A while back, Donald Trump became the 2,327th person to get a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

Almost before the glue dried, but then his TV show was rather abruptly cancelled. Somebody at NBC called and said: “You’re Fired.”

That’s life.

Tom Monaghan once said he went from the World’s Wonder Boy to the Village Idiot almost overnight. Personally, I’ve never actually been fired, but there are plenty of times when I should be, but if I fire me, there’ll be nobody to do the work. I know what ignominy is. I’ve been in bankruptcy court, I’ve been thrown out of a trade association, I’ve been served divorce papers.

At some point, usually more than once, everybody who’s doing much of anything gets their teeth kicked in. Goes from being the most popular king to the outcast nobody admits knowing. Has a series of really, really, really bad days. Fortunes turn.

Michael Eisener led a renaissance at Disney and was then driven from the kingdom. He’s far from the first or last CEO to have that experience.

There’s little of interest in any of these many fall-from-grace stories, although the public and the press take so much delight in the embarrassing crashes off pedestals you can almost hear a collective snarling and chewing of bones.

Most of the fall from grace stories are maudlin and representative of remarkable stupidity and smallness and arrogance or greed or absence of control, and poking around in all that only leads to a need to shower.

What’s interesting and instructive is those who are unabashed, who are quickly resilient, who achieve redemption, who have a greater and grander next act. From those people, there are philosophical, attitudinal and methodical, operational object lessons. A comeback story is infinitely more instructive than a success story.

Over the long haul, this ‘resiliency’ may be the single most important of all personal characteristics.

How well you can take a punch.

How quickly you can recover.

How you can weather storms of criticism or humiliation. How adept you are at reinvention.

If you want to cultivate a characteristic, this is the one. And one way to do so is with the little stuff. The day to day.

A lot of people are easily de-railed. Easily put into a funk lasting hours or even days.

Easily compromise or sacrifice their agenda. The breeze from a missed punch is sufficient to send them to the canvas. They wonder why they don’t get a lot more accomplished. It’s their glass jaw.

I was recently going over Sydney Biddle Barrows material, particularly her “training class” for the ‘escorts’, I was reminded that I have always viewed selling as performing, a sales presentation as a performance – and that I tend to forget, most salespeople do not share my view, or Sydney’s.

This viewpoint translates in many practical ways, including scripting; rehearsal and practice; attention to detail; pride in the performance itself….as opposed to saying any damned thing that comes to mind in any random order, winging it, using any old pen or pad, no props, and so on. Ernie Kessler, who has since died , a superb speaker/platform salesperson (who is in the Platform Selling Boot Camp program with Ron LeGrand and I) had his presentation choreographed….so he took his sip of water at the same minute, against the same phrase every time. I’ve always sold that way.

That’s important if you happen to sell, face to face, by phone, from the stage, and very, very, very few folks have the self-discipline to perform professionally like this, even when it is pointed out to them as the difference between a peak performer and an also-ran. But it is also a metaphor for whatever you do. One of the great speakers I’ve had opportunity to work with and learn from, Bill Gove, had a talk: “Are You A Pro?” Most people simply aren’t.

Woody Allen famously remarked that 50% of success was “showing up.” Too many people stop there, and get 50% of what they could – if they showed up as a real Pro. Alert. Prepared. Practiced. Primed in every way to deliver an extraordinary performance and get extraordinary results.

Nido Qubein and Tom Hopkins who both spoke at previous SuperConferences are speakers we all recognize as consummate professionals. But why shouldn’t you be a consummate professional doing whatever you do? And imagine a whole business staffed by consummate professionals.

The person taking phone calls, a consummate pro, with practiced scripts, polished skills. The salespeople, the service people. The guy putting the packages in the trunk of the car. Each person viewing their job as “Performance Art”. Such businesses are rare – and usually ENORMOUSLY profitable, as they are fueled by zealous word of mouth advertising, spend little or nothing on paid advertising and keep all that money as profit.

