Blog
Insights on marketing strategy, the 8 Profit Activators, and what actually works.
The train leaves at 1pm
One of the most powerful forces in marketing is scarcity. And one of the most abused. Robert Cialdini taught me years ago that we’re wired to want things mor...
Throw your hat over the fence
I’ve noticed something looking back through these old journals. So many of the things that became important in my business started as an intuition. A little ...
How high is high?
In 2006, I read an article about a guy named Gamal Aziz. He had just taken over as GM of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and he had an interesting way of looking...
Fast acting and simple
One of the most valuable ideas I learned from Dan Kennedy in 1997 was something he called intensification. Instead of sending someone one message and hoping ...
Message. Market. Media.
In 1997, I met Dan Kennedy for the first time. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Dan, you know what a lovable, approachable, huggable kind of guy he...
Freedom to say no
In 1997, I wrote a page in my journal called: Rules for Good Listings. I had ten of them. Geographic limits. The house had to be at least neutral in conditio...
25 headlines
One of the things I’ve done for more than 30 years is write headlines. Thousands of them. I was looking through my journals from 1997 this morning and found ...
Billboards work. Even behind trees.
I was driving down the highway recently and saw a billboard partially obscured by some trees. The headline said: Billboards work. And underneath: Even behind...
I buy your gold
I grew up in Toronto, and there was a guy everybody knew. Russell Oliver. He became famous…and very rich…with four words: I buy your gold. That was it. He bl...
The long game
One of the ways I started my real estate career was calling people in my neighborhood. But I wasn’t calling to ask if they wanted to sell their house. I call...
Preparing your case
What if you prepared your marketing the way an attorney prepares a case? In 1997, I was studying Gerry Spence’s How to Argue and Win Every Time, and I can se...
Horse for sale. (Details inside)
Sometimes the easiest way to sell a horse is with a sign that says: HORSE FOR SALE. I learned this lesson in 1997 from a woman who lived between my condo and...
The speed of reality
I had a realization going through my old journals this morning: Time moves at the speed of reality. Our minds don’t. You can sit with a journal and imagine a...
Ideas don’t compound
I just recorded my 50th daily video going back through 30 years of journals. And something has become really obvious. Ideas don’t compound. Implemented ideas...
The Ferrari Mind Tuneup
One of the most interesting things I found in my 1997 journals is a two-page exercise from my friend Jerry Ballinger called the Ferrari Mind Tune-Up. At firs...
Words that lead to “yes”
One of the greatest marketing lessons I ever learned came from four simple words: You get benefit now. I first learned that idea from Jeffrey Lant’s book Cas...
Creativity is a process…not a gift.
Yesterday I stumbled onto the earliest beginnings of what eventually became the 8 Profit Activators. Today I can’t stop thinking about why they’ve been so va...
Where ideas come from
Thirty years ago, I was sitting around a pool in Encinitas with Eben Pagan and Joe Stumpf, trying to work out an idea. Looking back at my journal today remin...
What do I want?
Yesterday, I talked about how it’s okay to want what you want. But there’s a second part to that: You have to know what you want. As I’ve been going through ...
Design Your Days
One thing I wish I’d done differently in my early journals… I wish I’d written the date, time, and place every single day. Now I always do. It’s amazing how ...
Referral multiplying idea inside
Most businesses ask for referrals at exactly the wrong time. They wait until the job is finished. In one of my 1997 journals I had a page titled, “How to get...
Not a diary
One of the unexpected gifts of looking back through 30 years of journals isn’t just remembering what happened. It’s seeing how I used them. People often ask ...
Think big. Start small. Keep going.
For years, I thought my greatest strength was seeing possibilities. I still think it is. But I also see the hidden cost. As I flipped to January 1997 in my j...
Storyboard imagination
Put a pen in your hand. Take out a blank piece of paper. And at the top, write down one specific thing you want to think about. That simple act does somethin...
Clearing time debt
One of the most useful ideas I ever wrote in my journal never made it into any of my books. I called it time debt. You already know what financial debt feels...
10 minutes at a time
One of the biggest mistakes I used to make was thinking too far into the future. I’d think about everything I wanted to accomplish this week. Or this month. ...
Idea tournaments
The biggest lie I believed for years was that I had a time management problem. I didn’t. I had a decision problem. Looking back through my journals, I can se...
Time isn’t the real problem
For years I thought I was bad at time management. Looking back through Journal Number 3, I can see I was trying to solve a problem I didn’t yet have a name f...
The most underrated kind of day
The last week of November 1996 was my first Strategic Coach workshop in Toronto. The beginning of a 30-year journey of learning from Dan Sullivan. One of the...
Brilliant idea #1009
Thirty years ago, Eben Pagan and I had a habit. Whenever we were traveling together, we’d invent businesses that would probably never exist. I’m looking at o...
This ad idea gets more, for less
One of my favorite ads I’ve ever written took up less than one-eighth of a page. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t beautiful. It didn’t win any design awards. But ...
Turning ideas into reality
One of the things you’ll discover if you keep a journal is that ideas aren’t the hard part. The hard part is getting them out of your journal and into the re...
Outcomes not Information
One of the biggest mistakes in marketing is thinking people want your information. They don’t. They want what the information will help them achieve. That so...
If you could only mail one letter.
What If Your Life Depended on One Letter? One of the biggest influences on my marketing career has been Gary Halbert. I first discovered him as one of the “b...
Nobody’s stopping you
For years, I’ve noticed something that almost every business gets backwards. They spend all their time looking for the tiny percentage of people who need the...
One page. Six months of innovation.
One page in one of my journals changed the way I think about innovation. At the top of the page I’d written one simple prompt: “26 ways to get more buyers.” ...
My best conversation partner
Have you ever noticed that when you’re talking to yourself… you’re actually talking to someone? It’s a funny thought, but it’s true. Some of the best convers...
More structure. More Freedom.
For the longest time, I thought freedom meant having no constraints. No schedule. No routines. No rules. Just the ability to wake up and do whatever I felt l...
Diamond Cutters vs. Diamond Miners
There are two ways to make money in the diamond business. You can spend your life looking for diamonds. Or you can become the person who knows what to do wit...
What’s not going to change?
One of the questions I ask myself whenever I see a new trend is: What's not going to change? Everyone wants to know what's next. What's the next technology…p...
It all started in my journal
This year I turned sixty. I'm re-reading my journals from the beginning… The ones I started writing nearly thirty years ago. As I turn the pages, I'm noticin...
The good old days
One of the unexpected gifts of going back through 30 years of journals is realizing something I never noticed while I was living it: These are the good old d...
The paradox of choice
I’ve been thinking about something lately that feels like a paradox. For most of my life, I’ve optimized for freedom. No boss. No commute. Nobody telling me ...
This goes on your permanent record
Every morning we wake up with the same daily allowance. About a thousand minutes. The question isn’t where those minutes go. It’s what remains after they’re ...
Stop trying to convince people...
Stop trying to convince people. Just tell the TRUTH and watch what happens. In the summer of 1996, I learned one of the most important lessons of my career. ...
The 9-Word Email: The Complete Guide by Its Creator
I've sent thousands of 9-word emails over the last few years, and I've never seen anything as effective. People use them in every kind of business you can im...
Groundhog Day
Ever notice the subtle patterns in your daily life? I like to start my day with breakfast at my favorite Honeycomb Bakery. Today, I realized a lot of other p...
Nobody Opens Email
The danger of blanket declarations is believing them to be true. Nobody opens email anymore. Direct mail is dead. But here's what I would stake my success on...
Penetrating the Prayer Chain
If you provide a product or service that isn't needed or used regularly, what do you do? I have a friend who's a personal injury attorney specializing in veh...
Please Open This One: The Origin Story of the 9-Word Email
Did I ever tell you about my journey on the path that led me to the 9-word email? I was sitting in my evil scheme hatchery, working on an email campaign, and...
Cute Bikinis for Cute Prices
Here's a little something you might never guess about me. The most watched creators I follow on TikTok are the three twenty-something sisters of the Strawber...
The Death of Email
I take great delight in my growing collection of screen captures of ads declaring "The Death of Email." I take a picture of the ad, then I click on it to fin...
The Van Allen Belt
The riskiest part of sending a manned rocket into space isn't once it's up there. It's getting through the Van Allen Belt. That's where the radiation is high...
The Inevitability Cheat Code
Mike Tyson once said "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When you stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson circa 1986, it was inevitable y...
Imagine If You Applied Your SELF
When my mother passed, I found a red box with all my old report cards. It was an amazing walk down memory lane. The thing I loved most was reading the handwr...
The Problem with Checklists
There are 2 basic types of people in the world. People who like to follow checklists — and people who like to make checklists. The problem is when you expect...
That's Not Your Job
I once saw a great interview with Quentin Tarantino on The Charlie Rose Show. He told a story about a lunch that changed his life. Quentin was having lunch w...
Time Travel Instructions Inside
It's easy to imagine the benefits of time travel. I think about it a lot. The main advantage I can see is acting with certainty of future outcomes…knowing wh...
Your Own Personal Pluribus
I just watched the amazing Pluribus Series on Apple TV. The central idea of the story is simple and unsettling: what happens when every person in the world i...
Irrational Confidence
The first time I saw the words irrational confidence together was in a book called Overachievement. It was written by a sports psychologist who has coached a...
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