Why Your Book Flopped—and What the Pros Know That You Don’t

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Hey there, and welcome to this episode of youf Ultimate Life, the podcast created to help you choose and learn to live a life of purpose, prosperity and joy by serving with the gifts and talents that you have and your life experience.

I've got a special guest today, Michael Drew, who I've known for many years ago and some years ago we shared a stage and got to know each other.

And he's got a book I love that talks about how cycles change in society.

Michael, welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

And the book you're talking about is this book.

It is, and I have it on my shelf.

And 2023, if I remember the cycles correctly, was supposed to be the apex of the.

The zenith of the Wii.

Yes.

Yeah, the zenith of the Wii.

And if you watch what's happening, I, I refer to that often and see what happens.

And I'm going to do we say that the at the zenith of the week, 10 years before, 10 years after, is a microcycle of witch hunts.

And I think it's pretty clear that that's the cycle that we've been in.

So, anyway, totally.

And I love it.

So I would recommend you guys read that book, Pendulum.

It's on my bookshelf also.

And so Michael and I share that he's been doing a lot of stuff and I'm not going to give a big, glitzy intro, although Michael certainly deserves it.

I'm going to start with another question.

And the question I want to start with, Michael, is I want you, without any false modesty, to tell people, how does Michael choose to add good to the world?

That's a great question.

So I'm going to tell a story to answer that question.

One of my clients, his name is Garrett Gunderson.

I think you know Garrett.

And he owned a wealth management company and he had a book that he wanted me to promote to the New York Times bestseller list titled Killing Sacred Cows.

And when I met with Garrett, one of the things I have to do with the client is learn their, their content material and philosophies and values and all of those things in, in defining what our, our marketing campaign is going to be.

And one of the values that he has, that he deploys for wealth management, for investing is something he calls Sole purpose.

S O U L purpose.

And what his belief is is that sole purpose is not given to the individual, for the individual, but for their service of their fellow man.

And from a wealth management standpoint, his application is don't invest into a business that is not directly reflected in the sole purpose.

Because to really do investment right, you have to really intimately understand that industry and that business.

They've got the right CEO and the right marketing plan and the right production and all of those things.

And if it's not core to the sole purpose, you won't put the time and effort to ensure that you are investing in the right companies.

For me, in what, what I do, my sole purpose is about voice.

I help people find, test and amplify voice, right?

So when I work with a client we define sole purpose and then we define are the guiding North Star values, right?

The I, I, I believe that everybody is on the ocean called life.

And there are four kinds of people on the ocean of life.

The first kind of person is your drifter.

And you know a drifter because they say yeah man, I'm just going with the flow wherever the, the tides of happen takes me man, that's where I'm going.

Right.

The, the next kind of person on the ocean of life is the, the drowner.

Now I'm not saying that the three, four, five times that we all drown or we're put in a position where we're drowning in life and we need helping out.

That happens to everybody.

I'm not talking about that, that those few times in life.

I'm talking about the professional drowner.

And these are people that you help today and they need help again tomorrow.

And we like to joke that the only thing you can do with a drowner is ground or is hold their head underwater until they stop thrashing because they're, they're taking away from society versus giving.

The third kind of person on the ocean of life is your surfer.

Now surfer is up, they're catching waves, they're, they're enjoying themselves.

And most people define success as what a surfer is doing.

But really a, a pumped up, what was the first one?

Drifter.

Yeah, they are drifting because they're going with the ocean currents and not directing the correct.

And so they're, they're going from one trend to the next.

That doesn't mean that they're not doing something.

They're more than drifting but they are still entirely dependent on the movement of the water and the waves.

So that's not, I don't define that as Success, although you could have fun doing that and you can create, you can do some things.

That's not how I define success.

Success is the fourth category, and this is what we call the navigator.

So a navigator knows who they are, and they know where they're going, and they know how to get there.

And it used to be on the ocean before we had modern technology.

There's no fixed point on the ocean, right?

So to navigate the ocean, you navigate it at night, and you would use declination and a compass, and in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Star, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the Southern Cross, to be able to get to let you know if you were in alignment towards the place that you were wanting to get to.

Right.

And so for me, the first thing is defining your sole purpose, but then it's creating your value set that is your North Star, that unmovable point that you're using to be able to help direct you to living into that sole purpose.

And so for me, our guiding values, or North Star statement, is we want everything to be real, raw and relevant.

And we apply that with vendors and employees and clients and marketing opportunities and all of those things.

It keeps us in alignment with voice.

The third thing that we then define for ourselves and for our clients is what does the promised land look like when we get there?

Right.

So we're living in their sole purpose.

We're guided by our values.

What does that look like when we get there?

It's a question that you and I've discussed in the past, which is, how do you define and measure success?

