Yesterday, on the Pathways to Paydays Summit, one of the people who accepted hotseat coaching was at step 0 of her business.
She has no sales, no clear offer, no real business.
I gave her a piece of advice which I believe will also be powerful for hundreds of you in my community because few people will say it.
Continue reading “The Small Goal That Makes a Big Win”I would rather my daughter watch violent movies than the children’s cereal commercials I grew up with.
At least the violent movies are honest about their message.
Do you remember the classic 1980s and 1990s cereal commercials? Cute little cartoon characters with funny little taglines.
“Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids.”
“They’re always after me Lucky Charms.”
A good marketing or sales message solves a problem that the audience has. The easiest way to know what problem the audience has is to give them the problem. An effective commercial will create the world in which you need their product.
Think of the infomercial where a person opens their kitchen cabinet and an avalanche of storage containers falls on them. Then they offer you a much more efficient set of storage containers.
Never in my life have I opened a kitchen cabinet and had a thousand containers fall on me, but as I watch the infomercial, I am thinking that maybe I should get their storage solution because they’ve drawn me into a world where such problems happen.
Remember the Fruity Pebbles commercials of the 90s?
Fred and Barney are supposed to be best friends, yet the theme of every single ad is that Barney is trying to steal Fred’s cereal.
What’s the moral lesson of this story? If you have something you like enough, then you keep it all to yourself and never share.
How about Trix?
“Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids.”
“Silly person whose not like us, you don’t deserve the good things that we have.”
Only the people in the privileged class (kids) deserve the best things (Trix). The conceit of the ad is built on the same philosophical underpinnings as segregation laws.
Now you see why I’d be more comfortable with my daughter watching John Wick than an old cereal commercial.
At least the moral lesson of John Wick is about love and loyalty, not racism and selfishness.
World building is a powerful part of any sales or marketing message, and it is as dangerous as it is powerful.
Think of the events in the coaching industry, the ones built around giving you knowledge as a way to draw you in to make an offer.
There’s nothing wrong with this format, just like there’s nothing wrong with a TV commercial, but where it becomes problematic is when the world created is not entirely accurate.
If you’re attending an event like this, it is likely because you think the host knows something worth learning. So, if they teach you that rapid action is the key to success, and they are successful, you’ll internalize that idea that rapid action is good.
But what if they are only teaching this so that you’ll take rapid action to buy their program.
How about if they teach you that worrying about risk is overrated, and that taking massive risks with limited research is the path to riches?
But they are teaching this because they want you to think less of the risk of buying their program.
Maybe you don’t buy into their program, but you adjust your risk tolerance based on what this expert taught you and you mortgage your house to buy into some risky scheme and lose it all.
The advice wasn’t actually good advice, but was simply advice meant to compel you to a particular self-serving course of action.
After 25 years of studying sales, I can sniff out when someone has crafted their lesson to “teach” me what I need to know to make the decision they want me to make.
When this happens, I learn that I cannot trust a single word out of their mouth. If they are always selling and always closing, then when are they truly teaching?
If their lessons are built around pushing me to buy the next program, can I trust them to ever stop selling if I do buy in?
The way we do one thing is the way we do everything, right?
It’s okay to plant seeds in a sales process, but it’s not okay to turn your event into a jungle of manipulation.
The reason that people sell this way is that it works. They get you in for three days, live or online, draw you into their world, and after all that time, your reality is shifted enough that you’re ready to make decisions you wouldn’t other.
Unfortunately, if you don’t end up buying, then you leave with your reality warped, not shifted.
The better way is to approach the situation with the primary desire to serve, teach, and support.
The better way is to go into your event with the primary intention that every, single person who has trusted you with their time (and possibly money) will leave that event better for having met you whether or not they buy anything.
The better way is to share the best of what you know and who you are and trust that the right people will be attracted to work with you.
Recently, I saw this image on Facebook…
Being a know-it-all, I assumed I know the “right” answer.
I shared my thoughts, and invited the thoughts of others, and discovered that I did find the right answer for me, but that it’s dependent on where one is in life.
My initial thought was that the $1,000,000 was the right way to go. With the 50/50 shot had a 50% chance of getting nothing, and the money, effectively deployed, could create massive traveling opportunities and give me the chance to hang out with whoever I wanted.
On further reflection, I’ve found that each choice is correct at a certain place in life.
