Personal Life Media

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m you host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet an old friend of mine, Tim Sanders. Tim is a very, very much sought after speaker because he’s just warm and human and motivational and you’re about to feel really good. He has a new book out called Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence. It’s a sequel to his New York Times Bestseller, Love Is The Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. He’s also the author of The Likeability Factor and Saving The World At Work. Tim is one of those men who I will read everything he writes. And I’m super psyched to have him here the day after the launch of his book to record this DishyMix interview for you. I hope you find it super motivating and gives you a ton of confidence to go out and create what you want in your world. So lets get Tim on the line. Hi Tim.

Tim Sander: Hi Susan.

Susan Bratton: How are you dear? It’s great to talk to you and have you on the show again.

Tim Sanders: You know, I’m doing great. Just got tons of momentum. I slept well and life is good.

Susan Bratton: I know, I slept really well last night too. It’s amazing the little things that matter. So you have a new book, it’s based on confidence. What is it that motivated you to write a book about confidence? Because interestingly enough I’m working on a little project myself with a woman named Dr. Susan Campbell…

Tim Sanders: Oh, okay.

Susan Bratton: on an online course called Getting Real Confidence. And so confidence for me is really a core, it’s a value of mine. I actually, I think it’s a part of my value system to foster confidence in others and to be confident myself. And so when I saw that you, a man that I adore, came out with a book about confidence, not only was I pleased but I wondered what it was about it that made that your subject.

Tim Sanders:    Okay, I’m going to put you in the time and the place, I can tell you the day. It was October 8th I believe, 2008. I’m in the green room at a major gig and everybody is freaked out. I don’t know the number Susan, but the market was probably down 800, 900 points that day, right. If you think about, it’s hard to think about those days again.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: But everybody was completely paralyzed and they’re completely freaked out. For whatever reason, I mean I’m sad because there’s a lot of loss going on, but I’m not freaked out because I’ve been through this with the dot com crash, I’ve been through this with 1991 when I was working in the cell phone business that was embryonic and it crashed, so I’ve seen this, and there’s always an opportunity if you believe in yourself and you have the right team. And so Dave Ramsey, you know him, the debt guy -- he’s wonderfully funny -- he and I are standing back stage. And he goes, “You know, it’s just all these people in the secret economy,” that’s what he calls the real estate bubble, he goes, “All these people in the secret economy, they’re bold in 2006.” He goes, “But look at them today.” And he goes, “You show me a fellow who’s confident just because he’s on a role, and I’ll show you a guy who’s a world class runner because he’s being chased by a tiger.” And I said, “You know, you’re right,” because the 1930’s trained an entire generation, my grandmother Billie, I had to see these as opportunities, and you do that Susan through lifestyle design. So that whether you’re at the top, you’re not arrogant; whether you’re at the bottom, you’re not afraid, and there’s an even keeled natured to your outlook. And I decided on that day that Billie’s story needed to be told. And she’s still alive, she’s 96. And I believe that on that day there’s a new generation that’s not familiar with Napoleon Hill, 1937, Dr. Norman Vincent Peel, 1932, and not even Claude Bristol, accurately Claude Bristol -- not the Law of Attraction Claude but Claude Bristol 1942. So I said, “I’m going to write a book and I’m going to carry this into the new generation because as a nation or as a group, we all need to learn how to be the phoenix and not the fodder when this kind of thing happens.

Susan Bratton: When I read the book I thought to myself, for me personally Tim – and this is, you know, I don’t think that I’m necessarily your market in that, I did grow up in an era where my parents taught me these things, but I had Billie’s in my life, like your grandmother, who gave me the fundamentals of moral code and personal authority and, you know, the perspectives on life and how to get through rough times and things like that, and you’re right that not everyone has a Billie or a really good set of parents who can instill those things in one, you know. My mother instilled my confidence in me from the day I was born. And so there are a world of people who need to hear these things, and you actually – always like a checklist. You have seven lifestyle principles, and I want you to go through those next.

Tim Sanders: Well, you know, one thing I was going to say that’s interesting is it’s not just how is my grandmother, it’s the generation.

Susan Bratton: Yes, the question I was getting to was you felt like there was a generation of people that needed to get this, what I would consider to be, fundamental parental wisdom…

Tim Sanders: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: You know, you didn’t have the benefit of your parents teaching you, but you did have your grandmother who effectively raised you.

Tim Sanders: Yeah, and there’s two things fundamentally wrong today in our understanding of how this works that wasn’t wrong in the 40’s and it’s been, for lack of a better phrase Susan, a little bastardized over the last 20 or 30 years with the psychology movement, and there’s two particular things we really believe in as a culture today that caused us to have the problems we have…

Susan Bratton: Well my god, what are those?

