mark levy - accidental genius (unplugged)

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Accidental Genius (Unplugged) A conversation between Mark Levy & Moe Abdou

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Page 1: Mark Levy - Accidental Genius (Unplugged)

Accidental Genius (Unplugged)A conversation between Mark Levy & Moe Abdou

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About Mark Levy & Moe Abdou

Mark Levy

Mark Levy is the founder of Levy Innovation LLC (Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.), a marketing strategy and ideation firm that helps clients increase their fees by up to 2,000%. Kate Purmal, a CEO at SanDisk, executive at Palm, and founder of her own consulting company, calls Mark “ . . . my secret weapon. Through his help I’ve transformed my business. Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things that matter in business and in life. [email protected]

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Mark is a positioning expert and maybe one of the best positioning experts that I have had the privilege to know. He is also an author. In fact, that’s how I got to Mark. He wrote a fantastic book called Accidental Genius. The title obviously is genius. That’s what introduced me to Mark’s work.

I’m truly excited to have this opportunity to speak with you today because as I mentioned to you a few minutes earlier that the title Amateur Magician on your website, I would like to remove that word amateur. I think what everyone is going to find out is it that not only you are a magician with words but certainly in what you do. I’m really grateful for you to join us Mark.

Let’s talk about something that I think is important and interesting. You’re one of the most creative positioning voices out there as I mentioned. I would like to start by hearing your personal positioning. Assuming you and I are sitting somewhere and somebody comes up to you whom I introduced that may ask you that question that everybody gets. What do you do?

The first thing I do is stifle a smile. Whereas most people get very scared about delivering their elevator speech, that’s kind of my shtick. That’s kind of the thing I do for a living. I help people come up with their big ideas and write their elevator speeches and all the things around that stuff for them.

When someone asks me what it is I do for a living, I say, ‘Consultants and entrepreneurial companies hire me to increase their fees by up to 2000%.’ Again, I love saying that. When someone says, what do you do for a living, I can barely contain myself.

Say that again because I think that’s really cool.

Consultants and entrepreneurial companies hire me to increase their fees by up to 2000%. They then say – as they do a hundred percent of the time – they say, “Oh my God, how do you do that?” which is of course the answer that you want. When we’re in personal conversation, when it’s not like some situation if I’m on stage or something like that talking to people but if I can really hone in on one individual.

So if a person sitting let’s say across from me at a business dinner and they say, “What is it you do?” I say, “Consultants and entrepreneurial companies hire me to increase their fees by up to 2000%.” They say, “How do you do that?” I say, “I do that in a bunch of different ways. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and your organization and then I’ll tell you how I would do it for you.”

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That’s not like some manipulative technique. I’m not trying to get like leverage over them or anything like that. The reason why I do that is because I do a lot of different things. I run my own marketing strategy firm. But within that marketing strategy firm, I help people come up with their signature ideas. I help them make those signature ideas come through on their websites and in their white papers and in books they write and in blog posts.

I coach them on writing speeches so that they can get that signature idea out there, that big sexy idea. I even do publicity stunts. One of my clients is in the Guinness World Book of Records around the stunt that we created. I coach people on writing books. So I do all kinds of varied things.

I don’t want to throw all my menu choices at them because that would be very, very intimidating. It would like if you went up in a diner to a waitress and you said, what do you have to eat? They had a 170 items on the menu and the waitress literally went over every item. “What do you have to eat?” “We have orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice. We have Tang. We have coffee. We have decaffeinated coffee. We have turkey wraps. We have chicken wraps. We have roast beef wraps.” And they kept on going on and on.

I don’t want to do that with my menu board so I ask them, I say, “I do it in a bunch of different ways. Tell me a little bit about yourself and I’ll tell you how I do it for you” and then I listen to what it is their life is about and what they have devoted their life to and what they find important in the world and in business.

I really like love hearing these stories. And then they also tell me about the challenges that they have. As they’re talking about these challenges and about the problems that they are experiencing, then I start offering suggestions. I actually try to kind of solve people’s problems while they’re speaking with me. Isn’t it the oddest, I just like doing that.

In any case, as I’m speaking to them, I then take the things from my background and those are the kinds of solutions that I offer them. Based on what their problem is, I’ll only bring up the stuff that’s apropos to them.

