No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy

This Book is For:

*Extremely ambitious entrepreneurs who always want to go faster faster faster, and who want to learn how to focus all of that excess energy into the high-leverage activities that will help them accomplish their goals sooner.

*Business owners and leaders at all levels in the corporate hierarchy who want to learn the open secrets and best practices of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country, including mindsets, strategies, and tactics they can use to wield greater influence and make a larger impact within their organizations.

*Anyone who is perpetually dissatisfied with the "culturally approved" pathways to success, and who harbors secret suspicions that there's a better, more exciting, and more profitable path forward that most of the people around them either can't or don't want to see.

*Creative thinkers and visionaries who are willing to work harder and longer than most people, but who want to be steered toward the activities and inputs that are going to make the biggest difference, and who don't want to waste time traveling the "slow lane" to success (or be held back by the advice and thinking of people who will never be successful at any speed).

Summary:

“Naturally, the 80 percent diligently obeying all the rules made for them and by them despise the 20 percent who defy some of the rules and the 1 to 5 percent who defy ALL the rules and get extraordinary, exceptional, infinitely better results.

If you listen to and conform to the 80 percent, you will be one of them. Here, I’m showing you how the top 1 percent to 5 percent think and act very, very differently, and get very, very different results.”

-Dan S. Kennedy

Most of the advice you're likely to receive out there - regardless of whether it's well-meaning or malicious in intent - is going to come from unsuccessful people who do not have what you want in life. But ask yourself: if you don't want to live like them, why are you listening to them?!

In this book, legendary marketer and multimillionaire-maker Dan S. Kennedy inspires you to seize control of the very last of your human freedoms - the freedom to choose your own way and walk your own path. He shows you why you should follow the law but not the rules, and how you can claim the kind of rewards - financial, emotional, and otherwise - usually reserved for the top 1% of our society.

The truth is that each of us possesses a dizzying amount of personal freedom, but our awareness of that tremendous power has been sucked out of us by a society that doesn't want any of its semi-depressed, psychologically-stunted worker ants to escape and realize they could actually ask for more out of life.

As just one example of many I could give, here's what society tells you at every step of your journey through life:

*Get Married (Sink $20K Deeper Into Debt)
*Buy a New Car (Sink $50K Deeper Into Debt)
*Go to College (Sink $100K Deeper Into Debt)
*Buy a House (Sink $500K Deeper Into Debt)

Then Society Says: "Congratulations!!!"

Suddenly, you're saddled with $670,000 of debt or more, forced to slave away at a job you (probably) hate for 40+ years, fed scraps tossed from the plates of your employers bringing home 10X more than you, toiling in obscurity and insecurity for decades of the most precious, vital years of your life...

And what's more is that this obsequiousness is met with shining approval and words of encouragement and praise from masses of desperately unhealthy and unhappy people who are being forced into the very same trap as you are.

For what it's worth, I will admit that it's possible to be happy and healthy while doing all of the above: getting a "good" job, getting married, buying a house, etc. Maybe you like what you do, and you are actually staying on top of your health and fitness while working a corporate job that adequately pays for your lifestyle. Too many people in the entrepreneurship space ruthlessly rip on 9-5s without ever considering that for a meaningful number of people, there's nothing "wrong" with that life at all! It can work for some people.

So no, I'm not here to say that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, or a "laptop millionaire" or anything like that. But if you do want more out of life, it's available to you, and Dan Kennedy's books will show you how to get there.

Speaking for myself, I'm not really a rule-follower by nature, so this book naturally spoke to me and my propensity to search for a better, more efficient, more profitable way of doing business and realizing my entrepreneurial vision. Exactly as the title says, it's an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of the shamefully bad advice out there about how to succeed in business and in life.

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules dismantles ideas like these and others that hold too many good people back from achieving astronomical levels of personal and financial success:

*Positive Thinking is the Answer to All Your Problems

*You Need a College Education to Be Successful in Life

*You Should Be Humble and Non-Threatening at All Times

*You Need to Have Brilliant, All-Original Ideas to Get Rich

*It Takes Money to Make Money in This World

*Some People Were Born to Be Successful and You Weren't

*All You Have to Do is Just Never Give Up

Many of these statements are half-truths at best, applicable in some situations and not others, and all of them have a deeper level of nuance to them that most people just don't understand (or are never taught).

For example: positive thinking is great! But it's not the answer to everything, and sometimes, reality-based, neutral thinking is what's called for.

You don't need a college education to be successful, but it's right for some people; and necessary for certain careers and life paths but ruinous for other people.

Sometimes you do have to be more aggressive and assertive - to take up more space in this world - and as Zig Ziglar said, timid salespeople have skinny kids.

You also don't need original ideas - the massive money is made in the execution of ideas, not just having them. The graveyard is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world because of the value of the ideas that are buried there.

Having money can definitely help you make more money, but it can also sink your wealth-creation efforts in surprising, non-obvious ways.

Many successful do have natural talents and abilities, but there's a whole other layer to their lives and stories that most people don't see. So natural ability and unfair advantages aren't the whole answer either.

And sometimes, giving up is the right answer! Sometimes you should stop trying to succeed in one area so you can free up time, energy, and other resources and put them into something else that will work. All these ideas and more are explored in this book, and knowing these things could save you decades of wasted and unnecessary pain and frustration.

Again, most of the advice you're going to hear out there in the world will come from people who will never be successful and will never get what they want out of life. That may sound harsh, but it's true. Real success - and the accompanying massive paydays - are reserved for those daring enough to break free from convention and play by their own rules. I've done it, Dan's done it, and now he shows you how to do it here in this book. He'll show you how to crush convention, command respect, and conquer your rivals on your road to success.

Your best thinking of yesterday is simply the old baggage you're carrying around today, and a lot of this outdated, antiquated, and sometimes downright harmful advice needs to be swept aside if you're ever going to the ascend to the heights you're truly capable of reaching.

The bottom line here is that there’s always a way to succeed, but you’re not likely to find it by following the crowd. To borrow from The Third Door, by Alex Banayan (another excellent book), life is like a nightclub. Most people are standing in line in front of the main entrance, waiting patiently, quietly following the rules, hoping eventually to get in. There’s also the VIP line going back in the opposite direction, where celebrities and people with money and connections also clamber to get in. Then there’s “the third door.” 

The third door is the one you make yourself. It’s where you go around the back of the building, crack open a window, climb in through the kitchen, slipping past security and the rest of the staff unseen and making your own way in. Dan Kennedy’s book will help you find the third doors that exist all around us, as well as show you how to make your own. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.

Key Ideas:

#1: Reasoned Optimism > Positive Thinking

“Give up forced ‘positive thinking’ or ‘motivation’; instead, build a solid foundation of strong self-image, well-defined goals, practical plans, and know-how that naturally produce positive expectancy, initiative, and follow-through. Cultivate REASONED optimism. Have something tangible to believe in and to be excited about - not just excitement itself.”

There's nothing necessarily wrong with positive thinking, unless of course it's all you do. There's even a place for neutral thinking, which Dan Kennedy would no doubt appreciate. But reasoned optimism is a solid approach. It's about giving yourself reasons to be optimistic, rather than puffing yourself with meaningless motivational phrases and manufactured confidence.

True confidence comes from competence, from being good at something, building real-world skills that you can deploy in service of getting what you want out of life. The false confidence that comes from positive thinking is ephemeral, flimsy, and likely to collapse at the first sign of real struggle or challenge.

In place of positive thinking, extend yourself, and expend real effort in becoming competent, so that you can look back at what you've done and draw confidence from your "reference experiences" - times when you've done this before, times when you've succeeded. Then you can be positive because you possess real confidence stemming from competence. It's one of the only kinds of mindsets that can survive first contact with reality.

#2: A Story About Why Natural Ability Doesn't Matter

“The activities in which I have become very successful and from which I make large sums of money are instructive because of how ill-suited by ‘natural ability’ I am to them.

For example, for more than twenty years, I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a professional speaker. I stuttered badly for a while in my youth, I was shy (I still, frankly, am not much of a ‘people person’), and when I started speaking I was downright awful, awkward, and uncomfortable. My earliest audio cassettes are so bad and embarrassing I try to buy them back when I find them.

I make the lion’s share of my living writing - 36 books have gone through bookstores; millions of dollars a year of my self-published books, manuals, courses, and newsletters are sold worldwide. And a large membership organization was built on the foundation of my writing. I have been and am routinely paid six-figure project fees as an advertising copywriter.

As I recall, I got a C in creative writing, a B in journalism, and my English teacher in my junior and senior years in high school suggested I’d make a great plumber. Several critics have made similar suggestions since then. And I would only agree to this extent: I doubt very seriously that I have any ‘natural’ writing talent. But I can certainly write for dough.

Instead of talent, I own what I call highly developed skills. These do not come out of the womb already installed. They are made through determination, study, and work.