Tim Sanders: Number one, positive thinking is an attitude adjustment. It’s something you prescribe to people. That’s not true. Billie taught me to believe that positive thinking is an outcome that is achieved through conscientious lifestyle design from beginning of your day to your waking moment. She said telling a person to think positive is like telling a person who’s morbidly obese “Just be skinny.” It’s just silly. But we live in a new self-help world where we think positive thinking is something you just need to do. The second thing that’s been kind of bastardized is parental values about what we raise our kids to be. And I don’t know where it happened Susan, but you know, Steve Jobs and Gary Vaynerchuck are not alone. It’s so popular to tell people “Just follow your passions. Just do what you love.” But you know what, that’s not what they taught people in the 30’s. They taught people that, in the 30’s they said, “When you’re a kid and you don’t have any responsibilities you should follow your passion to develop dimension and find what you love.” But as you grow up and take on responsibilities and enter this community of struggle, you need to follow a purpose and you need to make a budge for your passions, because when you stay centered on self your adult life you will never have confidence over time because adversity will cause you to look inside yourself instead of looking at something higher than yourself or delegating to your team. And you know how popular “Just do what you love is.” That is not a holdover from the greatest generation.

Susan Bratton: Thank you for that. I think a lot of the wisdom that you have in Today We Are Rich is something that any parent could buy your book and if they had a, you know, like an early teen child especially when they can really understand and they’re developing that core ness of who they’re about to become, you could actually go through, you know, these seven lifestyle principles with them so that they understood them, and I think that could be really good. I’d like to do that right now. Could you just walk us through the seven?

Tim Sanders: Absolutely. You ready?

Susan Bratton: I’m ready.

Tim Sanders: Number on, feed your mind good stuff. This is the nature of the free e-book too. But feed your mind good stuff basically says you should be as judicious about what you put into your head as what you put into your mouth. This means you don’t overeat and you don’t eat junk. You eat healthy stuff and just enough. This is a really important concept. It was invented in the 30’s to keep people from obsessing over the newspapers, of physical postings of various things from stock prices to job reports, that kind of thing. Because it’s just too easy for us to jump out of bed, hit the coffee pot, long on to email, which now randomizes our entire mental metabolism for the day, go online and then watch these fools on cable television who have not motivation to tell us the truth, they just have motivation to freak us out to keep us glued to the TV. We go to work. We hire people that are either unhappy but effective or chicken little and we reward them because it’s the prudence economy. Then we go home and we carry Smart Phones with us, even when we’re on dates with our significant others. And we’re constantly being rattled with information, and it’s not wonder that we have no control over our emotional lifestyle. So feed your mind good stuff says control your day, especially Susan the first 30 to 45 minutes. Don’t go online when you wake up. Don’t carry a Smart Phone when you’re out. Teach your people to make decisions without you. It’s a huge change of life, and what you put into your head instead are books and specialized information from dependable sources that you trust that make you better at what you do. That will give you more confidence than keeping up with Charlie Sheen’s Twitter stream.

Susan Bratton: Move the conversation forward, number two.

Tim Sanders: That’s number two. Number two says that you’ve got to create a conversation around solutions, not problems. This is especially true in times of perceived scarcity. You know, I’ve talked about this idea, the scarcity mindset and so has Steven Covey and Wayne Dyer and all the way back to William James, you know, this idea that the fear of poverty or the fear of personal loss triggers this change in our behavior and we become quite primal and we believe there’s not enough to go around. Well it’s an airborne disease Susan. You catch it from people that you work with. So the conversation at work needs to be focused on solutions. You know, you knew me back when I was Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo. I learned that when you get on the ground and you’ve just been fired by Procter and Goddam – that’s my marketing friends, that’s what you call them if it’s one of your accounts – if you’re on the ground with P&G and they’re cutting a $1 million commitment ‘cause you’ve under delivered on impressions and your young Yahoo’s are all freaking out, you have to start the conversation with, “What do we have to bear,” right. “Show me make good inventory capabilities right now. Show me upcoming flagship things we can do right now. Show me the thread so I can figure out, you know, what we haven’t done wrong.” And I always start, just like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, with trying to start with what’s going right. That’s a huge change, huge change in how we think about things. And for the folks listening on the call, especially for our dear friends in ad agency world that typically get dressed down too much by modern CMO’s, I tell marketers all the time, when you meet with you vendor partners in the world you start project meetings out with what’s going right. You keep starting these meetings out by punching people in their gut and squeezing something out of them and then you wonder why they don’t respond well for the rest of the meeting. We’ve got to flip the conversation forward, or as Andrew Carnegie used to ask his people, “What’s the good word,” is a much better opening question than “How’s it going?”

Susan Bratton: What’s the good word, I forgot about that. Yeah, you’re sending us into the way back machine with a lot of your references.

Tim Sanders: Well I love it because those guys were dealing with real scarcity and they were pre-psychology movement. So this was before somebody could quote a study where 12 people were put in the lab and this was the result because that just ruins everything. And, you know, for marketers it’d be like buying stuff without even considering z scores. That’s really how psychology works man. It’s a mad science. It makes Tim Ferris look scientifically accurate by comparison. So a lot of self-help books by psychologists basically since the 1980’s, I’ve got to be honest with you Susan, they’re horrible because they are selling correlation.

Susan Bratton: So you think just going back to the basics, the roots, almost like common sense.