If someone is talking about how they have a hard time articulating who it is they are and what it is they do, me talking about publicity stunts is just going to be daunting. They would never know I even did that stuff. I only speak to their concerns. You need to make it a hundred percent relevant to the other person.

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Mark, I think the ironic thing when you and I first spoke, you know, the interesting thing about it is that there are several relationships that kind of intersect in terms of the people you know and the people I know which really doesn’t surprise me.

I want to really walk an actual example with you. If you’re comfortable and taking an example of one of these individuals who we both know to talk about this whole process of where we started with this whole positioning thing and where you ended up. Obviously, we’ll condense it as much as possible.

I want to use a real life example or I want to just talk through a hypothetical with you so people listening to this can really get a true grasp of how transformative – you really are a magician of words.

We can talk about specific examples although I don’t like to talk too deeply into these things. I don’t want to violate any confidentiality.

Let’s assume I came to you today and I say, this person said you are a guru with respect to positioning. I’ve got a couple of entrepreneurial companies or I’m a consultant, help me.

I think I have a very unusual way that I go about it. If I was helping you I would use this method. A lot of people use templates. They go through stuff like let’s say, they’re trying to get information from you in order to put in an elevator speech or in order to come up with your competitive advantages or in order to come up with your marketplace position.

They use very templated information like exercises. I find that that stuff – if you could solve your problem on your own, if it required straight ahead thinking, if it required the kind of thinking that you’re currently doing, you would have already solved the problem. You would have no problem. You would have just already been implementing the solution and there would be no problem and you wouldn’t be speaking to me. So I take the tact.

This is not like a most specific thing. This is like any person who had ever sit down and say, “I’m interested in how you can help me.” I have to assume that the level of thinking that they’re bringing to their problem needs to change a bit because they haven’t been able to solve something.

I don’t ask people – I try not to ask them straightforward questions that bring about straightforward answers about who they are and what it is they do. I try to kind of get them to take left turns in their thinking. I try to get them to

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more or less forget the conventional ways that they answer questions and the conventional information that they give people.

For instance, I get people to tell me lots of stories. I ask people to talk to me about images that come to mind when they say certain things. I ask them to look from different perspectives at what it is they are doing because their normal way is not helping them.

For instance, if you came to me and said, I have this problem and I haven’t been able to find any solutions to this problem. I would probably say, Okay, that makes sense that you don’t find – I’m always very encouraging – that you’re not finding solutions to it. So let’s not even try for a solution. Let’s brainstorm right now. Let’s take 10 minutes and let’s come up with every possible question that we possibly can come up with about the situation.

If we can get to 100 questions, 200 questions that would be really cool. Questions about the resources that you have. Questions about your ability to do this stuff whatever it is as honest as you can be. Questions about what you’re trying to achieve. Questions about possible bottlenecks. Questions about how you have done it in the past. Questions about the best ways you’ve done it. Questions about the worst ways you’ve done it.

Shoot any kind of question. We’re not coming up with questions. You’re not going to have to answer any of these questions because that would be making work for yourself. If you thought you were making work for yourself, you wouldn’t come up with questions for me. You would hold back on them because you would be saying, I don’t want to answer all these questions. But it’s purely as a way of getting you to see the situation in an entirely different way than you would have seen it before. If you just go boom, boom, question, question – you’re just throwing these questions out, suddenly you start seeing things from a different standpoint.

So what it is I do? I’m taking this very roundabout way of telling you is I try to help people get to their best information and their best stories and their best fact and the most obvious fact and things like that, the highlights of their life. I get them to get all this stuff and we put it out in front of us like in documents on the table and then from their best material, I let the material lead the way in how we position them ourselves. It’s like what’s their very best stuff.

Let’s talk about elevator speeches. As I say, I position people, I come up with competitive advantages. I do a lot of different things.

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Let me interrupt you for one second, feel free to use me as a guinea pig. I respect the confidentiality of everybody that you’re working with so feel free to use me as a guinea pig in any of the stuff that you want to demonstrate.

Cool, we will definitely do that. There was a person. She is an executive coach, very smart, and brilliant. She wrote a couple of elevator speeches and the elevator speeches were not what I liked in an elevator speech. They were full of multi-syllabic Latinate language. They seem very artificial.