In fact, professionalizing yourself and everyone in your business might be the best way to boost net profits.

It Really Isn’t Hard To Have The World Clamoring For You
(and: how to make next year your best money year ever)

It has reached the point where I am annoying A LOT of people by turning them away and being unavailable to speak or consult or write, weeks to months tardy in responding to correspondence from those not already clients, yet still having so much to do I’m having trouble keeping my commitments (something I hate with a passion) and crave relief from pressure, so I am again re-engineering my entire approach to work between now and January.

Looking backward, I see it is not difficult to get into this position, of having the world clamoring for a piece of your attention, lined up outside your door waving money at you. Anyone can do it. The key components are simple.

I talked at length at my Sales Seminar in about one of them: Authority. A linked component is Competence. Consistent, reliable competence. It is SO rare these days that anyone who reveals himself, within an organization or to a clientele or market, as being solidly competent quickly attracts far, far, far more work or customers and clients or opportunity than can be handled.

It is, in fact, how we all kill The Competent Employee: you have five but one is The Competent One. All work and responsibility gravitates to her until she is so overwhelmed she becomes incompetent. If you place yourself in the middle of some group of people capable of giving you money for Service, Know-How and Expertise – of any kind – and prove yourself Competent, they will quickly come to rely on you (at exclusion of all others). Once you’ve done this, to make this year your best money year ever is child’s play; just keep raising your fees or prices, charge for access or the right to buy from you, “stretch the top of the pyramid”, so you get more and more money for the same hours.

I suppose that sounds horribly simplistic, as did your last success marketing strategy e-mail. Oh, you can complicate it and bring in all sorts of sophisticated and intriguing nuances, from NLP to hypnosis to preferred language for handling customers or clients, to our kinds of marketing strategies, and on and on and on. However all that and a dollar isn’t worth but a dollar if not matched with truly “delivering the goods” – competence. And sadly, most don’t. most are far more adept at promising than at keeping.

No, being the best is never, in and of itself, good enough to attract money in today’s cluttered, competitive, confusing markets. Emerson would starve sitting next to his superior mousetrap. But being the best, being extraordinary, getting it right and promoting like crazy, now you’ve got something. In business, “getting it right” extends to the answering of the phone, the frequency of cleaning the public restrooms, whether the thank you notes go out on time, and a million other ‘little things’.

A lot of businesses have most of it right but are then undermined by one incompetent or rude or lazy employee, one stupid policy, one neglected step. I moved a lot of business from one vendor to an overall less competent vendor only to end dealing with the first’s Battleaxe Bertha on the phone.

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.

For 9 years, I spoke 20 to 27 times a year on those giant Success circuses. Each time I forcefully sold my programs, the $99 and the $278 packages. After speaking, I’d go to the floor, a crowd would cluster around me, and I would answer their questions.

Two of the most common were: “Do you think your stuff will work in my business?” and “Which package should I buy?”.

Logically, given that I am there clearly and obviously to sell, you’d expect my answers to be: yes. The $278.00 one. Wouldn’t you?

This is but one small demonstration of the way I’ve made and make all my money.

The Dear Abby Principle is: people want to be told what to do.

No, they do not want to think or figure things out for themselves. They lack confidence in their own decision-making ability, with some justification; they have no process for making good decisions, and they probably feel like they have a history of making bad ones.

They are intellectually and physically lazy. They are overwhelmed and paralyzed by the massively multiplying variety of choices.

But, mostly, fundamentally, at core, they lack self-esteem and self-confidence. And prefer abdicating rather than accepting responsibility.

One of the most successful internet businesses is e-harmony.com. Why?

Because it uses an authoritative test, then tells you who you should date. It thinks for you. It does not ask you to think.

Because people want to be told what to do, there’s a lot of money to be made telling them what to do. Because people prefer abdicating to accepting responsibility, there is a great deal of power to be had by lifting responsibility from them.