I think the idea of ‘natural ability’ is, at best, irrelevant. The argument of genetics versus education and environment is almost irrelevant. Not necessarily invalid, just irrelevant.

If you are limited in a particular area, if you really do lack natural talent, you can make up for it if you determine to do so. If you happen to have some natural talent in an area in which you desire to excel, celebrate and build on the advantage gratefully. But either way, you can do pretty much whatever you set your mind to do.”

#3: Big Commitment to Big Goals Build Big People

“In fact, some excellent career or business advice is to pick endeavors because of the type of person the endeavors will force you to become.

An early mentor used to urge people of very limited financial means to commit to the goal of becoming a millionaire, not so much for the money, he explained, but because of the people they would have to become, the positive characteristics and behaviors they would have to develop in order to achieve the financial benchmark.

He was widely misunderstood on this point and perceived by some to be a preacher of greed. What he meant, simply, was:

Big commitment to big goals build big people.”

Negative conditioning in the areas of money and wealth-building can obscure the fundamental point behind Dan Kennedy's advice here. But hey, people are going to misunderstand you anyway, so you may as well just get rich in spite of them. The fundamental truth you have to convince yourself of is simply this: there are many paths to self-overcoming and to personal development, and the achievement of worldly success is just one of many valid paths to realizing your potential.

Some people aim to conquer space, others commit to working toward their Ph.D. Some people target the achievement of an Olympic gold medal or a world championship, and still others throw their heart and soul into building wildly profitable businesses. There are many as great lives that it's possible to live as there are people to live them.

What they all have in common, however, is that those pursuits - when taken up in good faith and with the intention of committing one's heart and soul to the endeavor - enlarge the person undertaking that quest. To use a Simpson's expression, those noble pursuits "embiggen the smallest man." Pursuing something (single-mindedly, drawing upon all your talents and capacities) is the growth choice, and you don't have to explain yourself to anyone.

Remember this the next time someone tries to belittle your pursuit of wealth, or questions your dream of building a better life for yourself. Big commitments to big goals build big people, and how you choose to grow is your choice and yours alone.

#4: Oh Yeah, and College Doesn't Matter Either

“College graduates, on average, out-earn non-college graduates by six figures to, at most, a million dollars, lifetime. That IS an argument in favor of a college education, although a million dollars divided over 40 to 60 years of active work is not as gigantic as it sounds stated as a lump sum.

Look closer and here is what you will discover: If college actually prepares you for anything, it is for a job. College does not prepare you to be entrepreneurial, and it certainly does not prepare you to get rich.”

I'll say right upfront that I went to university and I don't regret it one bit. So when I agree with Dan that university doesn't matter, I'm not saying this as someone who didn't have the opportunity to go, or who's criticizing it without knowing anything about the experience itself and all the benefits. And there are benefits - a multitude of them. It's just that if you didn't go to university, you're not a failure, and you're definitely not lost.

Some of the greatest times of my entire life happened while I was at university, and the friendships, connections, and social skills I picked up there have served me extremely well ever since. But there are lots of places you can gain similar benefits, and with the exception of certain careers where a degree is required (becoming a doctor, say), you definitely don't need a degree to be successful and live a fantastic life.

In fact, many of the millionaires and wildly successful business owners in my personal network aren't even all that smart. Seriously! They'd even say this themselves. Some of them wouldn't be able to pass an entrance exam, yet those same people earn more money in one year than your average university professor earns in ten years. Again: university degrees are not required to be successful.

Not only that, but you've almost definitely heard of rich college dropouts and broke, brilliant individuals with Ph.D.'s. So there are lots of reasons to go to university, lots of reasons not to go, and the choice (as always) is completely up to you. But there's one more thing to remember...

University is also an extension of the high school learning environment, one characterized by various authority figures telling you to follow the rules, do what you're told, do what they say, don't ask questions, wait your turn, follow this path, place your faith completely and totally in a system that doesn't care about your happiness one bit...and that's the exact opposite of being an entrepreneur.

#5: Arrogance is an Almost Essential Success Characteristic

“If you are not prepared to look anybody and everybody in the eye without blinking and tell them that you are the best at what you do and that you know your stuff, somebody’s going to kick your butt and send you home early.

And if you are not going to knock down doors, holler at the top of your lungs, make a miserable pest out of yourself, and do whatever else is necessary to attract attention and get your message across, the marketplace will simply pass you by.” 

This is probably the most misunderstood (but immensely powerful) piece of business/career advice in the entire book, and I'll use myself as an example here to show you why arrogance isn't the absolutely awful personal quality that most people think it is. At least not always. This is difficult to explain, but I'll try.

If you can, detach from your arrogance and use it as a tool, not as an unconscious, destructive aspect of your own personality. When I use arrogance as a tool, there's another, very real part of me that realizes that it's all for show. Even though I'll shoot a video featuring me reciting Hamlet's soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1 while doing 70lbs bicep curls, I also possess extreme intellectual humility, springing from the fact that I know basically nothing, compared to what there is to know. Sure, I've read a lot of books and can quote a lot of famous authors, but the knowledge stored inside my head is still vanishingly small when you think about the total knowledge that exists.

I wonder if the above explanation helped at all. Hopefully it did. I guess what I'm saying is that I possess the ability to loudly and confidently assert my right to be in whichever room I wish to enter, but that doesn't automatically turn me into a raging narcissist, and it certainly doesn't preclude me from treating every individual with whom I come into contact with dignity and respect.

These qualities, behaviors, and attitudes are not mutually exclusive. They can exist within the same individual and find expression at appropriate times when the situation calls for it. You don't have to be a jerk, even while you aggressively shove it in the world's face that you are here, and you will not be ignored.

What's more, you must do this or else you will be ignored. Speaking of people who have gained prominence in various fields and achieved popular success, Dan Kennedy says this:

“You don’t know them by accident. You know them because they purposefully set out to make you know them.”

Apologies in advance for swearing, but if you don't possess the ability to turn up your arrogance to the appropriate level at will, and in the appropriate places, you will get run the fuck over by people who do. You must think, move, act, and speak as though you deserve to be there, or else you won't be there for long.

Like I said, this is a difficult topic to speak about, because many of us grew up being taught that it wasn't polite to stand up, stand out, and assert ourselves. That pride and radical self-belief were somehow "wrong," and that we should be humble and quiet and "over there." This is flat wrong, and if you want to be taken seriously in the business world you'll need to get over this way of thinking.

You are no better than anyone else, but you're definitely no worse than anyone else either. There's a balance that can be struck between appropriate arrogance and being an unwelcome jerk, and most people can't really tell the difference when they've crossed over that line.

But I can tell you from experience that you're probably not too arrogant. If anything, you probably tend in the other direction, as most people do, so you could probably stand to turn up the arrogance a little bit. In this, as in all things, self-awareness and social intelligence is absolutely crucial.

#6: Command and Demand Respect

“In business, you must do everything you can to protect your ideas, information, and interests and to obtain full, maximum compensation for your knowledge and expertise. The respect granted you is the respect you command and demand.”

You teach the world how to treat you, and nowhere is this truer than in the modern business environment. You need to demand what you're worth, and expect to receive it, or you never will. Much of the corporate world is too competitive to operate in any other way, and as Zig Ziglar said, timid salespeople have skinny kids!

This is an extension of the previous Key Idea, but it's subtly different, and it still doesn't mean that you have to go around acting like a jerk. They've heard of you, because you've made them aware of your existence, and now you have to make them respect you and give you what you're worth. But, there are better and worse ways to go about it.

Be courteous, polite, and respectful, but be firm, damn it, and demand from the universe what's coming to you. Don't let people get away with siphoning off what's rightfully yours, thinking you won't notice or that you're too weak to do anything about it. Be dangerous. Be assertive. Be respectable.

#7: When They Show Up, Charge 'Em

“Give to charity, but never give in business. Place the highest possible value on your expertise and confidently present that value to the world. When they show up, charge ‘em. The meek and the humble may be very talented and capable but will all too often be overlooked or undervalued. Arrogance and self-promotion are necessary to advance in just about any business environment.”

I'm not letting go of this idea, because it's so critical to get this right. One of the ways that people undervalue themselves and sell themselves short is by not charging nearly enough for their products and services. Most people need to raise their prices. Still others need to stop giving away free work.

There's a lot more to this idea than I have space for here, but I'll lay out a few things I've learned, specifically from running my coaching business. On the one hand, you do want to stack the value of your offer as much as possible, by overdelivering and exceeding any reasonable standard of value that your prospective customer would find anywhere else.

For me, that looks like coaching right off the bat, during the sales call itself, even before they've paid me. To some, that might look like "working for free," but I don't see it that way. If I'm going to be spending a decent amount of time with this person, I want to know what they're like, and I want them to know what the coaching experience with me is like, so they can make an informed decision. So yes, I'll "coach them for free" during the initial assessment.