If she had delivered one of those elevator speeches, they would have smacked of being an elevator speech. You know, like something that came out of the head and not out of real life. Like something that her mind created and not from life.

The one word in the two elevator speeches that she had written that really resonated with me, she talked about pressure. She had used the word pressure. I said, “It seems to me like you work with people who are under pressure, is that right?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Tell me about that.” She said, “The people I work with, they’re under pressure. There is a guy who is a lawyer and he’s the chief rainmaker for his entire firm. He’s doing great and the firm is really doing well but he is terrified that if he ever faltered, the entire firm would falter and then it would come down around him and he would be in huge trouble. It would be his fault even though he is this champion rainmaker. He can’t sleep at night because of that.”

I said, “Tell me about someone else.” She said there is a woman. She’s a single mom. She started her own internet company and the internet company really took off but now it’s leveling off. She’s terrified that the leveling off is a precursor to the whole thing crashing. Not only what’s going to happen to her company and what’s going to happen to her but what’s going to happen to her little daughter. She had a 3-year-old daughter or something like that. She’s terrified that the company falling apart, what’s going to happen to her daughter.

I said, “Great, that’s your elevator speech? She said, “What do you mean?” I said you say something like this if someone says what is it you do? You would say something like I’m an executive coach. I work with people who are under tremendous pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from outside of them, from the marketplace but sometimes the pressure is internal.

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For instance, I work with a lawyer who is the chief rainmaker of his firm and he’s doing great. But he’s terrified that if he ever falters, the whole firm is going to come crashing down around him and it’s going to be his fault.

I worked with a single mom. She started an internet business and it took off but now it’s leveling off and she’s terrified that the leveling off is a precursor that the whole thing is going to crash and now what’s going to happen to her and her little daughter if it does. So those are the people I work with. And then we talked about what she would say after that.

That was the idea of letting the material lead the way. That’s my method. It’s like what’s your best stuff. Who are the people you work with? What are your ideas? What’s the obvious stuff? What’s the interesting stuff?

Another story related to this, if I may, there is this famous story. This takes place 90 odd years ago involving the famous advertising man Claude Hopkins who wrote the book Scientific Advertising.

Ninety years ago there was this famous advertising man named Claude Hopkins and Hopkins got a call and I believe it was from Schlitz Brewery. Schlitz said, “Mr. Hopkins there are eight big breweries in America and on the list of eight breweries we are number eight. We are in last place. We need your help.” Claude Hopkins said, “I’m sure I can help you but in order to help you, I’m going to have to tour your brewery.” The guy from Schlitz on the phone said, “Mr. Hopkins, we don’t think you’re going to find much if you take a tour here. But if that’s a condition of doing work with you, we’re happy to give you a tour.”

So Hopkins said great. He hopped the train. He went to Milwaukee. He went to Schlitz and he went to the brewery and they started giving him a tour. What he saw there astonished him. The first thing they showed him was a well 4000 ft deep. They went that deep to get the water because they thought that the purest water was there and they wanted to make a pure beer.

Then they showed him a machine that triple steam cleaned every bottle three times before they would pour the beer into it. Again, they wanted a pure beer so pure water and pure bottles. And then they showed him behind lock and key, they showed him a single mother yeast cell. I think is how Hopkins described it. It was the single cell that it took Schlitz brewers and scientist, I think it was 1014 experiments I think is what he said to make this single mother yeast cell that every bottle of Schlitz, like Schlitz wanted every bottle of Schlitz ever made to taste like this single cell, like they found the perfect flavor. They said, “This is the flavor we wanted replicated in every bottle of Schlitz ever made.”

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Hopkins was staring at this thing and he couldn’t believe it. He said, “My God, this place is a wonderland. Why aren’t you telling people about these wonders?” The guy from Schlitz said, “Mr. Hopkins you don’t get it at all. These aren’t wonders. This is how you make beer. We make beer this way and so do all our competitors. If you pull them you would be stiffed out you wouldn’t have beer at the end of it. What we do then is nothing special. It’s very, very ordinary.” Claude Hopkins, the famous advertising man said, “Yes, but the public doesn’t know that.”