Because if you can both clearly define what the outcome is and clearly define how you're going to measure, do that, then cool.

Paint the picture of what that promised land looks like, and then we can work backwards to know all of the pieces that need to be built along the way.

So for me, my objective is to help.

My definition of measurement of success is to change 3% of the world population.

What we know in organizational change studies is that if you want to change any group, a religion, a political party, a culture, a company, anything you need to change, you need to get 3% of that group to adopt or accept that change.

So it only takes 3%, but you need the full 3%.

So my objective is to help my clients sell any product, service, or event for a dollar or more to 435 million people throughout the world.

That's what my objective is with my clients.

And we've sold 55 million books so far and another 100 million products and services to folks.

So you know, we're, we're in 27 years.

We're, we're well on our way to be able to accomplish that outcome.

Long way to answer your question.

But that's.

No, it's price.

That's what I do, how I live and do it.

Because I want listeners.

I'm going to just take an edit editorial moment here and I want you to hear that.

Because a sole purpose and people struggle with that.

I don't know what my purpose is.

And you hear that sort of thing all the time.

All you have to do is look at your life experience and your skills and gifts, like you can figure that out.

And then the values come as you explore that.

And a key piece that you said is figuring out what it looks like when you get there.

Like, if you could change the world, what does the world look like when you've changed it?

Like, what is your promised land?

Yeah.

And for me, it's about being specific.

It's not sufficient to say, I want to change the world.

So, yeah, I want to change the world.

But I know that in changing the world, I need to reach 3%.

Like, I'm not changing an industry.

I'm not making more millionaires.

Like that's a valid outcome.

That's not what I'm doing.

I'm helping change the world.

So now I have a, I need to have a number that we know from data that 3% is the number.

So that's, that's what my.

And that number is going to go up over time because the population's going up.

But that's the, that's the objective.

The, the measurement then is the bigger the number, the, the simpler the measurement metric needs to be.

So if you want to change the world, you're not going to be able to get the micro data on every human being on the planet to be able to see the, the difference that you're making.

Right.

And so for me, it's like, no, If I help my clients sell any product, service or event for a dollar or more, then I know that I've done my part.

It also fits back into what my, my skill set is and my understanding and my values and my sole purpose.

Like, it's, it's about the ample, the amplifying of the voice.

And so that clarity is critical for when I work with any client as well.

Because if you can't define it and if you can't measure it, then you can't do it.

I love that.

And specificity is a key missing piece that so many people that have endured and even mastered hardship and struggle, which is often the genesis for a desire to help.

But they're not clear on what that looks like.

And so I love your focus on clarity about what that is, which is, before we were talking, I told you about my little rainbow.

I'm moving somebody from here to here, and that's evident by their behavior.

So now I'm going to ask you a different question.

We're going to go into how you're doing that and some of the cool stuff we were talking about before.

In a minute.

People get you don't fall up this mountain.

Okay, So I want to know what happened.

What set of things happened in Michael's life that made this amplification discovery and amplification of voice, getting rid of the fear that I don't matter and count, nobody will listen, and all the rest of the crap that goes with it.

What happened that made you climb this mountain?

It's a really good question.

You're talking about a life of experiences there.

I know I am.

And I want to hear some version of that, because one of the things that's so important is people look at you or me or successful people, and they say, oh, look at them.

I wish I could have that.

I could never do that.

But when we share the answer to the question, how did you get here?

Then we've really given a gift.

I think it's a great point.

And it goes back to the adage about being an overnight success.

Overnight Successes, they take 20 years to get to that.

Overnight.

That actually happens overnight.

A lot of my clients, they've built and spent decades building to the point where they're now able to leverage all of that work and all of that momentum to then shoot up into the stratosphere for their space.

And so it's important to note that when we see somebody become big, it's the end of a bunch of other actions and things that happened in the past that took them to that point.

Just because you didn't know who they were doesn't mean that they were building also.

Exactly.

To get to that point.

So this is your chance.

I want to hear your.

The stuff before the hockey stick.

How did you climb that mountain?

So I think part of it goes back to when I was a kid.

I grew up in Provo, Utah, in a large Mormon family.

And when we're the oldest in the family and when I was nine, we don't have.

We don't have religious thrift stores here per se.

We have the LDS version of a thrift Store called Desert Industries where, where members of the LDS donate use clothes.

And so my dad took the family there to get school clothes for that upcoming year.

And I'm like, I don't want hand me downs, I don't want to wear other people's old clothes.

I want new stuff.

But my dad, who was an English teacher, just didn't make, you know, enough money to, to do more than what to do what we were doing.

And so I said, cool, if I want this, I have to go and do it myself.