But I do not work for free. I don't offer handouts, and I don't do "just this one thing" in the "hope" that they'll pay me later. "Oh yea I'll take a look at your landing page for you." NO!! My time, effort, and knowledge is reserved for people with valid credit cards and who have made a firm financial commitment to purchase my advice. "Well I usually charge for this, but just this once..." NO!! I WILL NOT!!

Felix Dennis makes a similar point in his excellent (though somewhat tragic) book, How to Get Rich. On the subject of equity, he said that he would not give a single percentage point that he didn't have to. Ownership is the name of the game! Never, ever, ever give it up unless you absolutely have to! The meek and humble may inherit the earth, but not in this lifetime!

#8: "The Rules" are Barely Even "Suggestions"

“Things presented to me as THE RULES turned out not to be rules at all. They were just other people’s opinions, paradigms, ignorance, and bad habits!”

-Craig Proctor

Question everything in business, just as in life. One of the many, many reasons to read books like those of Jiddu Krishnamurti (and Dan Kennedy, of course) is that they get you to question all your assumptions about how the world is "supposed to" work, what's actually going on here, and what the rules are.

Because in a lot of cases (a surprising number), the rules are just made up.

Here's the real crazy part: the rules weren't put in place by anyone smarter than you! They just came before you, became habits and patterns of thinking for the people and wider society that raised you, and so you just kinda went along with them. You were like one of those baby elephants tied up with a string when you were too small to resist, and now that you've grown up, you're still being held in place by that little tiny string, even though you're a massive, full-grown elephant now that could easily rip it out of the ground if you believed you could. Sorry for calling you an elephant, but you know what I mean!

"The Rules" are just suggestions made up by someone else, and although many of them absolutely do have merit, you must question all of them. Especially the ones that seem too self-evidently true to be false.

They may not be true any more, if they ever were, and in business (again, just like in life), you need to be asking why that's the rule. What's it there for? What's its purpose and who proposed it? And most importantly, who does the rule benefit?

Incentives rule the world, and the status quo exists to serve the purposes of the people who built the structure. Rules often serve the people who made them up, and not you. So push back against them. Question them. Challenge them, and see if they're there for a good reason, or if they're just dust and smoke to serve the interests of the already powerful.

#9: Pick Fights and Get Paid

“Your ability to create fierce loyalty and enthusiasm for your cause, business, products, or yourself as a personality is restricted only by the extent to which you are willing to create fierce opposition.”

You can only create fierce loyalty and enthusiasm by inspiring strong emotions, and once you set out to do that, you'll inevitably create at least two distinct groups: people who love you, and people who f*cking hate you.

You literally can't have one without the other, and the worst outcome possible isn't that people should feel strong hatred towards you, but rather that they feel nothing at all. Like Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And we can say along with Oscar that the only thing worse than being hated is not being hated.

Not being hated means that nobody cares about you and your brand, message, and ideals. And this is another Key Idea that's super easy to misunderstand, because it's not about going out of your way to make people despise you; it's about being comfortable with it when it happens of its own accord, as a natural consequence of you showing up powerfully and effectively in the world.

It's also not about being rude, disrespectful, or needlessly antagonizing. But you have to be willing to take a stand and risk offending people, annoying them, or whatever else. Because if you're not willing to risk that, you'll end up playing it so safe and sterilized that your message will never be heard at all.

There are several books I'd recommend that go deeper into this idea (and that can help make you a ton of money in business), and they are: Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by Patrick Bet-David, How to Start a Cult, by Jody Raynsford, and So Good They Call You a Fake, by Joshua Lisec.

#10: Deserving It Won't Make It Happen

“If you wait to be discovered and rewarded based on merit alone, you had better bring a lunch and several good books because you’re going to be waiting a long, long time.

The bigger your ambitions, the more likely you are to offend people while achieving those ambitions. And your opportunity to have meaningful impact will be in direct proportion to your willingness to offend. What others perceive as arrogance may very well be the level of confidence, self-promotion, and pushiness necessary.

Also, arrogance magnetically attracts more than it repels because many people prefer association with an individual who is absolutely certain of himself and his convictions.

Leaders in fields, highest income earners, and most prominent figures become that by upsetting apple carts and disrupting the way things are supposed to be done.”

No one is going to pick you. No, you have to choose yourself first. "Place the crown on your own head" is a recurring theme of this book, because it's so important to understand if you want to build a wildly profitable business.

Don't worry about seeming arrogant to the people who don't matter (which is basically everybody). They can't "stop you" from being successful! There's no "mystical force" keeping you down, toiling away in obscurity...it's you. It's your comfort level, your unwillingness to put yourself out there, and your hesitancy to stand up and say "I am."

People want to follow the person who's most self-assured about where they're going, and yes, that requires a certain degree of arrogance and undeniable self-assurance. It's a magnetic quality, and people are desperate to follow those who possess it. As always, you have to ask the question: "Why not me?"

#11: Great Businesspeople Steal

“We rarely get paid for any original ideas. We get paid for creating profitable results - and nobody cares if we produced those results by originality and invention or just dogged implementation.”

I'll make a slight confession right here: some of my most viral reels on Instagram and posts on other platforms were inspired by other creators, with only slight adjustments (and hopefully improvements) to make them my own.

On YouTube, for example, I'll literally use the same video title as another creator who got massive views by using that same title. It's also perfectly okay to do so. There's no "copyright" on YouTube titles, and there are hundreds (probably thousands) of videos titled something like "I Read XYZ Number of Books on Money - Here's What Will Make You Rich." And no doubt you've seen videos like "How YouTube Changed My Life (With Less Than XYZ Subscribers)"?

Yeah: you can just...take that title. No one's going to come after you. You can make a better video than they did (that's the goal!), and then rake in views and AdSense dollars for years and years. It's called the "Skyscraper Technique," which I'll explain a little bit further down.

On Instagram, I once saw a reel about the best critical thinking books, and that reel got 250,000 views for the original creator. I created my own version of that video (using my own book recommendations, my own footage, my own caption, etc.) and my video got 1,000,000 views! And then you know what I did?

I reposted it several months later (after my current followers probably forgot about it, and my new followers hadn't seen it yet), and it got millions more views! I didn't invent anything! Sure, I had to read the books, offer my expert recommendations, etc. But I didn't have to come up with some "revolutionary" video format myself. I just used what works...and it worked.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you should keep reusing something over and over and over again until it stops working!

For example, in the Facebook Ads Library you can literally see every ad that's posted on Meta. They give you a whole bunch of useful information inside the Ads Manager too, which gives you a ton of insight into what's working already for other advertisers. And you can bet that if a particular ad has been running for months and months at a time, that ad probably prints money.

Knowing that, you can adopt elements of that advertisement for your own offer (it could even be from a completely different niche) and incorporate it into your own ad creative. This is called the Skyscraper Technique, where you basically take what's already been done well, and then you add to it - pile on top of it - to make it better and better. That's what I did with that Instagram reel, by the way. I took the original format, saw ways that I could make improvements, then added my own unique spin to it. The result? Millions of views and thousands of new followers.

Remember, like I always say: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." And I swear that I've never heard of Pablo Picasso.

#12: Easy Money Buys the Same Amount of Stuff as Hard-Earned Money

“When I go to the bank to make a deposit, nobody asks me: ‘Is this easy money or hard-earned money?’ The bank does not give me a bonus when I deposit hard-earned, hard-fought-for money. The bank does not penalize me for depositing money made easily. The bank doesn’t care.”

People have this strange sense of guilt about getting paid the easy way, when they really shouldn't. The truth is that nobody cares. Unless it was unethical or slimy or underhanded in some way, "easy-earned" money is accepted at just as many locations as "hard-earned" money. The spending power is literally the same.

Life is hard enough, and so you should take all the easy money you can get! Provided it's done in an ethical manner, ideally in the spirit of service and contribution. Which, coincidentally, is literally how value is created. You make other people's lives better in some way, you improve them, and they pay you money for that! Whether that's "hard-earned" or "easy-earned" is immaterial.

The bottom line is that guilt has no place in a well-run, values-first business. You may have unfair advantages that other people don't have, and of course there are people with unfair advantages that you don't have (and you should totally use every last unfair advantage you can find), but if you have a mental block, a script that's telling you that making money should be "hard," then I'm sorry to say, making money is going to be very hard for you!

#13: Run Experiments and Test Hypotheses

“Be wary of the ‘quitter’ label. Rethink your ideas about goals, persistence, success, and failure. Focus on ‘testing.’ And look for that which is easiest, most effective, and most efficient for you to do that can take you in the direction you want to go.

If you have diligently tested a plan, product, service, business, etc. and found it unrewarding, it is perfectly okay to bury it in the backyard and move onto a different opportunity or method.”

