Be Audacious

FEAR

If the hallmark of every great marketer and salesman is AUDACITY…

And if “anybody and everybody can” become a great marketer or salesman….

Then the people who throw their hat into that ring will discover that being audacious is TERRIFYING.

I wasn’t afraid to drive hours and hours to meetings.

I wasn’t afraid to do presentations.

I wasn’t afraid of having a big downline of people seeking my advice.

But making those phone calls terrified me.

FEAR.

Dread. Apprehension. Panic. A 7 pound brick of raw acid in my stomach. All manner of anxiety, procrastination and sick feelings.

I joined the business at the same time that I took a semester off to take a co-op engineering job. So that semester I didn’t have homework, I had a “J.O.B.” Which left me free in the evenings to grow my fledgling enterprise.

I would go to work every day and some time after lunch a shadow of apprehension would creep over me and that queasy, icy dread would creep into my bones as I realized:

“Oh no….. tonight I have to go home and make phone calls.”

I had a growing names list and the very sight of that sheet of paper triggered panic. I was afraid of every single one of those people in a slightly different way.

Day after day that miserable paralysis would grip me.

One day it occurred to me:

“Fear is a HABIT.”

“….and habits can be BROKEN.”

I would FORCE myself to reason with it. Which was an odd thing because emotions strongly resist being reasoned with. Especially primal, gut-level emotions like FEAR. It’s a battle of the will.

But I would reason with them anyway. I would ask myself: “Perry, what are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of calling Curt.”

“What may happen if you call Curt?”

“He might say X or Y or Z….” and I’d go through the scenarios.

“OK, so if he says X, what are you going to say back? If he says Y, what are you going to say back?”

I’d work through the tree of possible scenarios until I was prepared for everything. One day at a time I refined that phone script and developed branches so I knew exactly what to say in every circumstance and the answers were well-rehearsed.

Because this was a performance and I HAD to know my lines.

The other thing I quickly found myself doing was taking the canned answers they gave me on the tapes – which NEVER sounded quite right coming out of my mouth – and developing my own version. A version which was uniquely mine and which was really me.

This was *really* important. It was important because I had to feel I was being authentic, even if I was doing a “canned” business which more often than not felt cheesy. Finding my voice.

There were two questions I was most afraid of:

“Is this Amway?”

and

“How much money are you making?”

Over time I came up with a number of novel approaches which almost NEVER resulted in either of those questions being asked.

So for example I would call somebody up and say, “Hi this is Perry [blah blah blah] hey I’m working with a business development group out of Abiline Kansas and we’re looking at taking on some partners in [location] and I was considering you….”

Nobody naturally thinks “Amway” when somebody says “Abilene Kansas” and I was learning how people associate things in their minds – so that I could sit down with an open-minded prospect rather than battling through a pile of pre-conceived notions that were untrue or unfair. That script worked really well for a long time.

Notice:

I just described two skills which are absolutely essential to writing great copy:

1) Going through a decision tree of what people might say, planning your response ahead of time. The only difference with copy is, you go through that tree for them on a piece of paper or on a web page or email as though you were having a conversation with them – you don’t get to wait for them to ask. You have to accurately guess.

2) Developing a swiss army knife of language and descriptions which artfully shape perception; saying things in a way that they’ve never been said before, so that the old magically becomes new.

I was not accustomed to doing either one of these things before that. Both are vital verbal skills that are absolutely essential for any marketer or salesman. It’s a craft, it’s a performance, and it must be honed and perfected.

Those who hone this craft do it in idle moments and while they drive or walk or chew gum. They invest hours rolling around the right words and phrases in their minds.

One sentence may be the result of hours, days, weeks, even months of refinement.

It’s the RIGHT word at the RIGHT time.

Nothing less than that will achieve world-class results.

I was 21 when I began cultivating those skills and within a year or two, those habits were already so ingrained that as I graduated from college and moved into the professional world and later the sales, marketing arenas and eventually a world stage, I almost took those skills for granted.

Those skills were burned into my mind by the FEAR I was actively opposing.

It’s good to remember where those skills came from, and give credit where credit is due.

Last thought:

Please don’t ever let old lessons and past skills go to waste. Even the distasteful ones.

And whatever you do, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

People often ask me, “Dude, why are you so bitter about your Amway experience?”

Well, in a sentence, the answer is: Virtually EVERYTHING they told me was a half-truth. And I do mean everything.

There’s a couple of old newsletters where I describe all that ick in granular, hideous detail. When I finally unraveled the whole thing and left, I was ANGRY. Furious, actually.

Just being truthful here. (And the entire Amway business did implode when the Internet came on the scene, that is a fact. I was just one of the many hundreds of thousands of people who found out how deep the deception was.)

But my point today is not to re-hash that. The point is: It doesn’t matter WHAT you’ve been through, how abusive it was, how much you got ripped off or exploited or taken advantage of: There are things you learned in those experiences that you could not learn from any other experience.

And: If you got exploited there were probably ways in which you participated in deceiving yourself. You might want to thank the con-man for putting his finger on your own self-deception. I’ve certainly thanked many a con man for pounding the deception out of me.

If you want an extreme example of extracting the good from the bad, read Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” or Corrie Ten Boom’s “The Hiding Place.” Both are absolutely superb books that EVERYONE should read in their lifetime, and both are about what the authors learned while living in a…

…concentration camp.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take an abusive, pink-koolaid sales career over a concentration camp any day of the week.

This email series isn’t about re-hashing wounds or nursing grudges. It’s about taking all that past experience – the good, the bad, the ugly, the ridiculous, the sublime – and bringing it to the present so it has MAXIMUM force for doing good NOW.

The odds tilt in the favor of your MLM experience having been more failure than success.

Likewise the odds of anything you do NOW tilt in the favor of failing rather than succeeding.

Hey, that’s just life on planet earth.

But people don’t succeed because of ODDS. We succeed because of PLANS and LESSONS LEARNED and KNOWLEDGE and WISDOM.

Squeeze every drop out of the orange, my friend.

And today, whether it feels natural or not, whether you’re afraid or not…

BE AUDACIOUS.

Perry Marshall