And so living in Provo, I lived very close to the student housing for Brigham Young University, otherwise known as byu.

And so what I did for about a month there was in July, August is I went out to the campus was not full because of summer.

I door knocked on all of the, as a nine year old on all of the college kids and said hey, I'm Mike Drew.

I'm trying to earn some money for school and school supplies.

I'd like to do some odd jobs for you.

I take out the trash, do your dishes or heck if you want me for the guys.

If you go do telegram to that girl that you like or whatever, I'm happy to do that.

And so what I discovered in doing that, this was, you know, a good 38, seven years ago I was, I was able to make on average about $250 an hour doing that work.

That was a lot of money back back in the 80s.

88, right.

And so what I then decided was I could make that amount of money per hour, but it would be easier if I had other people doing the cleaning and if I could just knock on more doors, I could get more business and get more money.

And so then I had other neighborhood kids working for me and I would go knock the door, set up the appointments, the kids would go do the cleaning.

And that was kind of the model.

I do that till I was 15, made, made several hundred thousand dollars doing that.

I mean maybe I shouldn't say that because everything was cash and I certainly didn't pay anything to the, to the government.

But it was, it was, it was a business that, that I built and learned that if I wanted to do something that I wanted something, I, I could go and do that myself.

Later in my teenage years, I decided to leave school to go be with a young lady and be homeless up in, in the state of Washington between Aberdeen and Bellingham, Aberdeen in the south and Bellingham in the north of the state of Washington state.

And I, you know, it was just to be with a girl.

But I became a very successful drug dealer, made quite a bit of money doing that.

And then after about a year of that, I decided that I didn't really like the lifestyle I didn't have.

Like, I wasn't running away from home for the sake of abuse or other problems.

I, there wasn't a reason for me to not be at home.

So I, I decided that I didn't need that lifestyle anymore and returned home and as a high school dropout and I decided at that point to go ahead and get a job at a Burger King and became the manager at the Burger King.

And then I met a young lady who was a student at byu, a freshman student at byu and we got married.

And she said to me, michael, you're too smart to match a Burger King.

You got to go do something else.

Like you're not.

That's not the career that you should have.

And so I found a job at a company called Executive Excellence.

Executive Excellence at that time was a division of the Covey Leadership center before Franklin and Covey merged and it was their top publication before Priorities.

And the editor of the magazine was a gentleman by the name of Ken Shelton.

Ken Shelton was also at least self proclaimed the Ghost writer for 7 Habits of Highly Affected People by Stephen R.

Covey.

And so I worked there for three months and became the number three salesperson selling the magazine and in the organization.

And that's.

And the real significance of that is that the then number one, two and four and five salespeople had all been there for five or more years and they were just renewing subscriptions that they had set up in previous years and weren't really generating revenue.

So I was coming and generating a bunch of revenue.

And then the merger between Franklin and Covey occurred and Ken Shelton was given the magazine.

And his statement was because of his not being paid for ghostwriting Seven Habits, he was given the magazine.

And Ken came to me and he said, hey Mike, we publish all these great authors in our magazines.

Why don't we start publishing their books?

And as a young, naive 18 year old, I'm like, yeah, we could do that.

Let's go and do that.

And so I did.

And I failed miserably for a year.

But in failing, I learned everything about the publishing industry, got it set up for distribution with National Network, I figured out client acquisitions, I figured out all of the things that needed to be done to be able to make a book work in the industry.

And what occurred by the end of the year is I had impressed a woman at our distributor, NBA National Book Network, which is the largest distributor independent distributor in the industry, who is our publishing rep.

And she was the publishing rep at another publishing company called Bard Press for nbn.

And Bard Press is a legend in the world of business book publishing.

And so they just come off of a huge success with their book nuts Southwest Airlines.

Crazy recipe for success.

And Ray Bard wanted to expand the marketing and PR division of his company to be able to help more authors become New York Times bestsellers.

So Miriam recommended me.

And the recommendation for Miriam is important because Miriam is actually a legend in book publishing.

She was the first woman buyer at a retail chain in the history of the industry, meaning the person at a retail chain that determined how many copies of a book to bring in.

And so her recommendation to Ray had real, real meaning.

And so Ray interviewed me and he hired me.

And the first day on the job he said to me, michael, we publish business authors where our authors want more than anything else in the is to be a New York Times bestseller.

What I want you to do is go figure out how the New York Times bestseller list works.

And as a young, naive 19 year old, I'm like, yeah, I can do that.

And so funny enough, what did I do?

I called the New York Times and said hey to the editor that compiled the list.

I just started BART Press and I've been tasked with with helping our authors make your list.

What, what are the, the standards and rules, that number of cells that we need to be able to make your list.