Another unspoken "rule" that most people don't think to question is that you should never, ever give up. Well that's just dumb, and I'll tell you why!

You can try to hammer in a nail by using a chainsaw, or...and stay with me on this one...you could use a hammer! If someone told you that using a chainsaw is how you put nails in boards, and you kept at it, for hours, "never giving up," well you're just doing it the stupid way. Give up, and try something else!

Successful entrepreneurs run experiments and split-tests, and we do so without being too hung up on "having the right answer" from the beginning. That's why we test things! We want to get to the right answer, but we don't care whether or not it's the answer we already have, or if there's a better way we haven't seen yet. So we run split-tests, talk to customers, try things, launch products, etc. We're trying to be directionally correct, without putting undue pressure on ourselves to have everything figured out from the very beginning.

If something doesn't work, it's not that you failed (necessarily), it's just that you found one way that didn't work. Like Thomas Edison and his 1,000+ iterations of the lightbulb. He didn't "fail" 1,000 times, he just found 1,000 ways that didn't work. Edison gave up more than a thousand times!

Then again, there's another side to this. A counterargument. You can't give up too quickly either! Maybe it's not that it "didn't work," but that it didn't work yet. You can't just post 10 YouTube videos and conclude that "YouTube doesn't work for me." Define what "success" looks like to you, commit to posting 100+ videos, making small, 1% improvements to each video, and then see where you stand.

#14: "They Just Got Lucky"

“Good luck exists. Some people are going to get ‘lucky breaks’ whether they deserve them or not, whether you deserved them more than they did, and there’s not a thing you can do about all that. It is as random as where raindrops fall. So don’t let yourself get eaten up inside with envy or jealousy.

Focus, instead, on putting yourself in as many situations and circumstances where good luck can occur for you as possible. Then you’ll get your share.”

We create the majority of our own luck through our movements and actions. We can increase the likelihood of becoming lucky - expand our "luck surface area" - by stacking the probabilities in our favor. And we can do this without worrying or caring about the size of anyone else's luck surface area. We can run our own race.

Some people have rich family members, astonishing good looks, off-the-charts intelligence, a key person of influence who believed in them at exactly the right time, or have experienced a one-in-a-million chance encounter that changed everything for them. Some people were born at the right place and at the right time, and some people ended up at the right place at the right time later on in life, but none of that makes a difference to you and your success. Whatsoever.

In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that you should be happy for other people's good fortune and that they should experience unbelievable good luck, because there's more than enough to go around, and the fact that someone else made it means that you can make it too. Provided, of course, that you make your own luck, by actively seeking out opportunities and stacking up your competitive advantages as consistently as possible.

The bottom line is that peering over into the other lane and inspecting all the lucky breaks that somebody else got is only going to slow you down. Again, run your own race. Dig deeper, make big, bold moves in the direction of your desires, and run as fast as you can to the places where good luck is most likely to show up.

#15: "The Rushing Sickness"

“In the book Profiles of Power and Success, Dr. Landrum notes that the super-achievers studied were all afflicted with a kind of ‘rushing sickness’: They ate, talked, drove, even slept fast.

Napoleon graduated from college in half the normal time. Walt Disney went on prolonged, fast-paced working binges broken up by periods of complete collapse, and slept on the couch at his office nearly half his adult life because he resented the time wasted commuting. At age 19, Picasso was turning out a new painting each day. He was warned by art dealers that he would ruin the market for his work. (They were wrong.)

Impatience and intolerance for anything impeding their progress characterized every super successful man and woman featured in this extraordinary book, which I recommend highly. As I think about it, the most successful people I’ve ever worked with - and there have been plenty of them - have exhibited both of these characteristics in great abundance.” 

There's another amazing book that I highly recommend, The Hypomanic Edge, by John D. Gartner, that goes into this as well.

The prefix "hypo" comes from the Greek word meaning "under" or "below," and in the term hypomania, it indicates a state that is less intense or below full-blown mania. Hypomania therefore refers to a milder form of mania, characterized by elevated mood, increased activity, or energy levels, but without the extreme behaviors or impaired judgment typically seen in full mania.

The author's argument is that any immigrant population is more likely to be seeded with people who could be characterized as hypomanic, given the energy, drive, motivation, and willingness to take risks necessary to pick up everything, brave unforeseen and unimaginable dangers, and attempt to settle an entirely new country. Incidentally, since America is a nation of immigrants, Gartner hypothesized that many of the people who built that country likely suffered from hypomania, and he went on to study the lives of people like Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton and others to prove this was the case.

Okay, so what does this have to do with business and making money? Well, money loves speed, and the hypomanic, afflicted with the "rushing sickness," is highly motivated to get after it. Hypomanics move move move - they take bold, aggressive action, and they seize the initiative wherever and whenever possible.

This is the approach that most successful businesspeople take as well, regardless of whether or not they'd meet the medical criteria for hypomania per se. You see this in the Napoleon biography as well. General Bonaparte couldn't sit still! He traveled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles over the course of his life, wrote tens of thousands of letters, proclamations, commands, and orders, and through his sheer relentlessness brought the entire continent of Europe to its knees.

You don't have to conquer a continent or found a country - you don't "have to" do anything - but in business it literally pays to move fast. It pays to move forward relentlessly, and to leave your competition bewildered and delirious in the dust.

#16: Leverage "Other People's Customers" (OPC)

“Then came the opportunity. A new client, Peter Lowe, sought me out, to consult on ways to boost revenue of his public success seminars.

One of the strategies I proposed was adding an unadvertised bonus speaker at the very end of the day, a surprise to the audience, an unknown person who, if advertised, would not pull audience, but who could sell info-resources successfully in that bad time slot, under those adverse conditions. (The speaker and his company split sales revenue 50/50).

He wanted to test the idea, and we agreed that I’d be the guinea pig. I had a suitable info-product that I sold from the stage. I appointed myself to the new position I had created.

The SUCCESS events were fast growing, quickly full days in 25 to 27 cities a year, in basketball arenas, with 15,000 to 25,000 attendees, brought from about a $1 million ad budget per city. Virtually all those attracted to these events were perfect customers for me. And I was there, every time, for nine consecutive years.

The audiences shrank throughout the day, so I often had only 2,000 or 3,000 staying to hear me. But still I would sell to 300 or so in every city, over 7,000 in a year; because of their quality, over 2,000 converted to ongoing customers/members. I was - for free - acquiring Peter’s best customers that cost him over $20 million a year to get. That was good, but there was a bigger benefit:

Being on these events with audiences of this size, events covered by media, along with former U.S. presidents, Hollywood celebrities, legendary entrepreneurs, as well as the top business and motivational speakers of the day like Zig Ziglar, made me a celebrity by association. It poured gasoline on everything. This lifted me as a book author, speaker at other events, and gave me a lot of access into many OPC ‘nests’ I would not have gotten without this celebrity.

I estimate its overall OPC effect was about 1,000 new ‘sticky’ customers/members a month vs. the old pace of 1,000 a year. That’s a 12X, for those weak in math. In many cases, OPC beats OPM, hands down.”

#17: You Actually Can Get Rich Quick

“If you’ll examine the source of all the warnings you’ve had against the idea of getting rich quick, you will find that most, if not all, have come to you from well-intentioned people who have not gotten rich at all, at any pace.”

Get rich quick exists, but get rich easy does not. Of course, it all depends on your definition of "quick." MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane, makes the distinction between the slow lane to wealth (patiently saving and investing), and the fast lane: entrepreneurship.

But even for him, "quick" means 5-10 years. And that is quick! I mean, it's very possible to start and sell a business for millions of dollars and to do this in less than five years. Sometimes it happens in one, sometimes it happens in ten, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but it's tough to get rich earning 0.02% interest on money sitting in the bank. You can save your way to wealth, sure, but it's not going to be quick. And certainly, wheelchairs don't fit inside the trunks of Lamborghinis.

It also depends on what "a lot of money" means to you. If $1,000,000 is a lot of money for you (and it would be for most people), it doesn't have to take you 10+ years to build a business that brings in that amount of profit per year. Profit, not just revenue.

If it's $1,000,000,000 you're after (and if so, I really have to question whether you've priced out what your dreams actually cost - either that, or you're most likely being driven by ego and insecurity), well obviously that's going to take a lot longer, and for most people it'll never happen, regardless of how "motivated" they are or how much they "grind."

I mean what's stopping you from building a company valued at "just" $3,000,000 and selling it within the next five years? Even after taxes, you could basically be retired for the rest of your life if you invested your money appropriately (slow lane) and lived well within your means.

But this whole idea of "You'd better be careful! Don't want to move ahead too fast!" is mostly promulgated by slow people who will never get rich at any speed, just like Dan says in the quote above. Again, it's all about nuance and critical thinking here. It's not "lottery ticket" thinking, or gambling, or whatever else, but rather a reality distortion field of sorts that you enter and that most people simply wouldn't understand. Slow people can't comprehend speed, and if you want to make a lot of money faster than they'd ever thought possible, you can. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's impossible. Smile politely, then do it anyway.