Tim Sanders: Napoleon Hill interviewed every one of the most important entrepreneurs of our time and had 20,000 students that he trained before he wrote Think and Grow Rich. That’s real deal. That’s like Marcus Buckingham with Discover Your Strengths. That book worked…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: because gallop at what, a million people. I mean they had hard data.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: So I’m saying that a lot of modern works pre way back machine are based more on trying to make your book’s concept work than these guys, like Carnegie, who trained tens of thousands of people in New York before he wrote his book, or Peel who pastured tens of thousands of people. You know, he was a psychologist, Peel was at a church and a preacher. People don’t know that.

Susan Bratton: Huh. I didn’t know that either.

Tim Sanders: Okay, so these guys practiced on real great depression survivors helping them and understanding what it took for them to turn around their point of view. And he learned that, and they all learned that. The biggest eaves dropper on your conversation is your subconscious, which is directly connected to your central nervous system. It produces everything from your body language to whether or not your produce creative energy like DHEA, or negative creative energy like Cortisol. So this conversation, whether it’s inside us or outside us, we have to own it like they used to in the 30’s to turn this thing around.

Susan Bratton: So exercising your gratitude muscles is number three. Tell us about that.

Tim Sanders: All right, now this is a little Forest Gump. You guys just have to understand I’m southern, I’m country. But here’s where it comes from. My grandmother raised me to believe that gratitude was a muscle, not a feeling. She said if it was a feeling you’d feel it all the time. And throughout the course of my life she’s right. People get flabby when it comes to gratefulness, and I’ll illustrate this for you Susan. So if you’ve just hired somebody, he hasn’t worked for a year and a half ‘cause he got laid off at the agency when everything, you know, went down in L.A. He’s so grateful that he’s hired, you know how he behaves that first day. He’s strutting around, cocky, he’s free, he can’t believe it, loves the job, sniffing his business cards, says, “I’d do this for free.” If you as a leader don’t properly manage gratefulness as a continued resource for things like recognition or giving people challenging jobs, if you don’t master this a year from now, two years from now when he’s a vet at the company he’ll calm down the new hire that’s walking around strutting, saying “This is a great place to work,” and he’ll say, “You need to calm down. You’re making us look bad.” That’s an example of how gratefulness oozes out of us unless we learn how to program it. One business example of how to get this right, a friend of mine in this Seattle company that’s been going through a lot of pressure, what he’s done is he’s gathered struggling groups, I’m saying emotionally struggling groups, and they go into a room with an HR generalist and they fire everybody and then they rehire them and they take a little break. And I mean literally they do it legal. I mean it’s an emotional exercise. It started with Intel by the way with Gordon Moore, “You’re fired. Okay, guess what, you’ve been hired back. Now you’re new. Lets look at the whole company through new eyes like you haven’t been here for two years. Lets make a list of our assets that we can bring to bear in a sales situation – network, creative assets, legacy writ, you know, all of this stuff.” He says that there’s such a turnaround in point of view when you flip half twos into get twos by trying to look at things new. And this is why it’s so important in creative circles to consider task rotation and job rotation even though it’s program change. You know, they’ve been doing that at places like Zappos and Southwest Airlines and [inaudible] Institute for years as a way of helping people rediscover gratitude by putting them on a brand new wall. So anyway, it’s something you have to do everyday. I started out my mornings thinking about two people that helped me at work yesterday and a person that’s going to help me today, and the exercise is very liberating if you do it each and every day conscientiously because you realize you’re not alone. And as you express it to them, as you should do, you’re going to find that the reason you’re not alone is because all of you are really marching to a higher purpose or you’re just trying to kill it for the customer, and nothing generates total confidence like believing in yourself and other people and gratitude refocuses the mind on what you have, not what you lack.

Susan Bratton: I like the get to idea too. You mentioned it very briefly, but just explain that because it’s something that I’ve used for 30 years and I find it works really well for me too.

Tim Sanders: So Dr. Samuelson at Oregon State University, if you Google him Samuelson OSU, he deserves the ultimate credit. This is where I got it first Susan, from Organizational Development. It’s simple. Go interview a bunch of people who’ve been laid off that would have sat on a previous culture health index that “I don’t enjoy my job,” 85% of them have either regret for not appreciating what they had while they had it or severe depression for losing the opportunity to come into work every day and work with smart people. So here’s a bunch of people who probably saw work as a have to and their performance suffered because they weren’t engaged at work, their mood wasn’t right. So they were the first people let go in a layoff other than the unlikable people. And upon reflection they realized that had they seen their work as an opportunity they probably would’ve done better. And there’s actually anecdotal research that indicates that especially in the world of creative, a person that comes to work with a song in his heart, like “I can’t wait to get to work. I love what I do,” they have much higher brain leverage capacity and critical thinking skills and abstract object association skills that were than a person who says, “Man, I got to go to work and have five meetings and then I got to go to this AdTech conference.” Those people don’t get anything out of it.

Susan Bratton: So the get to, I think another way to look at it is if you’re looking at a task that feels a little onerous. You have to look at what it is about it, what’s complete that will bring value to you, and then you get to have the opportunity to have that value. Right, so…

Tim Sanders: That’s exactly right…

Susan Bratton: I think that’s important.