This is a great choice… if you have the knowledge and discipline to use it correctly.
With that kind of money, you have money to pay the bills for long enough to effectively deploy the rest of the cash to develop additional assets.
However, there are some people for whom this would be a terrible choice.
If your thought is “I want a million bucks because I could buy a house and a car and take a vacation,” then you shouldn’t choose this.
Why? Because you want to buy liabilities.
When the money is spent, you’ll find yourself worse off than before. That house will need maintenance and incur taxes. The car will cost taxes and require maintenance.
Likewise, if you already have over a million dollars in assets, then the million is just your next million.
A comment from a real estate investor friend made me realize the value of this choice. His worth is over a million dollars, so a million dollars would just be another million.
If he lost this bet, he’d still be in good shape, and if he won it, it would take him straight to the next level.
On the other hand, for someone who doesn’t have wealth, the downside risk doesn’t make sense.
If you know what to do with a million dollars, then you could leverage that into increasing wealth and it would give you the opportunity to hang out with whomever you want.
However, if you’re still in the place where you think about buying liabilities rather than assets with the money, spending time with the rich person would teach you how to use money to create wealth rather than to get things.
One person commented that they’d want to be paid to hang out with the rich person, which completely missed the point. People waste hundreds of thousands of dollars to get “education” at college, but they wouldn’t take the opportunity to get the massive opportunity of hanging out with the right people for free.
Heck, if you have the opportunity to carry the bags of a billionaire in exchange for hanging out with them and no pay, that’s still a fantastic deal.
At first I thought this one didn’t fit. I thought it was a wrong choice, but I recognized two scenarios in which this would make sense.
The first is for someone who is very young and immature. If you are not in a place where you would recognize or appreciate what the rich person could teach you, the travel gives you the opportunity to develop that maturity.
The other is someone who is just done. Life has beaten you down so much that you just want to go on vacation forever.
This is the one of the four options that does not directly lead to the next level of opportunity. However, it makes sense for someone who either isn’t prepared to receive and leverage the other three, or someone for whom this is the final step they’re seeking.
What do you think?
Do you agree with this reasoning?
What would you choose?
Recently, I wrote about what is coming with Covid and what businesses need to do to adapt.
We know how to end Covid. Masks, contact tracing, targeted lockdowns, and curtailing large gatherings prevent spread. Vaccines shut down whole variants.
Like seatbelts and vitamins, all these tools only work if we use them. People will only use them when everyone perceives Covid to be serious enough to act on.
Continue reading “When Will Covid End?”
(Note added August 10th, 2021): In this article, I suggest that Lambda is vaccine resistant, and will cause a major spike. Since writing this article, further research has shown that Lambda does not seem to be vaccine resistant. However, this does not mean that the events I describe will not happen. It only means that they will not happen right now with that one particular variant. The general point remains valid.
A month ago, I looked at the data available to me and predicted that within a month or two, we would see masking come back and possible lockdowns. Now that these have come to pass, I want to be more intentional in sharing what I am seeing.
Covid is not only not over but what is coming in the next 18 months will be worse than the previous 18 months. The difference is that the warning signs are here and businesses have time to prepare, if they know what to prepare for.
I’m not going to talk about the politics or the underlying causes. The purpose of this article is to share with business owners and anyone else who needs to prepare a general idea of what we might expect in the next 18 months, and what you can do to prepare your business.
What’s Happening?
Delta is giving us a preview of what variants will do. It’s high infectivity and partial vaccine resistance are causing numbers to rise again, mask mandates to return, and uncertainty in people’s plans and activities.
Continue reading “Covid Part II — What you need to know to prepare your business”It is super hip and woke to crap on billionaires these days. The narrative is that people like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk are sitting on hoards of wealth accumulated by seizing the labor of the workers.
A billionaire could literally dedicate their entire fortune to eradicating disease in the world and they’d probably still have people complaining. Not probably. That’s exactly what Bill Gates is doing. And that’s the reaction he’s getting.
Is their wealth really theft?
Continue reading “Why Do We Hate Billionaires?”We should always be suspicious when someone who writes, thinks, and speaks for a living opines on how lazy people are.
The Day, in their July 3rd edition, published a piece by professional writer and pundit Cal Thomas entitled “Getting Paid Not to Work Is Addictive.“
In it, he laments that human nature leads people to be lay about, taking advantage of enhanced unemployment to indolently bum around at home. He paints in your mind a lazy laggard who drinks and plays video games as the rest of us hard working folk put money in their bank account.
Nice story. Too bad it is mostly fictitious, and largely classist. The reality is that working is expensive.
When my daughter was in daycare, it cost $270 per week. That’s for one child.
Minimum wage in Connecticut is $12 per hour, which means that a 40 hour week pays $480. That assumes that you can get 40 hours, which you probably can’t.
Take out $270 for childcare, and now you’ve got $210 left. That’s before taking taxes, the cost of getting to and from work, and all the other costs of working. Can you live on $150/week? Didn’t think so.
In his article, Thomas pontificates, “It makes one wonder what happened to…the ‘work ethic’ when work was seen as a noble.”
Perhaps what happened is that work became less noble when wages remained stagnant for 40 years while the cost of living rose. Maybe it’s that workers are treated like replaceable cogs, liabilities rather than assets, due to misguided “lean business” philophies.
Or it could be that the concept of “work ethic” has always been an idea propagated by those who profit from cheap and abundant labor to convince people to work long hours, exhaust themselves too much to think, then sooth their fatigue with consumerism.
I know quite a few millionaires. None of them work more than 40 hours a week. Most of them less than 20. They deploy their resources efficiently, leverage connections, and find the places where their time most efficiently converts into money.
Anyone can do what they do, but it takes time and energy to learn to do it, to make a plan to do it, and to actually do it. Someone who is struggling to figure out how to pay the rent on $150 per week has neither time nor energy.
However, what happens when that person is given the time and the space to decompress, think, and explore? They start to discover opportunities that they were never aware of before. They find that they can start a business. They find jobs that pay considerably more than what they were settling for. They may even find that, net of childcare and other expenses, it makes more sense to be a single income household.
What would this look like in the macroeconomic numbers? Lower labor force participation, higher wages, more business starts. Just like we are seeing right now.
Covid support didn’t make people lazy. It made them creative. Maybe if Mr. Thomas got away from his computer and did some real work once in a while, he’d see that.
Michael Whitehouse is a motivational speaker, mindset coach, connector, and he helps people make a living by avoiding miserable, soul crushing work. If you’re interested in how you could shift from survival work to thriving work, set up a complimentary coaching session.
I often see discussions on business forums on personal appearance and professional appearance. People will talk about having to dye their hair back to normal colors or hide the more colorful parts of their personality from their social media.
The solution is not to remove your unique elements. Rather it is to clearly lean in to them 100%. Be the most awesome and badass version of yourself.
Above is the LinkedIn profile picture for RJ Redden. She is a marketing consultant that I met at the Strategic Alliance Live conference last week. She was there, googles, cape, purple hair and all and not a single one of the hundreds of highly successful entrepreneurs in attendance blinked an eyelash at her attire.
In fact, the reason I know her is that our conversation started with me saying: “I don’t know you, but your goggles tell me I want to.” I was right. She’s awesome.
The place you get in trouble is when you are apologetically yourself. When you sneak into the room with purple hair and wonder how people will react. She didn’t wonder. She knew. Her demeanor said “If you have a problem with my googles, that’s your problem, not mine.”
It’s 2021 and all the rules are in flux. No one knows what the cultural norms are, so why not make your own.
By the way, she has this super cool personality assessment tool. You should go there and check it out.
You might enjoy my impactful daily Morning Motivation podcast. Less than 5 minutes a day to get you fired up and ready for greatness. Listen and subscribe at http://morningmotivation.fun.
2020 was the year of the pivot. The world that we had all known had ended. It was time to adapt to a new world.
We launched new businesses. Created new projects. Developed new products.
And now…
The world that we pivoted in has ended, and we are, umm, here, I guess.
Continue reading “Post-Pivot Pivot”
As I often do, I made a social media post which was intended to remind people of their power to control their responses to their world. In this case, the post was “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” The intent of the sentiment is that we cannot prevent painful things from happening to us, but we can choose our response to it and whether we choose to suffer in that pain or deal with it in other ways.
Some people were inspired by this post and others were offended. I was hurt by their taking offense. I understood that those who were upset read the words through the lens of their experience and took a different meaning from that which was intended. What it took some time to recognize was the source of my own pain at the misunderstanding.
Continue reading “We Are All Damaged”