#18: Gather Unstoppable Momentum at All Costs

“Just about any rich person will tell you that slow is harder than fast, because it is almost impossible to create momentum while moving slowly.

A two-by-four across the tracks will bring a however-many-ton locomotive just starting to move to a grinding halt, while a train moving at full speed will turn that same board into toothpicks and the passengers probably won’t even feel the bump. If possible, you want momentum on your side.”

Dan Kennedy writes in several places of what he calls THE PHENOMENON, something I'm experiencing in my business right now actually. What he's referring to is a period of time when money is coming in quickly and easily; opportunities are presenting themselves left and right - more than you know what to do with - and it seems like nothing can slow you down.

If you suddenly find yourself experiencing THE PHENOMENON, while it's here you've got to capitalize on it, double down on it, throw your full weight into your current strategy, and squeeze every last drop of life out of the opportunities you've been given. Move fast. Move with speed and deadly precision (and gratitude), or else THE PHENOMENON will pick itself up and go visit someone else.

Remember: money loves speed. Money loves people who take bold ( yet calculated) risks and massive action, and you can trigger THE PHENOMENON in your own life by following up on every single opportunity and chance that's presented to you. Myself, I literally write them down. Every promising opportunity, connection, and chance I have to make exhilarating forward progress on my current goals. I review my Opportunities List every single day and make sure to move them all forward. And I make sure that I am moving FAST.

#19: Beware of "Other People's Money" (OPM)

“The biggest problem with OPM is that it encourages waste, misplaced priorities, and complacency. The end result of this is the same as Margaret Thatcher said about socialism: ‘Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.’”

Speaking of unfair advantages, it isn't always a blessing to have large reserves of money or capital at your disposal, as it causes laziness, carelessness, and apathy, and can lead you to make stupid mistakes and walk straight into a disaster.

You see this in the children of ultra-wealthy people all the time (not all of them, of course, but an astonishingly large number) who end up depressed, adrift, and sometimes crippled by addictions because they have more cash than wisdom, more money than emotional maturity. Don't let this happen to you!

Even if you do have access to OPM (Other People's Money), it may not be the best move to take it. If you're just given unfair advantages like this, someone else might come along whose unfair advantage is that they didn't have access to the same money or other resources. They may have had to develop these money-making qualities they're now using to demolish you in business. They could simply be hungrier than you, and this will be the very thing that helps them beat you.

That being the case, money (or lack of money) is no excuse, and can even be a hindrance to your success if it causes you to leave certain essential entrepreneurial characteristics underdeveloped. Take the money if you want, of course, just be damn sure what you're doing, and have protections in place to ensure that the extra cash doesn't leave you weaker and more vulnerable.

#20: "Supposed To" is For Other People

“Nobody in the herd would dream of working for free for a year. You will have no competition. This same principle applies to a lot of things other than getting a job. Certainly, to getting a desired client or account or customer. To getting a book published. To solving a problem.

Not hearing ‘no,’ doing what others won’t do, showing up differently, demonstrating tenacity have near universal application. In many such cases, you will be breaking the rules of how that situation is supposed to be handled and how you are supposed to behave. But ‘supposed to’ is for other people - not me, not you.”

To get what most people will never get, you have to do things they won't, can't, and refuse to do. You have to become someone they will never become, and you have to move through the world differently. "Supposed to" stopped applying to you the very minute you decide to become an entrepreneur.

Ignore the advice of anyone who doesn't have what you want, too, by the way. You're going to have lots of people tell you that something you're doing "isn't how it's done," or some variation of that refrain. Don't listen. Sure, take input and advice from others. Seek out wisdom and knowledge. Pursue excellence and never-ending improvement. Always! And read! Learn! Constantly! But at the end of the day, you have to return to yourself and decide what YOU think! What's right for YOU!

At this point, it's safe to assume that you won't go far wrong if you'll just do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. They are quite literally The Herd, and most people do not have what you want. Think differently! Act differently! Live differently! Be different!

Question everything, even and especially what I say and write. Always think for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Of course, it's a little bit trickier because sometimes the herd is actually right! This is an idea worth exploring. For example, do you want to buy a house?

Plenty of people would absolutely love to own their own home, and they structure their lives and make decisions around the pursuit of that goal, at least unconsciously. But whose idea was it that the be-all, end-all of human existence is to own a house? Do you actually want that? Some people do, and that's perfectly fine! That could very well be the right answer for them, and I'll never try to convince them to abandon their own ideas of what they want for themselves. But at the end of the day, you have to realize that most of the people who preach on and on about "the dream of home ownership" are actually realtors.

Go to college if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Get married if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a car if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a house if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). But don't do it because you're supposed to. You're an entrepreneur. A critical thinker and a massive doer. Your days as an unthinking member of The Herd are now over.

Book Notes:

“Reading this book is easy. Living it is hard.”

“We are a people in search of rules. It might have stopped when Moses came down from the mountain and announced: ‘Good news - I got Him down to ten.’ But even though few people manage to live by those, everybody wants more.”

“When you meet the Buddha of Conventional Wisdom on the road, aim for him and push the gas pedal to the floor.”

“Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

-Bertrand Russell

“Early on, I was not motivated to ‘get rich’ or inspired by positive visions of some grand and glorious future of fame and fortune. I was, instead, motivated by my HATRED for being poor.

A lot of people seem to resign themselves to being poor and get comfortable with poverty and failure. Not me. I absolutely HATED everything about it and every minute of it. I lived for a while with very ‘dark’ thoughts about my predicament, fueling a fierce determination to escape it and rise above it somehow, no matter what it took.

When I applied for my first job as a territory sales rep for a publishing company - offering a base salary, bonuses, and a company car that would make me NOT broke - I was rejected for being too young and too inexperienced by the national sales manager in town conducting interviews.

I was first depressed but quickly ANGRY. ‘I’ll be damned,’ I told myself, ‘if I’m going to let this bozo stop me from getting this.’ And the next morning, when he opened his hotel room door to grab the newspaper, he was quite surprised to see me sitting there, blocking his exit.”

“Who is to say what should motivate you? I say: whatever works.”

“In brief, Dr. Maltz became convinced that no amount of conscious positive thinking or attempts at willpower and self-discipline can overcome a negative self-image. Another way to say this is that whenever resolution is incongruent with the self-image, the resolution fails.”

“This is why, incidentally, for 40 years, I refused any speaking engagement where I was prohibited from selling my ‘tool kits’ from the platform. To get people all jazzed up about my ideas and then send them home without the tools they needed to make real changes and without securing their commitment to doing so is just one giant waste of everybody’s time.”

“You are not limited in business by what you know or can do - only by what capabilities you can organize. Nothing is really ‘beyond’ you if you go beyond yourself as is necessary for your goals.”

“I don’t need to know that - I have a button on my desk to push, to bring someone who does running into my office.” 

-Henry Ford

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Relying on academic theories and textbook case histories for your success blueprint in business is somewhat like relying on advice from poets on succeeding in the publishing business.”

“The only real financial security is your ability to produce.”

“And that’s the key: getting ‘education’ however you get it, that is relevant to your ambitions - and avoiding education not relevant to your ambitions.”

“An old friend of mine, James Tolleson, used to include in his speeches his story of graduating from high school in Boaz, Alabama, and being eager to get into the University of Alabama, where Bear Bryant coached, until he called up, asked for their course in becoming a millionaire, and discovered they didn’t have one.

Then he called around to a dozen other universities and, to his utter amazement, found that they didn’t offer such a course either. That ended his interest in attending college.

To this day, incidentally, you can get all the way through high school and college without taking a single course in basic financial literacy, let alone how you get and stay rich as an entrepreneur.

There is even a pervasive negative attitude about success ambition perversely flourishing at universities. A desire to get rich is considered crude and unenlightened by faculty, despite facts that their university is hoarding wealth in its endowment funds and that most of the facilities on campus as well as their salaries came and come from wealth.”

“I have nothing against college, incidentally, as long as the person going understands what it is and what it isn’t. For some careers, such as doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers, it’s essential. They have these rules about self-taught brain surgeons. But as I said, for most it is at best preparation only to work for and thus, be dependent on someone else.”

“When I make a bank deposit, they don’t deduct 10 percent because I made all that money without going to college.”

“Some individual or some short list of individuals can serve as your ‘college.’ Even without direct, personal contact, you can pick a few worthy models to make a deep, thorough study of.

For myself and my interests in writing and publishing to be a person of influence on certain philosophies to certain audiences, I’ve made Hugh Hefner, Ayn Rand, Napoleon Hill, Martin Luther, and several others subjects of my thorough, serious study. I own every book written on Hefner, a bookcase full of years of Ayn Rand’s newsletters, and the same for the others. As a self-promoter, I’ve done the same with Houdini. They have been my ‘professors.’