The applications are varied yet universal. The pet shop that puts aquarium, filter, gravel, castles and decorations, and five fish together as a “starter package” rather than letting the new hobbyist pick each item out for himself is telling the customer what to do.

The money manager who tells his client to hand over his money, stop worrying about the market, cancel his Wall Street Journal subscription, and relax, is selling just like the pet shop is.

The freelance copywriter who accepts assignments from clients can never make even a small fraction of what I make by telling the clients what the assignments given to me ought to be.

And I have just handed you a very, very, very big secret.

Picking up on the last success marketing strategy: this is why I harp on the idea that your business should be something you extract money from, not put or leave money in. (A principle I wish I’d grasped sooner in life.)

So you get to the point where your stack of what Ringer calls “no-touchies” is high enough you have absolutely zero economic need to work, and you are in what Brody called “the safe harbor position.” Then the work you do gets to be a lot more fun. You get to be a lot more selective. And anytime you like, you can just stop.

(To be fair, stopping is not easy. Surprisingly hard. For many reasons. Obligations and entanglements, your own emotions, habit-force. Etc.)

If you aspire to this sooner not later, then there are some important points I often make.

1. You have to sacrifice being an Empire Builder. Empire Builders re-invest virtually all into their businesses and extract little.
2. You have to determine what your enough-is-enough number is, get there, and secure it.
3. You have to keep from escalating lifestyle to match income. Simply put, you must live as far below your means as you are willing, so you move as much as possible to “no touchies.” If you keep buying bigger and bigger houses to live in and furnish, pricier and pricier cars to drive, more and more depreciating possessions, you can never stop. If you actually care about having all your income coming in effortlessly, it cannot come from business – it must come from investments.

Until you hit that point, you’re gonna work. The distinct difference between me and, hopefully, you, vs. the overwhelming majority of people, including business owners, in the dark and clueless about our kind of marketing, our entrepreneurial strategies, is (only) that we have a lot more choice in the type of work we do, how, where and when we do the work., and with whom we associate in doing it.

For example, few salespeople, professionals or business owners get to (believe they can) choose, train and control their customers or clients. We know we can. We can do different work and work differently. We can find smarter, more efficient, more leveragable ways to bring value to market. We can raise expertise and prominence so as to be paid much more for the work we do.

But we ought never seek to avoid work and get unearned income. Get over this foolish, juvenile desire to avoid work. It’s not worthy of aspiration, it’s nothing to brag about.

Any attempt to get something for nothing – even when temporarily successful – invites all manner of tragedy. It is immoral, unethical, in defiance of fundamental universal law.

In selling a proposition, there is advertising or poetic license in language like “easy” and “effortless” and “automatic”. It’s even legal. In advertising, it is called “puffery” – that’s what permits patently ridiculous assertions like “brighter than bright, whiter than white.” I write such stuff, on average, 3 hours a day, 1,000 hours each year (when I work ). But these terms are relative and subjective, not to be taken literally.

In buying a proposition, you are expected to be smarter than that. If you have ever done real manual labor for low wages as I have, then you know that, by comparison, lots of things are “more effort-less”. But if you are a grown-up rational thinker, you know nothing is literally effortless. Not even sleep. Your heart and lungs better be working.

“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
- General Douglas MacArthur

The perils of war haven’t changed much. Nor, really, have the perils of getting anywhere, accomplishing anything of real significance, in business or in life – it just isn’t a straight-line-from-A-to-B thing (as Dr. Maltz pointed out).

Most of our folks have had it so easy of late I worry about them being spoiled. Every ad working first time, every mailing profitable, incomes leaping by hundreds of thousands of dollars or triple-digit percentages year to year. Most haven’t gone down a blind alley and had their nose bloodied by the brick wall at its end while being kicked in the ass repeatedly from behind. But if by some chance you have stubbed a toe lately, you ought to rejoice in it. Nobody stubs toes sitting still.