Tim Sanders: That’s what they do with doctors that are burnt out say in the University of Michigan Healthcare Center. You know, sometimes they have like a doctor burn out program, but the new thing they have Susan is, you know, a lot of those places like UM, it’s a research facility. So, you know, they’ve got these technicians working 12 hours around the clock working on drug breakthroughs or treatment breakthroughs and they get burnt out too. You know what they do; they take them out to the field to see patients and when they go into a home where something they’re working on is saving somebody’s life and helping them sleep at night without pain, you talk about have to, get to. I’ll give you another example, Green Mountain Coffee Rosters. You know, you use them for cake cups; they have something called Trip To Source, a third of all the employees do it. That’s where they take them down to Central America so they can stand side by side with the farmers and pick beans. They realize the value of fair trade and how it changes their life and the lives of their children. But one of their executives told me that people on Trip To Source, they’re not just grateful for their job, they are desperately efficient because they know how hard it was to get those beans off the tree and to the cups. So these people are like scooping up remnants with their bare hands in trucks after they’ve been to Source. That’s the power of gratitude through experience, and that’s the last thing I’ll say here. Exercising your gratitude is about doing things that cause you to have emotional experiences that change the way you see the world. Again, it’s not just, “Okay, I’m going to be grateful, I really am, starting tomorrow.”

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s also a lot about appreciation. It’s about looking at the positive. It’s not positive thinking; it’s just putting your attention… It’s the same as feeding your mind good stuff. It’s like feeding your mind the opportunity to look at what it is that’s going to pay off for you. It’s all circular, you know?

Tim Sanders: You know, in the book we talk about this idea the good loop.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I like it. We call them positive feedback loops.

Tim Sanders: Yeah, yeah, it’s a positive feedback loop, but that means a positive feedback loop that doesn’t spin out of control, you know, [inaudible] in this case. So it’s this whole idea that there’s things we do everyday that change the incoming feedback from other people and events in our life that confirm our internal conversation that we’re doing it right, which causes us to continue to invest, and that’s where good people come from. Good people are people that do good things and then notice that it’s producing good results. Their ego’s in check, so that one time out of ten they do something nice for someone and they don’t get feedback for it they know that it’s [inaudible]. But if their ego’s not in check it seems like half or more of the times you’re nice to somebody they take advantage of you. That’s just an ego thing Susan; that’s not born out. Sociology calls I the law of reciprocity. It’s 9 times out of 10 in western culture, you can bet on it.

Susan Bratton: So the next one is give to be rich, and I think that one really follows suit around ego and ego management. Tell us about it.

Tim Sanders: Well the idea is that this is kind of the premise of Billie’s raising me and this is an important perspective. She said there’s two kinds of rich. That’s why the book’s called Today We Are Rich. There’s money rich, or if you’re listening and you run a business, there’s PNL rich, it’s on paper and it comes and goes and sometimes the market takes it away from you. And then there’s rich in meaning, and that means that you believe there’s enough to share or there’s enough to invest in others, and when you do you’re worth something and you get a lot of meaning out of that and no one can take that away from you. When you give, whether you’re mentoring somebody at work or somebody that’s new into the ad or marketing or social media world, whether you’re giving time or money to help people that are struggling or people that are in need, it redirects the mind to focus on what you have. And frequently when you give and you thought, “I don’t have time,” and you did this great mentoring thing and the next week you manage to catch up, you realize that you’re doing this to yourself. Creative imagination should not be squandered on worry, right. Dr. Norman Vincent Peel said if you can worry, you can create something. It’s the same element of the personality. So giving is a proactive move, redirects the mind to based on what you have not what you lack. It is the way to respond to adversity. So the best way to respond to adversity is to give what you think you lack and find somebody worse off than you, then help. And I teach this on the lecture circuit today in the major corporations. I say, “You know, the smartest thing you can do if you want to get out of this recessionitis is to find another group inside the company that’s worse off on resources and more pressured than you are and divert four hours this week of your best person’s time to help them,” and of course the crowd gasps when I say that. But in the back of the envelope as I talk to all of them over the course of the months, it was a liberating exercise and it taught them to value their time more and stop having these stupid two hour meetings to build consensus, start bringing a stopwatch to meetings like they do at Sas Institute, cut them to 40 minutes and to protect their time. It teaches you how valuable you are. As to quote the French philosopher [inaudible], you know, “That which you cannot let go of possesses you.”

Susan Bratton: Okay, prepare yourself.

Tim Sanders: That’s number five. So confidence comes from preparation, not hard work. You know, hard work we do a lot of busy work, we email forum, we do things that aren’t intellectually challenging sometimes to give our creative sense a break, etcetera. Real preparation changes your outlook, and one of the things I haven’t said yet on the interview Susan is that confidence in my book I would say is one’s outlook that they’ll be successful in a given circumstance.

Susan Bratton: And if you have preparation and you focus on that circumstance…

Tim Sanders: Right.

Susan Bratton: and you actually prepare for a positive outcome, it works and then you have confidence.

Tim Sanders: Right.

Susan Bratton: Another circle.

Tim Sanders: You know, and it’s important ‘cause if you believe you’re going to be successful in a given situation so much more of your brain’s available to create and to problem solve, so much less to worry and to defend. It’s huge. You’re much more charismatic to other people, they follow you much more, and you have much more clarity communication and people communicate at a much higher level with you when they perceive you being…  So these are important. So preparation, I’m just going to say it’s a couple of things, well three things. Thing number one, it’s the acquisition to specialize knowledge. Readers are leaders. Everybody I’ve met that rocks at marketing, advertising or social media they’re well read people, and I’m not talking articles, I’m talking books. You know, I probably read, you know, when I got into this [inaudible] I probably read 100 books in the first two years. I mean, you throw down a book, whether it’s Sparrow’s The Early Advertising Scene or it’s something more modern like Ogilvy’s On Advertising and in 1997 I read it. I’ve read it because it would be irresponsible not to. And when you read all these things, much like my old boss Mark Cuban, you begin to anticipate where things are really going, and like social media we could do a whole call on this. I have a real strong belief that I know where it’s going, but it’s because of the stuff I’ve been reading not just, you know, these bite sized conversations we have or these bite sized articles that we read. And we also have to learn how to become research moles, and we need to develop knowledge networking, but we can give inside information at places, *unless you trade on the stock market. But certainly in the ad world I get a lot of inside information on consulting gigs when I go to meetings, and I know one piece of special information every time I make a presentation that’s going to come across as unlikely and I just can’t wait for the meeting to drop the bomb. Rule number two…

Susan Bratton: Oh, I wanted to just say a quick thing about that, the insider information. Being well read but also having insider information, you’d spoken earlier about Napoleon Hill and he’s the creator of the concept of having a mastermind group…

Tim Sanders: That’s right.

Susan Bratton: and I personally I get, I’m in two masterminds, two business masterminds for my publishing business. And the amount of, oh, ground that we’ve covered in the last two years since joining our masterminds versus what we could’ve done by not being in those masterminds is an order of magnitude different…

Tim Sanders: It really is because…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: your friends don’t know everything that you need to know to have the inside scoop, but guess what, their friends do. So I love this idea, I’m going to talk about this at a marketing thing next week, a social media event a Nasdaq, friend sourcing. Friend sourcing is like crowd sourcing on – I hate the ‘on steroids’ metaphor – but lets just say friend sourcing is to crowd sourcing what Google Page Rank was to Alta Vista. Now thing about that for a minute.

Susan Bratton: So what do you mean by friend sourcing versus crowd sourcing? Your saying crowd sourcing is better than friend sourcing. Your saying using…

Tim Sanders: Crowd sourcing is the aggregation of averages. I don’t use crowd sourcing. I understand how crowd sourcing can give some insight, but if you’re creating something and you’re trying to figure out “what’s going to work”.

Susan Bratton: You need high quality people whose opinions you trust.

Tim Sanders: Relationship…

Susan Bratton: Hence the mastermind and/or what you’re calling friend sourcing.

Tim Sanders: So it’s like, you know, when I wrote Today We Are Rich you were on it, I had a couple thousand people who joined my author page and they supported my work over the years. Their engagement, their feedback, the quality of their contributions was exponentially higher than if I had gone to HARO, Help A Reporter Out. I used some crowd sourcing thing to ask 10,000 people to write a chapter, you know. It’s just not even the same animal. People ask to be your friend on Facebook for a very specific reason, right. And that connection changes everything from generosity to accuracy. And when I was preparing for the book launch – and folks don’t try this at home if you have as many friends as Susan does – I literally looked at every single one of my 2,800 friends one by one and put them in a spreadsheet pile. Everyone went somewhere. Whether you came from the event I did in the mortgage industry that’s now led to 300 mortgage friends, whether you were a ex Yahoo employee, I went to high school with you, I was on the debate team with you in college, I know you from the advertising community, you’re a big mouth, you got more than 4,000 friends. There’s all these Facebook segments I was able to create, and I only found about 12 people that I couldn’t source to something, and it was interesting. And, you know, I’m like a lot of people listening; I don’t accept every friend request. If I have someone that has no common friends and they’re just like “What’s up,” I don’t really, you know, my network’s pretty good. It’s a really reflection of people that at least feel like they know me or vice versa. They are a valuable source of specialized information. I have something that’s kind of like the mastermind groups called The White Hat Hacker Group, and it’s really about getting inside information over the firewall to things we really need to know. So as a publisher, you know, I’m like you, I do books; I need better information on Barnes and Noble’s inventory system than I normally am going to get from traditional channels. So, you know, I know, and I don’t like to wait on Book Scan to tell me how we’re doing. We do this at Yahoo. If you can get inside information on my box office before it happens and it gets published, you can advise, you know, movie marketers to change trailers like we did with Pearl Harbor in time. So the whole idea of getting friends inside at different places and creating that kind of solution, that’s cool too and of course that’s separate from friend sourcing. And again, you know, * be very careful about how you do this because, you know, it’s not always right but we’ve been very careful to make sure we add value to all the parties, but you really do want to try to do your best to create sources of very, very high level information.

Susan Bratton: So in ‘prepare yourself’ I think there was a one, two, three. I mean, I got lost.

Tim Sanders: Sure. Now number two is about, number two is about rehearsing as if.

Susan Bratton: What was number one again?

Tim Sanders: Number on is acquire specialized knowledge, the kind that’s so juicy you can’t wait for the meeting, right, or the project meeting or whatever. So number two, rehearse fully. You know, your life is a lot of performances, whether they’re pitches or proposals or whatever reports. Before you go do a live one make sure you’ve rehearsed it fully. Do your [inaudible] in exact scenario with real participants and real hurdles and obstacles and interruptions, and don’t ever think that just because you’ve flipped through your PowerPoint and gone through it in your head that that’s anything close to rehearsal. Because rehearsal allows you to make a lot of technical adjustments, but more importantly Susan when you’re well rehearsed your reptilian brain is available to you in the real moment to actually interact and observe what’s going on. So when I speak for example, I do a rehearsal a day before, in the venue if they’ll let me and I organize some of the people that are meeting and they watch it and they hate it ‘cause you’re doing like the whole 45 minute thing, but you can’t take shortcuts. And then like the other day in Denver, I get up two hours before my talk, actually two and a half hours before my talk and I do the whole header -- that’s the whole beginning of the talk – right in the mirror so that I can stare myself down and know that I believe what I’m saying. That’s important. So that’s the second thing. I’ll say the third thing very quick. Right before you hit the stage of life, whatever it is, the final preparation is to load a success experience into your head as the last memory before you hit the stage. So when I go into an event or I go into a pitch, going to go ask for a lot of money, go and tell a client we didn’t really deliver – those tough ones in life – always stop right before I walk into the room and I load an experience into my head from my past where I was in a similar situation, I had the same fears and trepidations, we were ready, we killed them, and I remember to tell myself one last thing, “You’re just as good as that guy was then.” And I’ve taken on some pretty hairy engagements using that tip.

Susan Bratton: So acquiring specialized knowledge, rehearsing it fully and…

Tim Sanders: Re-experience success. So recollect a success experience in high definition.

Susan Bratton: Got it. So loading the successful one in your head is the third thing.

Tim Sanders: Yup.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh. You know, it’s funny, I always practice my presentations. I always stand and do them. I just get it into my body. But I also really, for some reason I really like to drive and practice my presentations. I like to say my presentations out loud while I’m driving. I have no idea…

Tim Sanders: That’s good. I like that.

Susan Bratton: I have no idea why. But it’s like a good safe space where I can talk as loud as I want without bothering anybody. I think that’s probably what it is, you know. I like to really project, you know.

Tim Sanders: Yeah. And, you know, the thing I do too is that I’ll take, if it’s a high – it’s a really hard thing – we’ll run a whole rehearsal and then we’ll watch playback.

Susan Bratton: Right, videotaping yourself is very helpful.

Tim Sanders: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I don’t want to get off in the weeds here, but everybody listening on the call, if you’ve been doing this for a while and you really want to figure out how good you are at your presentation, stop videotaping yourself and get permission and videotape your audience and then watch that playback instead, ‘cause [inaudible]….

Susan Bratton: That’s a great idea.

Tim Sanders: That’s what I do now. So we always have what I call a robber cam or a spotter cam…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: so my coaches and I, that’s all we do is watch playback and you really learn how to make technical adjustments there and you also learn that [inaudible] are either working or provoking people, but that’s a distraction. But I wanted to include that.

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, that was really good actually. Thank you. I’ve never thought of doing that. All right, so lets wrap up with six and seven fairly quickly ‘cause I want to talk about a couple more things and we’re running long.

Tim Sanders: So all six is about is balancing your confidence, this idea that, you know, you want to be not overly confident or overly humble, and the best way to do that is to follow a purpose, because when you follow something bigger than yourself even if it’s just the company cars, it causes you to naturally balance your ego against the mission. Number seven is simple: promise made, promise kept. You can do everything we’ve talked about on this interview, but if you don’t keep the little promises you make you will not believe in yourself because integrity is all you have and your subconscious judges this question, “Am I a person of my word” mostly by the little things you don’t have to finish. So be rigorous, document promises made in meetings. They’re like crying babies in a theater, they should be taken out at once, you know. It should be carried out immediately. And just really focus on being 100% accurate on keeping promises or paying the price if you fail.

Susan Bratton: Nice! Thank you. And buy this book, Today We Are Rich because not only will it be a good refresher for you, but it will be a great thing to share with your loved ones. I’m giving away a free copy of Today We Are Rich on the DishyMix fan page. The fan page is just go to Facebook, search for DishyMix, all one word, and you’ll find it. If you want to win a copy of a personally autographed version of Today We Are Rich from Tim Sanders, just go to Facebook to the DishyMix page, post your desire, I’ll select one and there’ll be a winner. Also I want to get into how you marketed the book itself too Tim…

Tim Sanders: Oh yeah, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Because we’re marketers and we like to know how this, you know, occurring for you. I know that the bulk of your revenue comes from the speaking engagements that you do, not necessarily the book sales. Is that correct?

Tim Sanders: Well yeah, but I mean if you’re rocking it on Amazon or you get onto Times, your fee goes from like $15,000 to like what Peter Guber’s now $60,000. He was $25,000 three months ago or something. No, selling books impacts your fee on the lecture circuit.

Susan Bratton: Now wait a minute, so Peter Guber’s book, his new book Tell To Win.

Tim Sanders: Oh he’s the guy now. He’s going to be like Jim Collins was a few years ago. Jim Collins was like…

Susan Bratton: What do you mean he’s 60? What do you mean by that?

Tim Sanders: $60,000 a speech.

Susan Bratton: Okay, I got it. Okay, that’s what you’re talking about.

Tim Sanders: You’re perceived value goes up as your platform gets bigger or you’re a CEO that’s standing or you’re a New York Times bestseller with a business book, it’s huge. The value just so you know – I just read this recently – that the value of a New York Times bestseller advice or business is probably $750,000 amortized over 24 months. So it is valuable. Forget the royalties; it’s the platform. So but anyway, so I’m a mid platform guy or I’m actually the small platform guy for the marketers. What that means is I’m not Vaynerchuk or I’m not even, you know, Guy Kawasaki or Chris Brogan. I’m 15,000 followers on Twitter. I’m about 5,000 if you combine my personal friend and friend page at LinkdIn. So my footprints may be 25,000 to 30,000 max, okay. We realize that that’s not big enough to move the market. That means that, you know, we still have to get major media to break through. So what comes out yesterday, we organize a viral e-book giveaway. And you can download that at twar.com. Got a four letter domain too, huh Susan, twar.com.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that was pretty impressive.

Tim Sanders: And we hired Rapture Studio, which I think is the leading edge right now in social media programming for viral documents. They’ve actually cracked the code on iPhone, iPad unlike Adobe. And we’ve created an e-book that when you click and open it it has Facebook in it built into it with an automatic share function, not a like function – important. It’s got Twitter built into it, email with address drop down. You can buy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, add the document, and we’ve even created this thing called Custom Editions where we’ve gone out to about 20 big mouths that share my point of view about feed the mind good stuff, which is this thing, and they wrote a preface for it – you know, like you write a preface for a book. And then they highlighted four or five things that they liked about it, and we created a custom PDF with all this functionality just for them in their name, a custom edition that had all that sharing functionality and they gave away their network. So like one guy yesterday, the CEO of GiANT Impact, you know, that produces all the leader casts for Chick Fil A, he gave it away to 50,000 people yesterday, just yesterday. So we probably did at least I would say 250,000 opens against those custom editions alone. And so here’s a book that comes out yesterday, it’s growing biologically in terms of how it rolled out, and on our initial pop we got to 119,000, which is again, for a small platform person that’s pretty good. And I also didn’t do any gaming of the system or organized buy if you corporate pre purchase. We aren’t getting, you know, 100 other authors together and offering you $10,000 in digital goodies if you’ll buy my $19 book. It’s straightforward. We’re giving away 12% of the book with sharing built into it, and it’s taking, you know, a life of its own on in the market. I think that’s the future of publishing.

Susan Bratton: Why didn’t you do one of those, you know, round robin mail list things?

Tim Sanders: Well this is hard to explain, but in the speaker bureau world that’s not considered something that a high fee speaker would do. That’s not considered very keynote like when you’re talking about anything above $25,000 to $50,000. Like, you know, the [inaudible] is would Marcus Buckingham do this? No, he would never do this. Would Malcolm Gladwell do this? Of course not, he’d never do it. Tom Peters would never do something like that. You know, so that’s kind of the if you want to be in that space you have to remember that you’re really respected for not getting on the Times list but staying there after your opening week. So it hurts if you just… And the other thing too is the idea that I love this book Susan, and this book is worth the $12 whatever it cost on Amazon. It’s totally worth it. I don’t have to give you $1,000 worth of digital downloads from all my friends that honestly you could get anyway to package this together for you to get $1,000 to spend $20. I just, Billie’s got too much value to do that. And I had an offer, and of course you know that could have got us to the same place yesterday, but I just want Billie’s story on there free excerpt could take a life of its own, and I’m coming down the Seth Godin side of this publishing industry, ‘cause the New York Times is going to figure this stuff out and it’s just not going to work in the future. So, you know, I’m not negative about those that do it, but in this particular case I just believe in my work and I believe in the power of viral marketing and ingenuity and good old-fashioned networking.

Susan Bratton: I didn’t really completely catch, when you were talking about the special excerpt where a person of influence could give away a free chapter and write a preamble to it and pull a couple of things that were their favorite things. I got that part. But then what was the other piece that you said that Rapture Studio was doing that was so incredible?

Tim Sanders: Well if you go to twar.com and you just click the e-book, download the free e-book on twar.com you’re going to see a modal window pop up. It’s not a pop up window, it’s a modal, which means if you have a pop up blocker it still works. So the window comes up, and the reason we designed it that way is so that it looks to you like PDF but it’s really HTML 5, but it’s all paginated and it’s gorgeous. And there’s a button where you could download the PDF if you want to but most of our readers see it like that, and that works on iPad, iPhone. All the links work. See if I sent you a PDF and we use PDF pin to embed some links into it or something and you’re looking at it on an iPhone or an iPad and you click on one of the links, it doesn’t work. It asks you “What do you want to open,” because that’s our default reader because you know Apple and Adobe aren’t that friendly together. They’re not going to make it work for each other. So now you’ve got to either open Good Reader or iBooks and it kills the click throughs. It just destroys the conversion. So now most people that use PDF’s free e-books, even if they’re smart enough to build and like buy on Amazon, they’re kissing of the i user base. And Susan you and I know that any segmentation would tell you that the iPhone/iPad user base, those are the influentials. Those are the people that really make things spread. So Rapture cracked the code on how to do this, and I think it’s really cool ‘cause I just hadn’t seen a free e-book before that had that much viral capability due to its programming.

Susan Bratton: I see it now. So on the margins of the e-book every other page may be theirs.

Tim Sanders: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Share it…

Tim Sanders: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Facebook like or email, there’s Amazon or find another store.

Tim Sanders: We’re looking at about an eight to one multiplier now. Hopefully if the buzz around the quality of the excerpt goes up then it can get better. But it’s a good multiplier. And the other thing too is…

Susan Bratton: When you say eight to one multiplier, what do you mean, eight…?

Tim Sanders: 10,000 people is going to get me 80,000 reads in 72 hours.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Tim Sanders: That’s a prediction we’re making that looks like it’s coming true.

Susan Bratton: 10,000 people are going to get you 80,000 reads?

Tim Sanders: Yeah. So 10,000 initial downloads…

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Tim Sanders: are going to get you 80,000 opens in about a 72 hour period.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Tim Sanders: Which is a good pass along. I mean, you know, when you don’t have a lot of marketing dough that’s really important and for a lot of…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Tim Sanders: a lot of marketers out there that’s kind of cool. And by the way, if there’s anybody listening that says, “I’ve got a custom edition to me. I’d love to write a preface and put this out for my people,” just send me an email. I’m [email protected] and Rapture will build one for you.

Susan Bratton: And when people contact you to do this what do you think is the benefit for them in giving this particular thing away?

Tim Sanders: So if you go to tinyurl.com/customtwar you’ll see a link to the Facebook application as well as the centralized page that we also carry by Huffington Post and that shows all of the custom editions. It shows the greatest hit out what each one of those people wrote with a link to download their edition. We’re also buying -- I won’t tell you the amount but it’s pretty good -- Facebook ads against the custom editions on a performance basis so the more people that download your custom edition, the more inventory I’ll turn on to Facebook, add you to get more traffic and to get more friends, so you feel like it’s a win-win.

Susan Bratton: Now who’s handling that for you?

Tim Sanders: Rapture.

Susan Bratton: Rapture’s doing that too, that’s pretty interesting.

Tim Sanders: Yeah, they’re my account planner for that. I mean as this scales up, you know, if we get to more than say half a million impressions a month to schedule, we’ll probably fall back on one of my old agency buddies in San Francisco to make that more productive. But we’ve tried to create a value proposition with what we call the big mouths into doing custom editions, and quite frankly Susan a couple of people have done it because they want to be associated with the project and they think that their tribe would appreciate their point of view and this free book.

Susan Bratton: Explain to me how the Facebook benefit works again so that if somebody here is interested in doing that and they want the Facebook likes, explain it.

Tim Sanders: Well if you go to like… Okay, if you go to Facebook.com/todaywearerich, which is the page for example, you’ll see a tab on the left that says Custom Editions, and you click on that tab, and it opens up all the custom editions in this dynamic. So we just add them as they get created. And as you click to download that you also have an opportunity to like that person, and we’re going to target against that specific set of pages as well as the pages for the more popular folks that have now put that on their wall. And it’s a dynamic process for us to experiment with. I mean the early people are definitely, you know, taking an hour of their spare time to get involved on a bet, but we’re learning that as you reward the people who have real influence or power, it’s a win-win for everybody.

Susan Bratton: Well I think that anybody who has a mailing list and is looking for good content to send out to someone would naturally be interested in this because it’s something that appeals to anyone of nearly any age, you know. So your book has mass appeal, which I think is really important.

Tim Sanders: Thank you. And the last thing is – and you’ve known me for a long time – I’m the kind of person that pays back my debts. So there’s a lot of people that have helped me with the launch, and believe you me, besides the standard reciprocal agreement, you know, I’m a person whose, you know, counseled Tim Ferris on Four Hour Work Week in late 2005 on the [inaudible], Chris Brogin getting into the speaking business. I love to help people become successful, and I love to pay back people that have been there for me and Billie when we needed them the most. Like you.

Susan Bratton: You like them. You’re so sweet. Hey, I know that we’ve gone really long Tim and thank you…

Tim Sanders: We’ll cut out anything that’s verbose.

Susan Bratton: Oh well no, we’re going to keep the whole thing. It was very good. And thank you so much for coming on the show, and for not only talking about the book itself but also about your marketing strategy behind it. It’s nice when both of them are fascinating as they are. And so thank you so much for being on the show. I want to remind everyone that I’ll post all of the links that Tim talked about on the DishyMix page on my website. But if you want the copy, the autographed copy of his book then you do need to go to my Facebook page and post your desire there and I’ll select someone. All right, you’ve gotten to know Tim Sanders, author of Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence. This book, if you have any issues about your confidence, is a must read, and if you don’t it still makes you feel so good. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. You’ve listened to DishyMix. Thanks for giving me all this time today. I hope you had a fun time with us, and I’ll look forward to connecting with you next week. Take care.