I guarantee that I have a better-than-a-Ph.D. education in advertising in the wall of books I have collected on the subject, from ancient masters to contemporary figures.

You can also go to work in the field you wish to exploit, in a company where you can learn a great deal by observation. Try to work in every job within the business. Consider working free if necessary. Be a sponge. Soak up everything you can. The individual who pays attention for a purpose every minute can gain 10 years of synthetic experience in ten months.”

“YOU can be as ordinary as toast but decide to be extraordinary and to do extraordinary things. Please do. Go out and accomplish something extraordinary, that commoners are not supposed to be able to do - America needs the examples.”

“The meek shall inherit the earth…but not in our lifetimes.”

-Mike Todd

“The poorly paid and average paid people in our field are all in the copywriting business. I’m not and you aren’t. I’m in the Gary Halbert business and you are in the Dan Kennedy business, and we have, as our deliverable, copywriting work. But we are in the self-aggrandizement and self-promotion business. Never forget it.”

-Gary Halbert

“Don’t undervalue what is ‘common knowledge’ to you but very uncommon knowledge to the other guy.”

“If they show up, bill ‘em.”

-Stuart Wilde

“I’ll bet that occasionally you mentally convert your paycheck into dollars per hour as sort of a checkup on how well you are doing. This is deeply ingrained in many people. It is also very limiting.”

“If you are going to achieve exceptional success, especially exceptional financial success, you have to break completely free of wage-earner thinking.”

“Until you take control of your own life, someone else will.”

-Jack Welch

“I suppose we have all been raised with the ‘politeness ethic.’ I know that I was. And I have often been chided and cautioned about being too aggressive, abrasive, arrogant. Warned about losing my temper. Urged to avoid offending others at any cost. I am now 69 years old. I’ve had a 50+-year career. From that, I can assure you that this is terrible advice.” 

“My own experiences with Gerry Spence, limited though they may be, have been fascinating to me. When he came into ‘the greenroom,’ the speakers’ waiting room backstage at a seminar, his presence took over the room. He is larger than life. In keeping with every criticism I’ve ever read of him, his ego seemed larger than life, too.

Backstage he is attention commanding and attention greedy. Onstage, while holding an audience of 15,000 in his hand, and coming across as most humble, there is still also arrogance - the first time we were on a program together, he deliberately ignored the meeting planner’s instructions and the huge blinking digital timer and went a whopping 20 minutes over his allotted time.

The second time, given stern instructions, the flashing timer, and a staff person pacing in front of the stage at his cutoff time, he did wind up, but he let the audience know he was being ‘forced’ to cut his remarks short and that he wasn’t pleased about it.

Yet, he has personally been very courteous and gracious to me. And I must tell you: He delivers the goods. His speech was excellent and meaningful. His book How to Argue and Win Every Time is so good, I bought copies for my clients. If I were in big legal trouble, I’d want Gerry Spence, insufferable ego be damned.

Things like this cause many to view him as arrogant: Showing off his huge, Architectural Digest-featured home, he told a Playboy interviewer, ‘You see this house and whatever else I have. It all comes from insurance companies. That’s like an Indian hangin’ out his scalps. These are my f-ing scalps.’

Spence is gentle when playing to an audience in person, to 12 or 12,000, or on TV. But in individual relationships, in conducting business behind the scenes, he is anything but gentle. I cannot imagine anybody intimidating Gerry Spence. I can imagine Spence intimidating a lot of people.” 

“When I started in speaking, I was told by many never to tell a joke that might offend anybody and never to talk about politics, religion, or sex.

After a very short time, it dawned on me there wasn’t anything of importance left to talk about and, if you never risked telling a joke that might offend somebody, you can’t tell a joke, period. If I stuck with that advice, I’d be so bland I’d be invisible.” 

“The risks of timidity are greater, though: no attention, no interest, no affinity, no magnetism.”

“You may win some temporary victories with this approach, but after changing your colors so many times, will you have any true colors left? The contrarian approach: presenting a consistent personality, being yourself, saying what you mean, meaning what you say, and having everybody know it is more likely to lead to lasting, satisfying success.”

“Rush Limbaugh was fired in 1984 from a Kansas City radio station for delivering overly controversial, conservative commentaries. He got hired by a Sacramento station to replace Morton Downey Jr., and was told by management, ‘We’re not afraid of controversy here. But we will not back you up if you say things you don’t believe. If you can convince us why you believe something, no matter how outrageous it seems, we’ll back you up all day long. But we will not have controversy just for the sake of it.’”

“More fortunes are made by implementation than by invention.”

“The truth is, nothing needs to be original to you because most people have lots of ideas, including some good ones, but are very poor at implementation and follow-through. You can succeed by doing what they never get done.”

“He did fundamental things very well. And he got rich doing them.”

“You need only one creative thought to get rich; two just about guarantees it.”

“Ideas alone are like unplanted seeds.”

“In my experience, for every marketing challenge, for every entrepreneurial objective, for every personal desire, there is somewhere at least one successful model that already has plenty of answers available to anybody willing to pay attention. Solving problems does not require creative invention. It requires solutions.”

“The last truly original idea to come out of Hollywood may have been the big sign up on the hill overlooking the city. And that’s okay. It’s a business. About sales, ad revenue, viewer numbers, streaming subscription revenue. About profit.

Trying to raise the likelihood of a success by greatly borrowing from prior successes is just good business. Why risk creating from scratch when there are so many fantastic models to copy from?”

“Never underestimate the value and power of the ordinary implemented with extraordinary zeal and diligence.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”

-W.C. Fields

“The sales manager’s most frequent answer to the frustrated salesman is, ‘Make more calls.’ The parent’s answer to the struggling student is, ‘Study harder.’ But there’s a flaw in all this. Once I said to a golf expert, ‘Maybe I just need to practice more.’ ‘Not is you practice THAT swing,’ he said.”

“Speed of getting through noes automatically guarantees more yeses.”

“Raising questions about ‘persisting at what?’ complicates what dogma demands be a simple, bumper sticker-length commandment. I tell people: Don’t step in dogma! Success requires a more sophisticated navigation. Persistence has to be applied where it can do good but cast aside where it does harm.”

“Certainly, having a vision of where you want to go in life is important. But too often, people get too nitpicky in micro-defining how they’ll get there, thus excluding all sorts of great opportunities and sticking themselves with having to summon up huge amounts of persistence to get a goal the hard way even if an easier path presents itself.”

“You’ve got to place a bet every day; otherwise, you might be walking around lucky and not know it.”

-Character Played by Richard Dreyfuss in the Movie Let It Ride

“Decide who your ideal client is, then focus all your efforts on attracting that client, and no efforts on any other clients.”

“Through work, you can put yourself in positions where you can get lucky. I think you can learn the art of constantly putting yourself into situations where good luck can occur.”

“Steve Jobs said that if you are succeeding or leading you have to remember there are two kids in a garage staying up all night working on the idea they’ll use to take everything away from you. It’s a lot truer now than when he said it.”

“He says that his commitment to high speed and mega-growth created its own kind of momentum and magnetic attraction. This has been my experience with countless clients over many years.

What my friend Jim Rohn called the secret of MASSIVE action attracts people, capital, media attention, and excited customers like nothing else. When you are doing big things fast, the world notices.”

“As I write this, he’s on his way at a brisk pace to $200 million. All ignited by one Trigger: a multiplicity of offsets to new customer acquisition cost, not just the industry norm of one.”

“Why not get rich quick? There’s no good reason - only past negative conditioning - prohibiting you from taking a quantum leap, from triggering THE PHENOMENON.”

“Rather than advertising your product, service, or business, advertise FOR the customers or clients you want. The sooner you determine who your ‘perfect match customer’ is and target that person AND deliberately repel those who do not fit that description, the better. Not only isn’t the customer always right, but every customer isn’t always right for your business.”

“Resourcefulness is more powerful than resources.”

“If you can’t make money without money, you won’t make money with money either.”

“You are entitled to nothing but opportunity.”

“Walk through ANY open door.”

-Joan Rivers

“When I called, I was told the position had been filled a week ago. I still asked to speak to this entrepreneur, but I was brushed off. He was too busy and was not available. But I called every day, sometimes twice a day, for two solid weeks. Finally, he invited me in.

We subsequently did millions of dollars of business together; he was, in many respects, my best mentor, and without that relationship it is very doubtful that I would be doing what I’m doing today. What would have happened had I accepted that first brush-off?”

“Zig Ziglar tells the story of the saleswoman who couldn’t hear ‘No’ if it was shouted in her ear but could hear a ‘Yes’ whispered 50 feet away. If you want to fight through the crowd and gain entry to the career field you want, in the company you want, starting out with the attention of top leaders in that company, you need to be deaf to the ‘no.’”