I’m all for arranging your life to avoid challenges and experimentation, if you’re already where you want to be in financial and other accomplishment terms. And I’m not a champion of doing things the hard way when easier options are available.

However, you can’t go through life mad as hell and frustrated and disappointed when things aren’t going exactly your way either.

Being an entrepreneur means solving problems. Picking your way around potholes. Dealing with morons and malcontents.

That’s one of the main reasons we get the big bucks – not due to our exceptional genius, but due to our exceptionally high tolerance for pain. Our willingness to “advance in another direction” when most other people just stop, squat and give up altogether.

Personally, most of the success and fame-of-sorts I enjoy now and have enjoyed for the last 10 years is product of my willingness to be a piñata and get bashed around and suffer and look stupid and out-work 20 people for the previous 20 years.

By the way, politically, right now Clinton looks good to many by comparison to Obama and Bush. But let’s remember, Clinton didn’t try to do anything. He let the Reagan/Bush economy run. Name one big, bold iniative of any kind he made his ship he was willing to fight for and, if necessary, go down with. You can’t.

When you try things and push new iniatives, you sometimes wind up covered in shit and looking stupid. (McDonalds: sit down table service. FedEx: ZapMail. Martha Stewart: The Apprentice.) And you ought to budget some time and money to try new, different, radical, odd ideas, even ideas you don’t believe in, on an on-going basis.

It’s called R&D. And yep, you’ll get your nose bloodied a lot. But every once in a while, you’ll have a breakthrough that could never have been found without all the ugly stumbling and bumbling.

You should NEVER be complacent and just keep raking in the money from what’s working without reinvesting some % of it into looking for something else that might work too. NEVER.

How bad is your ‘education system’?

Well, the public education system is an embarrassment and disaster, largely thanks to the teachers’ union’s determined efforts at blocking any and all accountability, and liberal courts’ assistance in doing so.

A while back, a California court  threatened to force the state to scrap an exit testing program for high school students. Students were given six attempts during the year to pass a test demonstrating only 8th grade math and 10th grade English competency, but thousands of seniors flunked it.

Told they’d be denied diplomas, they hired a lawyer, sued, and not only has a judge ordered their unearned, undeserved diplomas issued, he may toss testing altogether.

In three states I know of, high school teachers have flunked high school math and history tests. Teacher competency testing has been blocked.

In Colorado, a high school geography teacher was outed for haranguing students with radical leftists political views rather than teaching his curriculum – revealing of zero monitoring or enforcement of standardized curriculum anywhere in the system.

None of this is a matter of inadequate funding. It is all product of inadequate standards, no enforcement of standards, no accountability for student or teacher.

There are three parts to the management success triangle I’ve long taught: Leadership, Management and Supervision (Enforcement). Triangle collapses if any side missing, like the Supervision side.

So, how’s your education system?

If you have staff and install them in jobs absent standards and training and supervisory enforcement for adherence to the standards, your system sucks too. If there is a script for handling phone calls or making sales presentations, for example, it must be written and charted; there must be training reinforced by role-playing and rehearsal; then there must be enforcement by spot-checking and mystery-shopping. Without the last part, skip the first part; it’s worthless.

I talked the other day with a franchisor’s training director, pleased that he has nearly doubled the franchisees’ sales by getting them to do only one of four things being taught, but frustrated the other three aren’t happening. When I discovered there was no Supervision/Enforcement, I said it was a miracle one was being used.

If you have customers, clients or patients you teach how to use what you sell, and you have reason to care about their results, the exact same triangle applies. I’ve had three different chiropractors give me a page of exercises to do at home. The only one who actually got me to do any of the exercises made me demonstrate that I knew how to do them in the office. Simple: don’t expect what you don’t enforce.

I got a ‘C’ in Earth Science in high school, so I’m not qualified to judge the real merits of Al Gore’s dire warnings about global warming. I do recall, there was an ice age before the invention of aerosol deodorant, but this is obviously a more complicated issue.