And the gentleman there at the time, his name was John Wright, he laughed at me and said just, I'm not going to tell you but, but I appreciate your calling.

And let's, let's keep, let's keep chatting.

Then I called the Wall Street Journal and talked to Robert J.

Hughes and said the same thing.

And he laughed and said the same thing.

You're fun kid.

Just let's keep building a relationship and call me back.

And then I did the same thing with Jackie Blaze at USA Today and folks at Business Week go to list at the time and so on.

And so I started calling these folks and getting little bits of data information from them.

And the first book I worked on was for Roy H.

Williams, who is known as the wizard of Ads.

He's actually my co author on Pendulum and he was publishing a book titled Secret Formulas of the wizard of Ads.

And so he wanted to be a New York Times bestseller.

And so we came up with a strategy wherein we sent a copy, an advanced copy of the book to the general manager of every radio station in the country.

Now that's important because Roy owned at the time the fifth largest ad agency for buying radio advertisements in the country.

It's now the third largest agency.

But all of the, all of the stations knew who Roy was.

They were always for his clients money.

So we, so we had that, that warm entrance and so we mailed an advanced copy and then I oversaw a sales team who called all of the stations with the offer of saying hey, we'd like to help you sell more radio.

Secret Formulas of the wizard of Ads argues that radio is the best form of advertising for small or medium sized retail business.

What we, what we've put together is an opportunity.

If you buy 20 copies of the book and run 200 radio ads promoting the book and yes, you can run those overnights when you're not, when you're not selling ads anyway, we will give you.

This is back in 99.

And so the offer was we'll give you a 12 tape training library on VHS if that is Roy teaching the sales reps how to use the book to sell radio.

And so we had almost 900 stations that participated in that offer.

And we were able to launch the book to number three on the New York Times and number one on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list.

That was the first now of 131 consecutive New York Times bestselling books.

And that tells me how long it's been since we talked.

Because when we talked last or when we shared that stage, I think it was at Alex's event, it was in the 70s and so now you have 50 or 60 more.

78 or 80 or something at the time.

So that's been a few years.

The numbers go up for sure, they better.

So with that was the learning that I could do that.

And that first campaign gimme about 80% of the insight into how the list work.

And so between that campaign and then the relationships I was building with the bestseller list themselves, I was able to really refine it.

The next book I worked on was with Ivan Meisner for a book titled Masters of Networking.

I was the founder of BNI and we actually broke a Guinness World record.

What we did is we actually it was a multi author contributed book.

We set up 56 book signings on the same day at the same time and use it as a membership drive for BNI chapters and the, the franchise owners, the executive directors were the contributors.

And so we got, they had all of their folks to bring folks out to the book signing.

And again Launched the book number one on the Wall Street Journal and I think number two on the New York Times, actually.

But Ed Burke, Guinness world record for most book signings.

So what occurred working at Bard for the next five years was a, a learning, a deeper learning of how the industry works and a deeper learning of how to work with an author to be able to promote books to the bestseller list.

And I moved from Bard to Longstreet Press.

You actually purchased BardPress for a short period of time eventually.

And I was the publisher for BardPress.

And then I got a job offer at Entrepreneur magazine to be the book publisher for Entrepreneur magazine.

So I took that job and worked there for a year.

Now, the difference between working at Bard an entrepreneur is that every book that we did at Bard, our standard was folks that could have the platform large enough to be able to meet the standards to become a New York Times bestseller.

Entrepreneur had a totally different model.

They were actually creating content from their, their contributors for the magazine and publishing that and making a decent amount of money selling the, selling their books through the, their website and through their, their magazine.

But it was far less exciting to me because I couldn't run these bigger campaigns.

And one author during that, that year that I was there who had the platform to launch a bestseller campaign, which was Anthony Parrinello selling DeVito.

And I put that on New York Times and Washington Journal.

And then I just said, you know what?

I really enjoy helping authors at this bigger level with the building of the platform and, and, and launching books to the bestseller list versus just running a.

Yes, it was profitable.

Running a profitable publishing company is, is nice.

The bestseller campaigns were much more interesting and exciting for me.

And so I started my own company, promote a book.

22 years ago now.

21.

22 years ago.

And what happened when I, when I left being a publisher to being an agency owner was I did several books.

I think it was seven books that first year when I, when I left being a publisher that we put on the bestseller list, all of them in New York Times.

I delivered exactly what I promised, but there were three of my clients that were not happy with me.

And why weren't they happy?

Because as a publisher, the expectation was do the publishing stuff, help with the distribution, take the sales that the authors generate, make sure that they're going through the retailers and being reported and counted and just doing all of that stuff.

Well, that's just what the expectation from the author and publisher is.