“I wonder how many job applicants call back 50 times? Or send a new letter every month for 12 months, discussing different reasons why they want to get started in that particular company?

I wonder how many applicants are so determined to break into a particular firm that they will continue to try to sell themselves week after week, month after month, for a year or more?”

“Neither your college diploma nor your resume has even a penny of value, in and of itself. To get going, you must begin. To get ahead, you must begin. You must get a foot in the door and a hand on some rung on the ladder somehow, somewhere, the sooner the better.

A key to success is doing even the lowliest, least desirable job better and with greater zeal than anyone has ever seen anybody tackle that job. Learn to stand out from the crowd in every positive way possible, but most of all, in your willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work.

However, another key to success is leaping, NOT ladder-climbing. You must be alert for such opportunities, recognized or created.”

Important Insights from Related Books:

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy:

In this book, the eccentric entrepreneur Dan S. Kennedy shares the extreme time management strategies he uses personally to run his multimillion-dollar company while successfully safeguarding his schedule and his sanity.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“The multiple demands on an entrepreneur’s time are extraordinary. I am here to tell you that you need to take extraordinary measures to match those demands. Measures so radical and extreme that others may question your sanity.

This is no ordinary time management book for the deskbound or the person doing just one job.

This book is expressly for the wearer of many hats, the inventive, opportunistic entrepreneur who can’t resist piling more and more responsibility onto his own shoulders, who has many more great ideas than time and resources to take advantage of them, and who runs (not walks) through each day. I’m you, and this is our book.”

“There’s a reason why you can’t find a wall clock in a casino to save your life - those folks stealing your money do not want you to be aware of the passing of time.

And that tells you something useful right there: you want to be very aware, all the time, of the passing of time. It is to your advantage to be very conscious of the passage and usage of minutes and hours.”

“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive - and, often, poor.”

Read the Full Breakdown: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson:

What if the human story is just getting started? What if there's a future techno-utopia just waiting for the right group of smart, ambitious, optimistic thinkers to come along and help make it real? What if there was a book that laid out a grounded yet exciting roadmap to get to that bright future?

Sample Quotes from the Book:

"Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can't be. Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn't."

"As a guiding philosophy, 'win and help win' will always outcompete 'live and let live.'"

“It’s not just about free speech. It's about the cost of speech. If you're jailed by the state for speech, you may not speak out. But if you're fired by an employer for speech, that is costly too - a cost greater than most can pay. Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely."

Read the Full Breakdown: The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson

The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker:

By wanting to become rich, you are also saying that you want to accept the challenge to be better at making money than 99 percent of the people on this planet. Just by attempting this, you are going to have to accept the fact that you must not just be good, you must be incredible. Are you ready?

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“It’s impossible to think that you could become a billionaire without believing that money is abundant.”

“In order to make as much money as possible, every moment of our time should be spent focusing on what gets us paid.”

“If you decide to follow through no matter what and never give up, becoming rich will not be a matter of if, if it will be a matter of when.”

Read the Full Breakdown: The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg:

Doing well in school has very little to do with how successful you become. In this new economy, the biggest factor in your success will not be abstract, academic learning but whether you develop the real-life success skills evinced by the people on these pages, and how early you do.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”

“The breakthrough realization for you is that you are in the marketing business. You are not in the dry cleaning or restaurant or widget manufacturing or wedding planning or industrial chemicals business.

You are in the business of marketing dry cleaning services or restaurants or widgets or wedding planning or chemicals.

When you embrace this, it makes perfect sense to set your sights on marketing mastery. If you are going to make something your life’s work and chief activity and responsibility, why not do it exceptionally well?”

“The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you.”

Read the Full Breakdown: The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg

The View from the Opposition:

No one's ideas are beyond questioning. In this section, I argue the case for the opposition and raise some points you might wish to evaluate for yourself while reading this book.

#1: Know the Rules Before You Break Them

As we've discussed, many of the rules you're likely to encounter exist simply to serve the interests of those who created them. The world is ruled by incentives, which is why you have to look at things like who benefits from which arrangement. This will make a whole lot more about this world make sense. Trust me.

Some of the rules, however, exist for a very good reason, and you need to understand why they exist before you go around breaking them. This mostly comes about through time and experience, but in every industry there are rules and best practices that you'd be wise to adopt.

For example, ripping off somebody else's YouTube video and making your own version that's exactly the same as theirs, with the same script, the same graphics, the same title, the same thumbnail...Seriously, people do that! It's crazy, especially since it's sooo easy to tell, but people will blatantly steal everything about a popular video and or a viral tweet and pass it off as their own. That's wrong. But then there are people who take inspiration from those earlier creations and put their own spin on them. That's okay, and you'll need to understand the difference.

Take going to college, for another example. Why is there a "rule" that all successful people go to college? Because the college system makes stupid amounts of money perpetuating that message and making as many people as possible believe it! That's a rule you can break, and depending on what you want out of life, you probably should.

That goes for every rule, regulation, guideline, and "common sense" principle you can think of. You need to approach these things from all angles: ask why they exist, who enforces them, and why. What's their motivation for getting you to believe this? Why does such and such rule exist, and who is it designed to stop?

In the same way that to make the most money possible you'll have to know your customers' needs and desires even better than they do, you'll need to understand society's rules and who benefits from them if you ever want to discover for yourself which walls are made of stone and which ones are made of paper.

#2: Don't Romanticize the Rule-Breakers

Being a rebel is all fun and games until they hang you from your neck in the middle of the town square. Often, it's a better strategy to be seen following the rules, even if on the inside you know they're just paper walls. Why create unnecessary opposition to yourself? Outwardly observe the rules, and move in silence.

Some people break all the rules because they hate being confined by any rules, no matter how sensible and necessary. These people just go around making a big show of how they're different and "special," with no consideration of how they're being perceived by others. Again, you want to be seen following the rules (usually), and seen fitting in, so your movements are less obvious and your strategies can run in the background unopposed. Don't call unnecessary attention to yourself.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking:

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:

You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.

Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...

#1: "Why would you take advice from someone who doesn't have the life you want?"

#2: "What incentives are in place that result in people giving you bad advice about business and success in general? Why do they believe things that are so clearly wrong?"

#3: "Were you ever told that it was wrong or morally questionable to pursue wealth? Who implanted that idea in your mind?"

#4: "How many of your current goals and dreams are actually yours, and how many were simply placed there by others?"

#5: "What is one thing you've always thought of as a disadvantage that you could actually turn into an unfair advantage of your own?"

#6: “What if everything you’ve been told about speed has come from slow people? And is wrong?”

#7: "What 3-5 things can you do in your business (or stop doing) that will fuel your forward momentum and help you reach escape velocity?"

#8: "What are 3-5 untapped forms of leverage - like Other People's Money (OPM), Other People's Resources (OPR), etc. - you can cultivate that will help you achieve your business objectives?"

#9: "Where has your former conditioning come from? How have you been able to recognize it, and what are you doing now to prevent yourself from succumbing to "average thinking" in the future?"

#10: "What's your deepest belief that you've never thought to question?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

-Voltaire

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Observe the Masses

Look around you. Most people simply aren't thriving. A quick glance at the mass of people within your society and you'll see that they're in worse shape than they want to be (physically, financially, mentally), they're less happy than they want to be; they have fewer friends than they want to have; more problems, more worries, more emergencies and distractions.

They are miserable, complaining, excuse-making, pessimistic shells of their true selves, and you will become like them if you don't make a sincere, concerted effort to avoid a similar fate. And it is an avoidable fate, by the way. You're not destined to be like them. You can change. You can change right now.

Simply observe what you don't want - the characteristics and circumstances you don't wish to reflect the conditions of your life - and find models for what you do want. Find the people who are thriving, and determine to be more like them in any and every way that's important to you.

Now's the time and place to point out that you and I are not somehow "better" than those unfortunate people we observed in the first paragraph here. We are no better and no worse. We and they simply are.

Every single human being on this planet possesses infinite worth, dignity, and human value simply by virtue of the fact that they are human. We are more like them than we are different. But that doesn't mean we have to live like them!

So you really do have to keep two (seemingly) conflicting thoughts in your head at the exact same time: most people don't have the life you want, and if you allow yourself to slip into apathy and despair like they have, you will be desperately unhappy for the rest of your life. And also, you are no "better" than they are.

You're just choosing to make different, more life-affirming choices, and by so doing, opportunities will become available to you to achieve success and fulfillment that the great masses of humanity would never be able to dream of in their common hours.

#2: Cultivate Radical Self-Awareness

Nothing that you learn about yourself could ever be a bad thing. No matter what it is, at least you'll know, you'll gain valuable self-knowledge and self-awareness, and no matter what's revealed to you, those qualities are everything in life.

