lot by building better mental pictures in it. If it’s one I intend using in a speech, I work on it in writing, get it right, then tell it that way to anybody a dozen times and then I’ve got it. I’ve been a serious student of this for 30 years, studying Benchley, Thurber, Parr, Berman, Newhart, Charlie Jarvis, Steve Allen, and on and on.

Anyway, language that creates vivid pictures is very powerful. It has lost its power of late, but for years President Bush has gotten much mileage by merely mentioning “9/11” because we instantly see the smoke pouring from the collapsing towers, the panicked people running in the streets, and the weary firefighters, faces caked with smoke and char, digging. A lot of mileage, too, out of “we fight the terrorists over there or we’ll fight them here, in our streets.” People see that when it’s said. And that’s the question: do people see something when you say what you say or write what you write?

Most people don’t invest much conscious thought into the words they use. They wing it. I never have. I’ve carefully developed and stored countless stories, anecdotes, parables and jokes, to be pulled out and used again and again. Every sales pro should have this, at least for his main sales presentations, products or services. Amateurs wing it. Pros do not.

The other day, a client visiting said, “ I don’t think much of anything you do is accidental.” He is correct.

What is Your Excuse?

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 9th, 2011 8 Comments

Debra LaFave, that infamous hot blonde school teacher who had sex with her 14 year old student had a “emotionally absent” father and a boring marriage.

Mel Gibson was drunk.

The Florida ex-Congressman who e-mailed sex-charged communiqués to under-age boys was (a) molested as a boy by a priest, (b) drunk, and (c) gay, and was rushed to rehab upon his outing.

Flip Wilson’s “The devil made me do it” has evolved from joke to strategy.

Unfortunately, nearly universal strategy. Everybody’s got an excuse, everybody heads off to rehab to begin their recovery. Nuts.

Let’s get something straight. There is a Grand Canyon sized difference between an ‘explanation’ and an (acceptable) ‘excuse’.

Hey, I used to booze and I did some really stupid things drunk – some I know about, some I’m afraid I don’t. Being drunk was certainly an explanation. But no excuse. Had I run over a kid driving drunk, there’d be no acceptable excuse.

Everybody’s up to their eyeballs in explanations they want accepted as excuses – they want to say “excuse me” and have that be the end of it.

Vendors: ‘I thought…”, “I assumed…”, “I was busy…”, ‘Mary was supposed to…”, “my equipment broke down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s all irrelevant. You don’t pay a vendor to hear excuses. You pay for performance.

As individuals and as a society we desperately, urgently need to start saying, “No, sorry, but you are NOT excused.”

Teachers and principals who can’t get kids to learn, football players who can’t get along with coaches and teammates, salespeople who can’t sell, employees who can’t do their jobs, elected officials who can’t stop stealing or screwing long enough to do their jobs, etc., etc., they all need to be fired and exiled.

It starts with the person in the mirror. The elite minority of people I work with, who make big money, think, talk and act differently about this . They deliberately and simply accept responsibility. That usually works out better for everybody, by the way.

It’s the mealy-mouthing and stonewalling and lying and finger-pointing that gets everybody in trouble or worsens the trouble they’re in. Own your successes, own your screw-ups – and opt for the swift sword.

Government and big business is paralyzed by people far more interested in covering up their mistakes to cover their asses than in getting anything accomplished, but at the entrepreneurial level we need not follow their bad example. Choose thoughts, language and behavior that gives you the moral authority to demand much of everyone around you.

If you’re busy making excuses, you won’t be making much of anything else.

4 BIG Miscellaneous Tips

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 6th, 2011 7 Comments

If you want to get cooperation from somebody – especially a busy, successful person, make it easy for them to give you what you want. A few days ago, I was asked to record some fairly lengthy audio clips for somebody’s tele-seminar, which I was happy to do – until the “system” kept cutting me off and giving me a 9 choice option menu to deal with. So much for that.

People frequently send me books they’d like favorable comments about, but hardly anybody sends a pre-done FedEx, many hide their fax numbers. (When I sent books out and asked people to do me a favor, I sent them FedEx, with $50 bills attached to the “please” letter.) People send me video to review – on DVD’s, which can’t be easily stopped and rewound; triples the work time vs. VHS – so I don’t do it at all.

If you want to sell to somebody, find out how they want to buy. Different people want to buy differently at different times. Sometimes I like to take my time shopping and I enjoy being creatively sold – the clothing salesman finding matching shirts, ties for jackets, socks for slacks, endlessly showing me choices until I succumb. But, the other day, I hit a Jos. A Bank store in a hurry and made it clear I wanted to buy “the basic uniform”: blue blazer, camel blazer, gray slacks, tan slacks, blue shirts and be gone in 20 minutes. To her credit, an assistant manager “got it” and got a $1,600.00 sale. But more often than not, I’m not asked how I’d like to buy, and I’m not listened to when I tell people how I want to buy. On two occasions, I’ve had salespeople lose big ticket sales to me because they insisted on telling me a lot of technical information instead of asking whether or not I needed and wanted to hear it.

If you want to make more money, stop yourself and your staff from down-selling. My travel agent, bless her, is constantly anguished over the money I’m spending and feels compelled to save me, suggesting less expensive hotels, resorts, suites, travel. And she’s on commission. Silly?

Well, 90% of everybody selling does this very same thing. Worrying more about price than their customers or prospects. Instantly going to the lowest priced option. At that Jos a Bank store, she wisely did NOT steer me to the “50% Off” selection of shirts (Carla found it) – because it was clear I didn’t care about price; I never asked a price question – so why sell me anything but their best? But most salespeople could be heard immediately telling each customer: ‘”Look, we have shirts at half off today.”

If you want to get more done, kick the asses of people who interfere with you getting more done. Recently, I consulted with a Member who has leapt from $300,000.00 to $1-million in yearly income in 1 year. I told him: your hour is now worth 300% more. Waste you might have tolerated last year, you can no longer afford to tolerate. Of course, if you make $300,000.00, a fast path to making $1-million is treating your time’s value as if you were already making a million.

Profits From Niches and SubCultures

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 3rd, 2011 5 Comments

The One Hundred Acre Development, north of Tampa is full of large, upscale homes, as large as 4,000 square feet. The tree-lined streets are populated with Porsches, luxury SUV’s. There are 600 full-time or “snow-bird” residents here, in a mix of homes and condos.

In addition, the resort the residential community surrounds attracts 1,000 people every weekend, 200 to 300 most weekdays. There’s an 8,400-square foot spa, golf course, bicycle trails, pools with waterfalls, and clubhouse. It is the Florida home or vacation spot of choice for affluent empty-nesters with one thing in common: they like bicycling on those trails, golfing on that course bare ass naked.

This is one of the largest, if not the largest “clothing optional” resort/residential communities in America, but it’s definitely not the only one.

Exclusive, gated communities for the affluent are nothing new – although it interests me that more proprietors of other, different types of businesses haven’t noticed and applied the strategy. After all, you probably boost the sale price of the homes by 50% as soon as you slap up a gate, guard shack and clubhouse. The bigger lesson here is the combining of a demographic niche (age/affluency) with a subculture niche (nudists).

It is obviously exclusionary, ruling out the majority of people – something most marketers are loathe to do. Yet by excluding most it is irresistibly attractive to the tiny minority it caters to, and, I can assure you, price disappears from the choice grid.

No, I’m not necessarily suggesting that GKIC make our offices “clothing optional.” I am suggesting there are a lot of ways to mine riches in niches.

One is combining. You might combine occupational niche with a subculture niche, like dentists who own and ride Harley-Davidsons, so you have your dental seminar just for them at Sturgis or Daytona Beach, immediately before the annual biker invasions. Or occupational with demographic – Dr. Searby’s done that, targeting dentists within a certain number of years of intended retirement, to sell his dental assistant schools to.

Actually, the combinations within the combinations, putting age, gender, married, single, divorced, with kids, without, Catholic or protestant, by occupation or business, years in business, by income, by net worth, recreational pursuits, etc. into a matrix, produces endless possibilities.

You shouldn’t ignore subculture by any means. People, businesspeople are much, much more passionate about whatever personal pastime and subculture they’re in than they are about their business.

Should You Just Quit?

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 2nd, 2011 3 Comments

As you may recall, France leapt up and demanded to lead the U.N. “peacekeeping force” to be plunked between Hezbolah and Israel, 15,000 strong – to which France would make a “very significant contribution.” That turned out to be not 15,000; not 5,000; but 400, only 200 of which ever arrived.

Stephen Colbert said:

“The only difference between500 French troops and 15,000 French troops is – less prisoners.”

They’ll never escape their deserved reputation for surrender. It’s not an enviable reputation. It’s not an enviable behavior.

In a nice little community next to mine, there’s been a thriving “Main Street’ with independent merchants for at least 50 years.

I like going to the independent bookstore there and browsing in the much-too-cluttered-too-much-stuff-in-too-little-space a lot better than I like going to a Barnes & Noble megastore-coffeeshop-and-auto repair place.

I like buying toys in the little toy and model train store.

I like eating in the little diner.

Well, last year, in its infinite stupidity, the city let developers build a big, fancy shopping and restaurant “fake little town” behind the real Main Street, where chain restaurants and stores have proliferated.

The Main Street merchants are dropping like flies. But they are just surrendering.

They’ll say they’ve been driven out of business. But they’re all despicable liars.

The local media’s doing sob stories about them.

They deserve a horse-whipping, not sympathy (as do a lot of people). In fact, two of the fastest to surrender were the pharmacy with soda counter and the model railroad store; there is no pharmacy or train store opened or coming to the new area behind them – but there is MORE customer traffic for them to benefit from. These ‘French” started waving their white flags even before the Germans got there.

I deplore the Oprahization of America, the wimp epidemic that has turned men to mice, the poor-me eagerness to be a victim, the thumb-sucking and whining, the behaving like the damned French.

Hopefully, you are better equipped than most – with marketing, sales and business know-how, and with confidence – so that you aren’t running around waving the white flag in the face of any and every challenge or interference that rears its little head.

Hopefully, you get up every morning on your hind legs and stand tall. There’s no place on the business battlefield for the faint of heart, the timid, the easily discouraged or distracted, for anyone with white flag at the ready.

What Really Counts: The Trophy On The Mantle Or The Millions In The Bank

By: Dan Kennedy on: May 2nd, 2011 3 Comments

At least the infomercial industry’s annual awards dinner I attended was honest. Shows nominated were successful.

At the Emmys, Julia Louise-Dreyfuss won an acting award for a truly abysmal sitcom that was cancelled almost immediately upon airing. Other cancelled shows won various honors.

At the Oscars, movies the public hated won awards; movies the public loved were snubbed. All that’s fine as long as everybody admits what they’re up to; gathering in their own little clique and giving each other awards with no relationship whatsoever to the only judgement that really matters: the marketplace’s.

No, I’d rather not say that every movie has to be a blockbuster at the box office to get recognition. And there are movies that have taken off after public attention was drawn to them by such awards. But it does seem sort of silly giving awards to actresses in cancelled shows or actors in movies nobody went to see.

Hollywood, however, is supposed to be about fantasy and make-believe, so maybe none of this matters at all.

What is important is you not falling into a similar trap. In business, in sales, there is only one judgement that counts: the buyers’. Every other opinion, good, like an award, or bad, like your mother-in-law’s, can never be given even the slightest bit of attention.

In the advertising business from whence I came, agencies get away with murdering clients’ wallets and businesses, setting aside market realities, deliberately producing advertising with the top objective of winning awards – which are, in turn, given out with no connection whatsoever to the actual success or failure of the advertising.

This is sick, and sickening.

Usually, by the way, if your peers applaud what you’re doing, it’s an alarm bell warning of marketplace rejection. Peer approval and recognition ought to be AVOIDED.

At the Renegade Millionaire Retreat, a long-time Member who should be much farther head in his business than he is, finally faced the conclusion that he was being handicapped and held back by his deep involvement in his trade association, by his seeking those peers’ approval, by pursuing their awards, by hanging out with a whole crowd of people who desperately seek each others’ approval as a means of being validated and important – because their faulty approach to the business denies them the validation of marketplace success.

If you really need a trophy on your shelf, take a few bucks from the millions you make by not pursuing trophies and buy one for yourself. Your local trophy shop will “give” you whatever award you like.

Is It A Fact?

By: Dan Kennedy on: April 28th, 2011 4 Comments

In Japan or China, I forget which – this was in a little typed doohickey running across the bottom of the screen on CNN – the government is trying to outlaw and stop the common, popular practice of hiring strippers to dance and take-it-all-off at….funerals!

Hadn’t occurred to me before, but this does seem like something I’d like happening at mine. In between speakers and product pitches.

It seems that the people believe that the bigger the crowd at the dead guy’s send-off, the better the treatment he gets in heaven, as an obviously important and honored person. So, to attract crowds, they hire strippers.

Well, okay, it sounds goofy to you. But it’s a lot harder to see how goofy a lot of what you believe seems to others – or, more importantly, is.

There is a Grand Canyon difference between beliefs and facts, between believing and rational thought. Not acknowledging that difference is the cause behind most war and conflict, and is responsible right now for getting a whole lot of people killed every damned day.

Not acknowledging the difference is a very big problem in business. Way too much advertising, marketing and other decisions are made based on what we believe rather than what we know. And, ironically, beliefs tend to be permanent, while reality changes quite a bit from month to month, year to year. Tricky.

Gotta constantly question yourself: do I believe this to be true or do I know it to be true? Gotta get a few others you can rely on to challenge you, too. (Good reason to be in mastermind groups. Hint, hint, hint.)

Gotta constantly gather factual information wherever you can. Gotta be willing to consider new information that is in conflict with your beliefs. Have to be decisive, then firm and determined, not easily influenced by each new voice, not easily distracted, But also need to be flexible, open to different ideas and information . Tricky.

Are you too often in “instant reject mode”? That’s no good. Are you too often swayed by others opinions? That’s no good. Tricky.

One ‘fact’ is worth a hundred ‘beliefs.’ Fact-finding is a very profitable thing to do, if you can set aside beliefs in order to use the facts you find.