When you move over to a marketing agency standpoint, the actual outcome isn't Bestseller.

It's what the author believes that the bestseller will do for their business.

Which is not a distinction that I understood as a publisher, nor did I have to, but I didn't because I didn't understand that you could necessarily put a book on the bestsellers list.

Spending money and time.

That doesn't have a huge impact on your business.

Exactly.

It's like people that show up on Oprah and they expect their life to be gilded from then, from then on.

And it's not because all the rest of the stuff's not ready.

And a bunch of other stuff.

Well, even with, for me, I call it the Oprah myth.

Because every.

Everybody that called me said, oh, just get me on Oprah.

I'm like, you know, it doesn't work like that.

Even if I got you on Oprah, that doesn't guarantee you anything.

I had a client at Bard Press who we was on Oprah every year for five years.

The first year he had one, one episode.

The second year they gave him like two episodes.

And then for the following three years, he was the guest star every episode for a week.

So five, like on Oprah, it was Oprah and this gentleman just talking about, about things related to the subject matter of the book.

They show the book all the time.

Now, people would think that that author would sell thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of books.

Absolutely, you would think that.

Well, here's the thing.

What was the subject matter of the book?

The book was titled the Owner's Manual for the Brain.

It was a thousand page compendium on the functionality of the brain, which is relevant when you're dealing with psychology and analyzing things.

So in terms of being on the show, his expertise was absolutely critical.

But when you compare that book against the Oprah audience, which is Stay at Home Moms.

Yeah, Stay at Home Moms want to read the Owner's Manual for the brain.

Very few, 0.1%.

Well, we sold.

We always sold a few.

But I think that the biggest year we sold in 2000.

But again, you're dealing with the biggest medium at the time, the biggest show, the most amount of attention that you could possibly give to any one person.

Because even when they brought on Susie Orman or Dr.

Phil, they'd come in for a segment, not for entire shows, not for entire weeks.

And so he was the only one that they did that with based on the subject matter.

But there's that contextualization of understanding that it's more than just getting that exposure.

And so what I learned that year from the clients that were upset with me.

The other ones were happy because they had a better understanding of how to make sure their campaigns tied back into the business.

Was that what I had to get into the business of was platform building.

Because really, what a bestseller campaign is is an amplification of voice at a very high level.

And so you need to know what voice you're amplifying and how that ties back to the author's business.

And so for the last 20 years or so, I've been a ardent student of different types of platforms.

Now, definitionally, for your audience, I want to kind of simplify what platform means, because platform can be used in a lot of ways.

Like there's technology platforms and there's education platforms.

And platform is a word that is used in multiple different ways.

What I'm referring to when I say platform is the ability of the individual to have their voice heard over the crowd.

Historically, missionaries and politicians would stand on a soapbox so that they would be elevated above the crowd so that their voice could be heard by everybody in the crowd.

Because if you're on the same level, your voice goes into the first couple rows and then nobody can hear you.

So the platform elevated you so that your voice could be heard by the masses.

In theater, stages do the same thing.

They elevate the.

The.

Actors and actresses above the audience so that everybody in the audience can hear what they're saying.

So platform then means the same thing today.

And there are offline and offline platforms.

Speaking on stage is an offline platform.

Doing a podcast is an online platform.

Absolutely.

And so these are different types of platforms.

And what.

What I do when I work with a client is we look at what their existing platform is, and we look at the book and the book campaign, and we look at how do we first leverage that platform, the.

The existing elevation of.

Of the individual so their voices heard over the crowd.

How do we.

How do we leverage that for the promotion of the book?

And in turn, how do we use the book to expose that.

That business owner, that author to a wider audience that they didn't have previous to running that campaign, so that.

So that we grow that platform?

Right?

And so that's like.

So.

So that.

That.

That first year out, I.

I succeeded and failed, but the failure that I had put a fine point on, the need to understand platform.

And then a few years into running campaigns, I was hired by a gentleman by the name of T.

Harv Ekerman, and I ran a book campaign for him.

The book title was Secrets of The Millionaire Mind.

We launched that book to number one on the New York Times and other lists and kept it there for like a year.

It was a huge, massive campaign.

One of the biggest campaigns I've worked on, had a great strategy.

It actually is what built his organization peak potentials to the size that it did.

But after that campaign, about a year, he and I met in person and he was very gracious about and thankful for the work that I had done for him because it really did that.

That campaign really grew his business in a major way.

And he, he made an observation to me.

He said, you know, Michael, what you do for, for folks like me is amazing.

Like you do.

You do really great work at helping people who have an existing platform business to have their, to have their voice heard by a wider audience and have, that have make an impact on the world.

But he said there's a whole lot more people out in the world that aren't at this level that need your help and support.