So hold nothing back. Hold everything about yourself up to the light, and make a faithful commitment to radical transparency as it concerns yourself, who you are, what motivates you, and what you're capable of and interested in doing. Your limitations, what holds you back, your weaknesses...inspect it all, fearlessly. As James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

It's about boldly committing to the kind of self-awareness and inner searching that most people are simply too afraid and weak and lazy to do. There, I said it. Just don't be weak and lazy! Commit yourself, fully and totally. You will find things out about yourself that will astonish you, that will teach you more than any four-year degree, any course, any "program." It's all within.

There are many ways to pursue self-knowledge, of course, including, paradoxically, through engaging with the external world and witnessing your reactions and subsequent evolution! Solitude also works. Reading books. Therapy. These and more are all pathways to vital self-knowledge.

But one thing is more important than virtually anything else: the one thing you must never, ever, EVER do is lie to yourself. To thine own self be true, and trust that whatever truths you uncover during this process will always lead eventually to your benefit.

#3: Test and Track Everything, Relentlessly

Alright, switching gears here, back towards achieving business success, which is the point of this book after all! And speaking of uncovering truths about yourself, tracking your progress, your experiments, your results - everything - will put you so far ahead of your competition that isn't doing these things...it's not even fair.

You'll never know what's working if you don't have a record of what you've tried, and tracking your activities and results will help you stick to your strategy as well. One of the first things I get all my personal coaching clients to do is start tracking everything. It's the foundation of most of their future success - and yours.

What, specifically, you end up tracking is always going to depend on your goals and what you're seeking to improve. In a business context, you're going to want to track key metrics like LTV (Lifetime Customer Value), Revenue, Expenses, CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), and many, many more. If you're looking to grow your YouTube channel, you'll want to look at your CTR (Click-Through Rate), AVD (Average View Duration), etc. And if you simply want to get into better shape, you'll want to track your sleep, calories in/out, your workouts, and things of that nature.

But the thread running through all these different examples is that you have to know what you're doing currently, if you want to find out what's working, and once you find something that's working, double down on it.

If, for example, you notice that Instagram is bringing in the majority of your most profitable customers, you'll want to put more time, money, and effort into maximizing your Instagram presence. But if you didn't track where your customers were coming from in the first place, how much you're spending to attract and acquire them, etc., then you'd never have the information required to make these kinds of intelligent, data-driven decisions.

You should also be tracking your inputs, and establishing a baseline for the kind and quality of effort you're putting into various endeavors. For example, something I've spoken about and taught many times is the Rule of 100, which requires that you do 100 primary actions each day to move you towards your goal. Whether that's 100 phone calls, 100 cold emails, 100 social media comments, etc.

The end result of all this testing and experimentation is that you'll be able to confirm that what you're doing is working (or not), and you'll be able to take your success out of the hands of fortune and back into your own. Complete your primary actions enough times so that you remove all doubt that you will be successful (next Action Step), and gain the necessary insight to be able to formulate a better strategy for next time.

#4: Stack the Probabilities in Your Favor

Dan Kennedy's book will help bring to light the many ways that we get in our own way, and it'll help you realize that the way "things are done" isn't necessarily the way that you need to do them. In fact, "business as usual" is usually synonymous with stagnation, if not downright poverty.

Again, most people are poorer than they want to be, and they've reached that sorry state because they've faithfully lapped up advice and opinions from people who've never even achieved success in the first place.

Instead, what you need to do is start finding things that work, and then double down on those things. Find your native advantages, develop others, and secure assistance from other people and add that weight to your side of the scale too. Basically, what you want to do is stack up every single advantage you can, and take ruthless advantage of those advantages until they stop working.

You start stacking the probabilities in your favor by eliminating negative, fruitless behaviors, and adopting as many positive, success-oriented, money-getting behaviors as you possibly can. You embark on a sincere search for the best way to win, the highest-leverage actions you can take to become successful, and then you relentlessly hammer away at those things until you do win.

Perhaps most importantly, you can't stop doing things once they start working, either! If a particular traffic channel, say, YouTube, has been insanely profitable for you, don't all of a sudden turn around and coast on YouTube while starting at zero with Facebook ads or partnerships. YouTube was working! You were doing great! You were winning! Why would you just throw that away and chase after the next shiny object? It makes zero sense!

Once something starts working, you double down on it. You get damn good at it, and you leverage it for all it's worth. If your YouTube channel is starting to gain traction, you can stack the probabilities in your favor by hiring advanced video editors, paying top-notch designers to create epic thumbnails, maybe employ a scriptwriter to take your message to the next level...you have plenty of ways forward there. Take acting classes! Anything you can do to improve.

After every little bit of success you experience, you also have to ask yourself, Why did that work? What did we do right? What should we keep doing? Then do more of that! More of what's already working! This is the way.

There's virtually no limit to the advantages you can give yourself and the ways in which you can level up. Whether that's investing in books, courses, and mentors for yourself, expanding your team, increasing your ad spend, etc. Every single thing you can do will give you an advantage over your competition.

A final, enlightening question you can ask yourself is this: If you had to live your life over again 1,000 times, and could only do the same things you're doing now, would you be happy and successful in at least 999 of them?

#5: Trigger "THE PHENOMENON"

We touched on this earlier in the Key Ideas above, but THE PHENOMENON is Dan's word for the massive, meteoric, mysterious momentum that he's been able to ride at several different points during his career. THE PHENOMENON isn't really something you can "control" per se, but it's very hard to stop once it starts happening. It's the golden wave that you want to catch and hold onto for dear life.

As it happens, I'm living through this period now, at the time of this writing. I'm now experiencing THE PHENOMENON in my own life, and it's manifesting as a seemingly never-ending stream of epic opportunities and chances for profit and growth. After going through something of a "dark night of the soul" last year, everything's finally coming together, and my one task right now is to ride this current momentum right to the finish line.

The point is that you can't always control when THE PHENOMENON shows up, but you always have to be ready for it, and there are also things you can do to make it more likely that it does show. Stacking the probabilities in your favor is one of those things, for sure. Create the conditions for THE PHENOMENON to appear and begin acting in your life, and you make it more likely to appear.

Part of this means capturing and relentlessly executing on every single opportunity that comes your way, until your calendar is completely full and you can't possibly expend one additional muscle fiber in service of creating your success.

If you have a prospect that says "Maybe call me back next month," you damn well call them back on the first of the month. If you got decent results with your latest Google Ads campaign and you have a spare $100 kicking around, invest it into running more Google Ads to grow your business. You can handle posting 3 times per day on Instagram instead of just 2? An extra YouTube video on Wednesday instead of just Monday and Friday? You damn well do it. Everything you possibly can. Whatever it takes. Always. All the time. Relentlessly. Until you make it happen. Until you reach escape velocity.

In celestial mechanics, escape velocity or escape speed is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape from contact with or orbit of a primary body - in the case of a rocket, this would mean the earth. It's the momentum required to take off, smash through the gravitational resistance, and maintain propulsion toward the objective. THE PHENOMENON shows up when you reach escape velocity in your work. It graces your life when you've done everything possible to set yourself up for victory. And if you want to make your entrepreneurial vision a reality, you'd better do whatever it takes to be there when that rocket ship takes off.

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Dan S. Kennedy is the provocative, truth-telling author of seven popular No B.S. books, thirteen business books total; a serial, successful, multi-millionaire entrepreneur; trusted marketing advisor, consultant and coach to hundreds of private entrepreneurial clients running businesses from $1-million to $1-billion in size; and he influences well over 1-million independent business owners annually through his newsletters, tele-coaching programs, local Chapters and Kennedy Study Groups meeting in over 100 cities, and a network of top niched consultants in nearly 150 different business and industry categories and professions.

As a speaker Dan, has repeatedly appeared with four former U.S. Presidents; business celebrities like Donald Trump and Gene Simmons (KISS, Family Jewels on A&E); legendary entrepreneurs including Jim McCann (1-800-Flowers), Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields Cookies), and Nido Qubein (Great Harvest Bread Co.); famous business speakers including Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Tom Hopkins, and Tony Robbins and countless sports and Hollywood celebrities. Dan has addressed audiences as large as 35,000, and for more than ten consecutive years, he averaged speaking to more than 250,000 people per year.

Dan lives in Ohio and in northern Virginia, with his wife, Carla, and their Million Dollar Dog. He owns, races and drives professionally in about 100 harness races a year at Northfield Park near Cleveland, Ohio.

Additional Resources:

Dan Kennedy | Magnetic Marketing

Dan Kennedy | The Magnetic Marketing Podcast

This Book on Amazon:

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy

If You Liked This Book:

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Wealth Attraction in the New Economy, by Dan S. Kennedy

No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, by Dan S. Kennedy

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson

The 10 Pillars of Wealth, by Alex Becker

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg