The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Jack Canfield’

Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success? 

I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and it got me thinking about interviews that I have conducted, so I decided to explore an idea. I still haven’t gotten further than a third of the book so far, but when you ask most people about Outliers, they’ll mention 10,000 hours to become an expert at a craft. But from what I have read so far, hard work doesn’t equal success, you also need opportunities and talent.

I have taken five of The Invisible Mentor interviews that I have published on the blog, and extracted the responses to big breaks, mentor influence, and steps to success. Today, I’m focusing on five men, yesterday were five women. As you read the responses, what ideas and thoughts come to mind? Are there ways you can create your own opportunities if you haven’t had your big break as yet?

Name:  Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

Big Break:  One big break was from a famous man in America, Professor George Gallup who started the Gallup Poll and invented market research. He is the fellow who discovered the statistical sample. If you measure a population you can get their point of view and of course that is difficult and expensive to do. If you measure a statistical random sample of 1,200 people, you get the same point of view as if you measured the population. And of course it’s possible to measure a sample and get a small deviation plus or minus. The Gallup Poll has predicted the outcome of every US Presidential Elections since the mid 1930s.

At a time when we needed some help and advice in getting The School of Thinking going, in breaking through the education system, someone of that stature as Professor George Gallup lent his name to it, and he said that what we were doing was possibly one of the greatest things in the world. He in a sense became my mentor, the supervisor for my PhD. He wrote the foreword for one of my books. He was a very nice and encouraging gentleman. He was in his 80s at the time, and I was a much younger man and he extended a hand. I was very gracious with his hospitality and would visit him at his farm up at Princeton. Looking back, this was a huge break and very practical one, and I’m very grateful because it led to a cover story on Readers Digest in 1993. It was an international edition with over 70 million readers which put the school of Thinking on the map. At that time, it was like being on Oprah today.

Mentor Influence: There are people who come along, and sometimes they encourage you, or tell you what you do not want to hear. So one category are people who are wiser, often older and in a different circumstance, who are able to give you good advice, direction or point things out if you are willing to listen. Professor George Gallup and Edward de Bono were great mentors for me. Edward de Bono was my tutor for my PhD, he had one student, me. I am the only one in the world who has a PhD in lateral Thinking, and Edward de Bono and George Gallup were my examiners. They were two extraordinary individuals who spent a lot of time with me, and I have built a whole career around that.

Steps to Success:  I make sure that I do something that I enjoy doing. And I do them every day. In other words, from the point of view of virtuosity, it takes a long while, you cannot just pick up a book or video on something and become an expert. Some people think you can, but you can’t. It may take 10 years, and you can do 10 years if you love what you are doing so it’s a combination of loving what you are doing, and doing it every day. Enjoy success as you go and do the 10,000 hours it requires to achieve virtuosity, and then enjoy that kind of success as well.

Name:  Steve Kayser

Big Break:  Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Steve Kayser: Just one? I have had big breaks all my life. Every day. Every month. Every year.

Tom Nies gave me my latest big break. He asked me to run PR for Cincom Systems North America. When I told him I didn’t know anything about PR he said, “Read this book – you’ll be fine.” The book he gave me was “The Death of Advertising & The Rise of PR,” by Al Ries. I read it. Then called Al Ries. Explained my situation and asked his advice and also asked him to contribute to a fledgling online E-Zine I was developing called Expert Access. He did become a contributor and we went from 5,000 subscribers to 25,000 in about 1 month because of it. Al Ries (and his daughter Laura Riesnow) have done several interviews and articles with me … And,  Al Ries was also one of the first guests we had on Expert Access Radio — http://radio.cincom.com.

One of the lessons I took from that — People at the top value great thinking. They pass it on. If you take advantage of their thinking (in this instance Al Ries’ book) it can change everything for you. But you have to teach yourself – learn yourself. No handholding allowed.

It’s the biggest thing I would look for in new employees or partners now. Are they autodidacts? Can they teach themselves new things – continuously?

Mentor Influence:  Wow – where to start. See above. Some of those guys were. But I also read 3 to 5 books a week and find great mentoring there.

Steps to Success:  Stumbled. Staggered. Fell.  Those are kinda the steps.

No failures = no success

To succeed you have to fail at some time. No way around that I think.

Since I’ve literally reinvented myself 5 times during my life and am in the process of doing it again – I can only say what steps seem to be common in all of those endeavors:

A Joie de vivre  – a joy for living & loving life, learning, re-learning. I need to throw a quote in here.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Name:  John Kremer

Big Break:  Probably the thing that had the biggest impact for me is that Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen loved my book and recommended it to everybody. I was successful before but I sold a ton of books based on their recommendation. They took my book 1001 Ways to Market Your Book and basically put it up on a wall and did the things that they wanted to do. The Rule of Five is one of the strategies that they took from my book, which says that you should do at least five things every day to market your book, any book that you still love and want to have sold and that helps you to be successful marketing your book.

Mentor Influence:  I haven’t had any real mentors who sat with me that much, but I’ve had many mentors through books. I have been mentored by people who I have read like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and people like Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen through their books, and also by marketing people like Jay Conrad Levinson.

Steps to Success: The main thing that I did was study and learn and keep observing what other people were doing that was working and follow what I noted when I watched people. I have a lot of people that I learned from and not just the gurus but my customers who tell me what works and doesn’t work for them. Much of what I know about book marketing comes from people sharing with me what works for them, and all I do is essentially pass on that information.

Name:  Kevin Popović

Big Break:  There is a gentleman named Bob Friday, and he had a company called TGIF Productions that did video and event production. While I was a struggling entrepreneur, and trying to figure out where I was going to fit in this communications business, I had to take a part-time job in retail. Every so often Bob would come in to the store and buy something new for his office, and he’d share a story and I would chime in about what I thought about his story. We started communicating back and forth.

I ended up offering to help him with these projects on the side to gain experience, and after four or five months of this he started paying me to freelance and after six months of that he brought me on in a full-time position as assistant producer. For four years I traveled all over the country learning about video and event production and how to deal with clients.

I saw how he ran his business and I also saw what I did not like about how he ran his business. So I attribute one of my big breaks to Bob Friday, and thank him for the opportunities he provided and the lessons that he taught me. Many of which are things that I knew that I did not want to do. My father taught me a long time ago to learn from my mistakes and I’ve tried to apply that to everybody I’ve worked with. As much as I have learned from them about what to do, I’ve also learned what not to do.

Mentor Influence: I’ve had a couple of mentors. My father has been a good mentor to me as a professor of marketing. My grandmother has been a mentor to me. She sold shoes for 30 years. Michael Bosworth, sales legend and author of Solutions Selling, Customer Centric Selling and Story Leaders has been a mentor to me in the way that I approach sales and how I present myself, or professional opportunities.

Steps to Success:  I’ve always tried to keep moving forward, lateral at worst, never backwards.

Name:  Andrew Warner

Big Break:  There were lots of big breaks, but here is one. I went to downtown New York, not too far from my office to talk to a customer of mine. On my way out of there, I heard this guy say, “I’m sorry guys I have to run, I don’t have the time. I have to go and look at an apartment uptown. I can’t help you guys today, maybe tomorrow.” So I recognized the guy and said, “Mike, I’ve got a car downstairs, my brother and I will give you a ride up to your apartment and you can get there on time.”

So we’re driving up to the apartment and the whole time I’m thinking, “I should be at my desk, I should be working, what am I doing, just kind of hanging out, what’s wrong with me here, I’ve got to be more efficient,” but I’m enjoying the conversation so I continue, and Mike and I are having a great conversation with my brother, and it’s terrific. I pull over and let Mike out in front of his place and he says, “Thank you! By the way I know that you’re trying to build up your business Andrew we have this customer called Life Minders, they have been buying lots of advertising from us, if you email or contact them and mention my name they’ll buy from you. Alright, goodbye!”

He leaves and I’m sitting there stunned, the guy just handed me a customer, one of his best customers he just introduced me to. That would never have happened if I was just sitting at my desk. It would never have happened if I didn’t get to know him, if I didn’t have this conversation. I called up that Life Minders, and they ended up buying from me. The very first cheque to me was for over $300,000. I looked at it with my brother. We had never seen that much money in the business. I don’t think either of us has seen that big a cheque ever in our lives. It turned around our whole business. We were deep in debt at the time. We could barely pay the bills at the time. That cheque turned things around.

The next cheque from them was for I think $1 million, the next one was for $2 million in advertising and it turned around our business. And what I learned from that was to just go out and have conversations with people and get to know them and really learn from them. That kind of information would never have been on a blog, would never just be on the internet somewhere, and would never have been advertised. I had to get to know Mike to get that kind of information.

Mentor Influence:  I didn’t have enough of them unfortunately and I wish that I had more along the way. I know that there were times when I couldn’t see that having four or five big clients was dangerous for my business. I had them, I was doing well, I turned away other customers because I couldn’t fit them all in. That was a big mistake, then a few of them went out of business, and if three of them went out of business, 60 percent of my revenue was shot.

If I had a mentor, he would have looked at it and said, “Look Andrew, I know you are doing well but you’d be better off with less money but securing your future by locking in multiple sponsors,” or they would have said, “Andrew, you should diversify away from this business and have other product lines,” and I just didn’t have that. That was a big mistake.

Steps to Success: Showing up every day. Even when I started out as an entrepreneur earlier on, my friends who didn’t have jobs, or happen to have a day off would ask me to go and hang out, and I remember saying, “I’m working, why are you even asking,” and they’d say, “Because you’re not really working, you’re working for yourself, you don’t have a boss. There is no reason for you to show up today, you can show up tomorrow. You can always make up for it the next day. Or do work on the weekends or in the evenings.” And if you start doing that you never really catch up. But if you show up for every single day, and you think about your job as a mission then you do grow every day. And everyone around you starts to respect what you’re doing, as you respect it yourself.

From what you have read today and yesterday, do Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Steve Kayser Interview (Part I), (Part II)

John Kremer Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Kevin Popović Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Andrew Warner Interview (Part I), (Part II) (Part III), (Part IV)

Book link is affiliate link.

Have a book you’d like to market? John Kremer is the guy to turn to. In fact, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen the masterminds behind the “Chicken Book” series used several of Kremer’s ideas from his hugely popular book, 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. When I interviewed John Kremer he indicated that Canfield and Hansen gave him his big break. Who gave you your big break, or are you still waiting for your big break?

Tell me a little bit about yourself

I am 61 years old and I live in Taos, New Mexico. My passion is publishing, marketing, walking my dog and spending time with my wife.

What’s a typical day like for you?

When I get up, one of the first things that I try to do is to check my email. I spend most of my workday on the computer, but I take time out of the day to walk with my wife and dog. I also work at nights because it’s very quiet.

How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

I have to pay the bills so that’s a motivating factor and that keeps me motivated. But I enjoy what I do so it’s very easy to stay motivated.

If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

If I had to start over from scratch back in 1980, I would try to sell my books to some of the bigger publishers more aggressively. I would learn how to do that right. But nowadays, I wouldn’t do that because the big publishers are dying. In today’s world it’s very practical to self-publish or publish through a Print on Demand company like Lulu or Infinity Publishing. In today’s world I would focus a lot on ebooks, and especially with the iPad, the ways it has been showcasing books you can do a lot more with it than with a Kindle book reader, which is only in black and white and fairly static. You cannot include audio or video, and I believe with the iPad you can include audio and video.

What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

I don’t know about the last year, but the most important discovery that I’ve made in the past 15 years is understanding that ultimately all marketing is creating relationships, and I think it is the most important discovery that I’ve made and continue to make. You have to create relationships and that’s how you market successfully: you create relationships with booksellers, distributors, media, and bloggers. Also, the ultimate reader and customer do a lot of word of mouth marketing for you, so I think the key is creating those relationships.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Probably the ebook revolution. The Kindle and the iPad are going to be the biggest things, and of course the iPhone apps that are being translated to the iPad, those are really crucial I think in terms of delivering content to people. So I would say that’s the biggest revolution. There were ebook before that time but they weren’t a mass market item as they are now.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

I’m the best book marketing consultant that you can find. I know more about marketing books than any three people combined.

What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

I drill down to the five best things that people have to do to market their books, so I focus on that and I don’t get distracted. I really want people to be focused and not be driven by the winds of “oh here is a new hot thing”. Sometimes I do tell people that here is a new thing you need to do and it’s hot now, but I really want to focus on the key thing which is building relationships. For example, in internet marketing there are new things coming up over and over again, but the most fundamental and important thing you can do marketing online is to create relationships with the top websites that have the audience that you are trying to reach, and people still keep hoping that there is a magic button that you can push and everything will be taken care of for you and the reality is that magic button is simple, you create relationships.

Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

I don’t know what that would be. I just go day-by-day and do the work so I don’t think in terms of challenges, or things like that, that I have to resolve. Every day is a minor challenge. There are things that you have to do, probably my main challenge is time management because there are things that I like to do and there are things that I don’t like to do and I tend not to manage well the things that I don’t like to do. I think that this describes most people.

What lessons did you learn in the process?

This means that there are days when I have to sit down and do the things that I don’t want to do, and I know that I have to do that so I set aside a certain amount of time every week.

Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Probably the thing that had the biggest impact for me is that Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen loved my book and recommended it to everybody. I was successful before but I sold a ton of books based on their recommendation. They took my book 1001 Ways to Market Your Books and basically put it up on a wall and did the things that they wanted to do. The Rule of Five is one of the strategies that they took from my book, which says that you should do at least five things every day to market your book, any book that you still love and want to have sold and that helps you to be successful marketing your book.

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Again you want me to focus on things that I do not want to focus on. The biggest failure is probably a trivia book that I wrote when trivia books were going out of style and I printed 10,000 copies and shouldn’t have printed that many, even though everyone was telling me that I should. I eventually end up burying 5,000 copies and that hurts when you have to do that.

I learned that you have to be conservative with your print runs and do not listen to people because you can always go back to press.

What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

The biggest disappointment in my life is that I still haven’t learned every thing in terms of who I am in the context of the universe, and that is an ongoing disappointment so I haven’t prevented its reoccurrence. I would still like to know where my place is in the universe and how I fit and know it not just on the level of intellect but know it on the level of visceral experiences.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

The reality is that every day you are making little decisions about a lot of what goes on in your life, and the little decisions are as important as the big decisions in my experience because one decision after another can lead you into an entirely new direction you wouldn’t have gone had you not made those little decisions.

What are three events that helped to shape your life?

One was something that happened when I was in 10^th Grade High School English class. It’s when I learned to love to write and it certainly impacted my life because before then I didn’t like to write. After that class I learned that I liked to write and wanted to write and that was going to be my life.

The second thing is something that I learned in college, and it was discovering a man named Carl Rogers who talked about how people can change their lives, and the most important thing that you can do to support someone is simply to give them unconditional love, and I think that’s really important because it’s not only about how you treat others but how you treat yourself.

The third thing that shaped my life the most is starting to meditate.

What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

1001 Ways to Market Your Books.

How did mentors influence your life?

I haven’t had any real mentors who sat with me that much, but I’ve had many mentors through books. I have been mentored by people who I have read like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and people like Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen through their books, and also by marketing people like Jay Conrad Levinson.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Have fun! The most important thing is that you need to enjoy what you are doing, and if you are doing something that you don’t really enjoy, figure out (1) do you need to do it, (2) if you need to do it can you find someone to do it for you, (3) if you can’t find someone to do it, is there some way to minimize how much you have to do it, so that most of your life you can be happy and have fun.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

I don’t bring my personal into my professional life because my wife does not want be bringing business into our relationship. On the other had I do bring my personal life into my business life because I don’t think of business as just business. What I am doing I enjoy doing so it’s fun and it’s part of what I am and who I am and it’s always going to be that way. I won’t do something for very long that I do not enjoy, except for accounting and taxes which I have to do. And even though I hire people to perform those functions, I still have to do a certain amount to help them do their job.

What are five takeaways from John Kremer’s interview? If you have a book that you’d like to market, would you be willing to give the Rule of Five a try?

Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

A few years ago I came across the Rule of Five outlined in 1001 Ways to Market Your Books by John Kremer, a book marketing expert . Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen have also used the Rule of Five to take their books to bestseller status.

The Rule of Five simply means that each and every day you perform five activities that will assist you in achieving your core goals. So in their case they were trying to sell their book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, so one day they would send out five copies of books to be reviewed, another day would be calling five radio stations to get interviews and another day they would be sending out five press releases.

The Rule of Five can be applied to any goal you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to get a promotion:

• Who are five people who you could call for an information interview, who have already traveled the path you are on?
• What are five things you can do to get noticed in your company?
• What are five ways you can improve the way your work gets done?
• What are five things that you could do to make yourself more valuable in your company and industry?
• Who are five invisible mentors (unique leaders) you could study to model their behaviour?

What would your Rule of Five look like? Please keep the conversation flowing, please comment.