And so he urged me to go and figure out how to serve a wider audience beyond those folks that, that could run those bigger New York Times bestseller campaign.

And that was the kind of the next impetus for me in figuring out how to, how to serve the world in a better way, reach a wider audience.

And I think Harv and his admonition was spot on.

And so it's now.

So from there, we enhanced our business and elevated our business to being able to serve folks who can run smaller campaigns.

People who are in need of just building a platform or who just wanted Wall Street Journal bestsellers or USA Today bestsellers are now success magazine bestsellers at a smaller level, but from a zigzag standpoint, like, you've got your, your ultimate goal.

You got to do the work to get to get there.

There's no magic button.

And if there.

And if something magical is going to happen, it's going to happen no matter what.

So don't.

You can't plan on that.

You can't plan or depend on that.

So I want to ask you a question, and I know there's more to this story and I love it and I love the fact that Harv had you explore that possibility.

But there was a thing that happened when he did.

And so the question that's been building in me, as you told this, you started from a young age figuring things out, figured out how to make some money for new clothes, figured out how to start this whole publishing journey and making choices.

And clearly you're a person.

And those listening Saying, gee, how did he get here?

Hard work is clearly part of it.

Curiosity is part of it.

Sticking to a goal, having a clear expectation like he talked talked about in the beginning.

Now that Harv said that and you said, okay, I'm going to do that, I want to go to a sole purpose question.

You have, you had already created success, you had created a way to help people that had, you know, a platform and budget to do large scale success.

Somebody said to you, yeah, you ought to help more smaller people, mid tier people or whatever.

What I want to know is what is it in your heart that says, yeah, I'm going to do that?

Because you could have said, well, I like what I'm doing and I'm making good money and I'm having whatever.

But you said, you know what, it would be a good idea.

Like, why would it be a good idea?

Why couldn't you just, I mean, you could have just said, nah, I like these big ones.

So I want to know what's in Michael's heart that says, you know what?

I do want to do that.

Tell me about that.

So a couple of things.

Roy Williams, who's co author Pendulum, my first bestselling author, he's a close friend and a mentor.

And we were in New York City after Book Expo America, which used to be that they no longer do it, but used to be the biggest trade convention in the world for publishing.

And we'd finish up the day and we were just walking the streets of New York and talking and.

And he said something to me quite profound that I hold dear that influences a lot of what I do, but I also recommend this to everyone else.

And what he said is, Michael, the winners and losers in life are determined when the teams are picked.

There are two teams that are essential for your success.

The first are the team of people who select you to be on their team.

And the second are those that you select to be on your team.

You know, Einstein said that the theory of relativity was done on the shoulders of giants.

He that theory is just based on the work of others that came before him and was the net result of all of their work, not just his individual work.

And that's my experience in life as well.

I was, I did the right things.

I showed up, I was willing to do the work.

But also people chose.

They saw who I was and they saw something in me and they chose me to be on their team.

Right.

When I ran the Roy Williams campaign for Secret Formulas, I actually spent three months in his office every day.

I'd get there at six or seven in the morning and make calls and oversee the telemarketing sales team.

And then at around 4:30, 5:00 clock in the afternoon, every single day or virtually every single day, I would go into Roy's office and be a fly on the wall for whatever meetings or conversations he was having.

And sometimes he would just spend an hour with me.

And so I was able from that to really learn from a master how to engage and communicate and understand marketing.

The other part was Ray Bard of BardPress who hired me after that, put his arm around me and mentored me in publishing it in his model.

He's a legend for a reason and so I was able to learn from him.

And same thing with Ivan Meisner and others, including a T Harv Eker.

And so for me, one of the things that I value is when I'm chosen to be on someone's team who's an industry maker or changer, that I need, whether I understand it or not, that I need to follow their advice because they're not giving me advice for no reason.

There, there's a very clear reason for doing that.

There's also, you know, interesting confluence of things that are happening at the same time.

So I have the conversation with, with Harv and then a few months later I meet Garrett and then I learned sole purpose.

And right.

So it, these things just start coming together and start working together, start working together.

And for me, what I was, what I was recognizing is I would speak at events all over the place and the, the content that I gave was amazing, whether it was pendulum or publishing related, but it only like it might have resonated with an audience, but practically the only people that could do anything with what I was saying were the other speakers.

Maybe, and maybe probably only a small portion of those speakers could actually implement and execute the things that I was saying that need to be done.

I was right, I was accurate, I was even precise in what I was saying.

But there's a big difference between here's the optimal way to be able to build this and I don't have any of the resources to do that.

So what is the next solution?

And so I would, I would get people mauling me after events, just wanting to ask me questions and get advice and feedback, and wanting to hire me that I'm like, I can't.

Like you don't have the stuff or the budget.

So for me it was that there was an obvious need to demand to reflect what, what Harvard said.

And, and there's nobody out there doing this in the right way.

There's a lot of charlatans out there.

There's a lot of direct response marketers that call douchebag marketers that are out there to just take people's money and to be able to, to give them tactics.

Not outcomes, not strategies, but tactics that they used, say, well, this is what I did.

You can do it too, without the context of understanding of all of the things that went before that tactic that build up to it, without the, the explanation that there's this thing called the it factor.

And the it factor can't be taught.

Like you either have it or you don't.

And so when you, when you take all the past work and the it factor and you do something, you're going to get a result.

To then go and sell that as a predictable model that anybody else can follow is dishonest.

Yeah, I was going to say it's not.

And so you, you know these people as well as I do.

There's a lot of these folks out there that are douchebag marketers that are basically using psychological manipulative tactics to get sales in a very similar way to what pickup artists do.

Right.

To get laid.

Right.

But the only difference is they both want to get into somebody's pants.

Only that the douchebag marketer wants to pull out the wallet.

Like that's, it's the same, same mindset and modality.

And so for me, because I was raised in, in the world of Roy Williams and the Wizard Academy where, where we, we look at things persuasively, but we don't look at things manipulatively.

Right.

One of the things that is, taught it for some direct response marketers is this concept called nlp, Neuro linguistic programming.

And people believe it to be true.

The problem is with that, and I'm just trying to illustrate the point of dark marketing.

The, the thing about NLP is that they make statements about the way the brain works.

Things like people are auditorial, auditory, visual or kinesthetic.

Guess what?

That's not how the brain works at all.

There is no visual part of the brain.

There is no auditory part of the brain.

There is no kinesthetic part of it.

It's not how the brain functions at all.

A really simple example of that is that when, when you see something, what part of the brain is the first part of the brain that processes that?

The auditory cortex.

Right.

The part of the brain that deals with auditory, with sound is what processes it before it's processed.

Through any of the other parts of the brain that deal with visual.

So you're going through auditory before you're going through visual with visual.

The brain doesn't work in that capacity.

And so what you end up with is when you have someone who teaches NLP band learn his whole organization.

When you build something that is based on falsehood, on dishonesty, it then permeates into everything within that, within that group and organization and what's being taught.

And then the people who then are attracted to NLP are the manipulative people who are trying to find manipulative ways because.

To get an outcome.

Because that's the ethos of what NLP is.

Right.

And so for me, when I started doing this more broad work, my objective was again partially based on the, the training from Roy was to, to teach people how to do things honestly, to do it the right way.

And why, why I'm getting to the heart like what is in you that makes I agree with you, I love it, I love you.

And everything about that and the stuff that I do is 100% focused on truth, clarity, integrity and all the rest of those beautiful words.

But I want to know why you care about that so much.

Because.

Because in my world, my clients don't sell commodities.

They're not selling a pencil, they're not selling a can of soup.

There's.

What they're attempting to do is to change the individual, to change the, the heart, the mind, the physical body or the spirit of the individual.

And that is where the outcome happens, is by getting people to do the things that are necessary.

But here's the thing.

If you are a transaction based douchebag marketer, the things that you do to get the sell violate the things that get the people to take the action that makes the difference and the change.

So if you are sincere about wanting to help somebody, then you can't just sell them.

You have to get them to be able to do it in the direct response industry.

And this is true for some of my clients.

Unfortunately.

20 years ago people would talk about oh I've got a 20 CD trainer, 20 DVD training program and oops, the printer made a mistake in the fifth video.

The fifth DVD is all blank but nobody ever gets there, so we never get any complaints.

So consider that mindset.

Whether the content is good or not, these people are creating content not with the intent of actually making a change.

They're doing it to make a buck, to make money.

And for me, back to my sole purpose, back to which is voice, back to My objective of changing the world, I need my clients, customers to implement what they learn.

And if they don't implement it, then why are we doing it?

Right?

And so that's, that's where it all boils back to me, is like, I want to make a difference in the world.

And I know that I could do that with my clients.

But we have to note that we have to build intimacy with the customer in order to create trust.

Because we're not asking them to spend a thousand dollars or $5,000 or whatever the money is.

No, we're asking them to change who they are.

That is fundamentally a deeper investment than any amount of money that we ask for.

I love it.

That is just.

Exactly.

Finally.

Not finally, but I'm grateful that you're passionate and anybody watching this that can't figure out that this is near and dear to his heart's not paying attention.

And I appreciate you answering that because that's all that matters.

We are built to love and serve each other.

We have all kinds of crazy ass experiences that drag us away from that, that make us doubt our voice and our purpose and meaning.

But when we connect to the truth of who we are, we are built to love and serve.

And that requires authenticity, transparency, honesty, and all those cool buzzwords that float around that most of the time don't mean anything.

So it requires that you as the.

For you as the individual, whether it's you or someone watching this or for me, even if I care about other people and I'm here to serve them and I'm here to help them improve their life, that means that I have to treat them with respect.

And not only that, I have to learn about them because I.

Because how I think and how I act is different than how you think and how you.

We might have similar values, but we're also different people and we have different ways of gathering information and processing it.

And so if I want to help you, I need to learn about you and I need to be able to communicate to you the training or the service or whatever in the language that you speak about what's important to you.

Right.

And so that's, you know, as a marketer, that's where that messaging comes in.

But fundamentally, the objective is to model out the system, to be able to not just generate the sale, but to be able to get the customers, to get the results.

Thank you.

Results oriented.

So I love it.

And I want to ask you now because.

Obvious number.

Several things are obvious.

One, you're serious about it.

Two, you're successful.

With it.

And three, you're passionate about the truths that you have just taught.

And let there be no mistake, for those that are listening, what Michael has said is the truth.

It's the truth of our beingness as humans.

It's not just an idea that he happens to hold.

So, Michael, people are going to want to find out more to follow up to, you know, see what you can do for them or maybe engage with you in some way or buy some membership or program that you might offer.

Where should I go?

And I'm speaking for all the listeners to find out something more about.

I've been moved, so where do I go?

So let me do a couple things I'm going to send to you to make available to your audience a couple of white papers.

One is on the publishing industry that goes into extensive detail about the form and function and roles and responsibilities in the industry.

It's called how to Publish a best Selling Book.

The other document that I'm going to send to you is a document called the 12 Steps of Intimacy.

And what this talks about is what we use for our clients instead of funnels.

Funnels is a push process, not pull where we are in pendulum.

It's about community and relationship and all of those things.

It's not about pushing, it's about pull.

12 steps of intimacy is based on the work of Desmond Morris, which is used today by a very large portion of marriage counselors in helping to help relationships heal and get back together.

We use it for mapping out what we do in an intimate world.

In a non intimate world.

Right.

So our conversation is intimate.

Your audience is in a non intimate world environment.

Right.

Because they're not, they're not asking us questions.

They're not here.

You and I are intimate.

We can see each other and talk and the whole thing.

And so the, the thing is that your physiology and psychology and spirit when you're in the real world versus in a non intimate world, the Internet and marketing advertising is the same.

You are not a different person in those two environments.

The differences in an intimate environment, we unconsciously or subconsciously do things in our engagement with other people that allows for the, the relationships to be built, but it's not consciously done.

But we're still doing things.

So what you do then in marketing in non intimate environments is determine all of the little things that you don't think about in the intimate environment and make sure that you're doing all of those same things in a non intimate environment.

You're very intentionally planning out to make sure that all of those things are there because the person that's going through that engagement is still a human being that has the same views as they would in the intimate environment.

And so that 12 steps goes into kind of the, you know, the ethics that we're talking about a few minutes ago of direct response douchebag versus relationship marketing.

This is the kind of the structure, the human structure on how to build intimacy and relationship with your audience.

So that sounds really for you to share with your audience.

Thank you.

Those sound very valuable.

And we'll figure out how to make them available.

Podcasts go on platforms, but we'll figure it out in terms of with show notes or downloadable things.

Michael is there.

I want you to tell me anything that I didn't ask you that is on your heart that you really want people to know.

There's.

Well, there's lots of things I want people to know that's on my heart, but it probably would take another interview or two to get all of that out.

Well, maybe we should do that.

But tell me now for this one because we're about at our normal time.

So tell me that.

I'd love to be able to go to 12 Steps for your audience and what that means.

I'd love to talk about buyer Personas.

I'd love to talk about Pendulum, for that matter.

Right.

Because it contextualizes things.

But I think really the most important thing that I'd like our audience to take away is the quote that I gave earlier from Roy Williams that the winners and losers in life are determined when the teams are picked.

The first team are those that select you to be on their team, and the second are those you select to be on your team.

And what I would urge your audience to do is to make sure that they are picking the right teams to be on and that they're picking the right people to be on their teams, because that's where their ultimate joy, satisfaction, and success will come from.

Michael Lovett, thank you for being with me today.

And thank you for sharing from your heart and your passion about who you are, what you're doing in the world, and how you hope to affect, because you and I are just lined up on that 100%.

I love that.

And so you've given us a fabulous set of things to think about, and I really appreciate you.

You're welcome.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.

I want you eyes all to take this seriously.

Listen, this guy has done well.

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Follow it and begin now to create your ultimate life.

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