Such idiocy isn’t new. Remember saran wrap and duct tape for your house?

When I was a kid, in school, we actually had nuclear holocaust drills, to practice crouching under our little wood desks. Handy when a massive fireball hits.

Every once in a while, the dire warnings are valid. Folks in New Orleans should have left – although I confess, if in a hotel when its fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, I ignore it and stay in bed.

The last time we really had an epic mess in the entire U.S., it was Jimmy Carter’s rendering of the military impotent, giving us double-digit interest rates and inflation and unemployment and high gas prices, gas shortages and gas lines, pretty much bringing everything to a crawl.

Most of the time, most of the screaming warnings of impending disaster prove empty. Most of what everybody worries most about winds up affecting them the least.

I am often asked now for my predictions about real estate, interest rates, the stock market, the economy. I have them, but I recall John Kenneth Galbraith’s statement that economists and their predictions serve but one useful purpose; to make astrology appear legitimate.

Here is what I know: The changes we make will be more important than the changes that occur around us.

I know you win by focusing on what you can control. I know that money never really dries up; in different circumstances, it moves differently. There’s always plenty available.

So, we’ll prosper. Period. I know that, in microcosm, Halbert was right; there’s hardly a problem that can’t be solved with a great sales letter – the macro version, most problems can be solved with better marketing. You can sell your way out of just about any set of adverse circumstances. (And a whole lot of problems persist purely because of lack of good salesmanship.)

I know that we actually do have more to fear than fear itself, but that most decisions made based on fear turn out badly.

I know that Pollyanna positivism, whistling in the dark graveyard is dumb, too; you have to create reasons to be optimistic, so you get to make decisions based on positive expectations.

It’s foolish and dangerous to just be or act optimistic. There are a lot more things I don’t know. Like whether Gore’s right. So I focus on working with the comparatively short list of things I do know.

I never totally got over the idea that there ought to be some moments in life, some sanctuary relationship, some place or time or person, some peak of achievement, where you could take a break from selling.

A mentor did his best to beat this false hope out of me.

Intellectually, I know he’s right. Emotionally, I never quite got there.

More than anything else, probably explains why I have to check off  ” ___Divorced” on forms these days.

The No B.S. truth is, always be selling.

George W. may have learned this lesson – it was certainly taught to him. In spite of the biggest economic boom I can recall, his poll numbers plummeted. Chalked up to a war evermore resembling, or at least presented by the media and vocal opponents as Nam, or to Katrina.

But in the last couple weeks before one Christmas, with none of that changed, his poll numbers started climbing back up.

Why?

Because he went back out on the campaign trail and started selling. Four major speeches, a day with Brian Williams, “exclusive” interviews on other talk shows.

If Oprah’d have him – which I’m sure he has NOT been invited – he’d have been there this week. Say what you want about Clinton: he was and is a salesman’s salesman. As was Reagan.

It’s funny – a lot of speakers who observed me on the SUCCESS events remained puzzled by my stellar, superior-to-all-others’ results. I spoke too fast, I stuck my hands in my pockets, I said “uh”, I certainly wasn’t as famous as others.

Couple little secrets: unlike others, I sold from first breath to last, every sentence calculated to sell.

But the other secret: I sold the staff and temps manning the tables on liking me and selling for me. Nobody else bothered to schmooze those folks, let alone offer them cash bonuses.

I schmoozed the A/V guys so they actually paid attention and made things work for me.

I sold Colin Powell on finishing close to on time, and telling people to stay and hear me, mentioning me by name, endorsing me.

I got my butt over there two hours early every single time, 243 times, for 9 years, and hustled around and sold everybody on helping Dan sell. I wasn’t that much better on stage, but I was a lot better off stage.

Success is an endless campaign of selling. First breath to last, every single day.

You can fight this; you’ll lose. You can be depressed or fatigued by it – and every so often, I am. Or you can embrace it, which 95% of the time I have, I do. The one thing you can’t do is deny its reality. At your peril.

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