Hopkins proceeded to write a series of long advertisement detailing everything he saw there. He talked about the 4000-ft well and the pure water and the triple steam cleaned bottles and the mother yeast cell and the 1014 experiments and all that stuff and more. He put in these advertisements. In no time Schlitz went from being number 8 in America to being I believe tied for first place or in first place like they went up really rapidly.

The moral to me of that story that Hopkins told in his book is what’s mundane to you may be extraordinary to your customers or your prospects if they only knew about it. So you become dulled to what it is that it’s not just special to you but that’s what’s special to your clients. So what’s special to your clients might be entirely different than what’s special to you.

Another thing, you said, like what would I do with you Moe, that kind of thing. One thing I do is I have my clients list every obvious fact that they can about their business. About where they are located, about what their guarantees are or what their product is. I mean, like dirt obvious stuff nothing special whatsoever. And then I have them go over each fact one at a time and try to convert into a reason for doing business with them and they go over fact after fact after fact.

What that sounds like by the way, I remember that there was one person who owned a computer store somewhere like hardware/software stuff like that and there were other computer stores. They had other competitors in their area. When I had them do this exercise the fact that they wrote down was that we have three owners. There were three people who own the business. That was one of the facts.

Of course when he wrote that fact down, he was just trying to complete the exercise like he didn’t think that fact was interesting at all. It was basically no more important than what their address was. Like, “We’re here. We have three owners. We have 2000 square feet.” He wrote all these things.

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But when he took that fact about the three owners and he converted it into a reason for doing business with them, he said, wait a minute, we’re the only computer firm in our area where there is an owner on the premises all the time, any time that we’re open. There is always someone who is skin in the game, who is here. And in all the other computer stores, when you walk in, you’re sometimes dealing with clerks, you don’t know what they’re doing, who don’t care. It’s not part of their thing but there is always someone with skin in the game in our store.

He thought that was an epiphany to him, that was a main competitive advantage that he said, that they should start advertising around. I just wanted to show you how – if you just start looking at stuff. You don’t even have to look at stuff in too special a way. You don’t have to necessarily look for grand moments, sometimes your best differentiators and competitive advantages are just hidden in ordinary stuff that you may not be seeing clearly.

I think that’s a great testament to the importance of having an outside pair of eyes look at your business or look at your life. I think sometimes we walk blindly into what we do and like you said, what’s routine for us certainly isn’t for whether it’s our customer or even our friends.

Right. It’s very hard where our minds kind of keep us stuck. I wrote a book called Accidental Genius using writing to generate your best ideas, insight and content. It’s how to use free writing, this fast writing tool as a way of liberating your thinking. It’s very much about this idea of – I’ll make this figure up, I don’t know the exact figure – I like to say that inside each one of us there is an internal editor that does a very important job.

It cleans up what we think and say and write as we think and say and write it so that we always look intelligent and confident and consistent to other people. So that a Moe sounds like a Moe thought. You know, your friends say, “That’s something Moe would say.” We all have the same kinds of thoughts.

Our internal editor, you don’t want to get rid of your internal editor because it’s done a great job for you. It’s helped you achieve prominence in life. So you owe a lot of your success to an internal editor. But what your internal editor does is that you kind of have – here is the figure that I’m making up – you kind of have like 780 thoughts that you kind of cycle through over and over again. I have no idea what the real figure is. I’m sure it’s the same for everyone listening. It’s certainly the same for myself. You have great thoughts but you tend to have the same great thoughts over and over again.

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So you go through these problem solving strategies, these pet philosophies, these all kinds of things and it’s the same 780 thoughts. And your internal editor, every time you have this problem, coming up with a distinctive marketplace position, your internal editor is going to keep on feeding you the same 780 thoughts over and over again one at a time.

It’s going to say, this one worked before, why don’t you try it here and then you go, no it’s not working. Well, now, try this one. It worked before. Try this one, it worked before. Once you go over those 780, you’ll start again from the beginning. I’m being a little metaphorical and a little facetious but that’s why we tend to get stuck in cycles of thinking.

That’s why you need someone – it’s so helpful for someone to look who is outside of your business. Understand, they have blinders too and they have their own 780 thoughts too but their 780 thoughts are not likely completely overlapping with yours. Their blinders are not your blinders so they’re going to see things differently.

You know what seems to me that’s apparent in some of the stuff that you’re doing is it seems to me that you work really hard to find the why in why certain people do things to help us understand that. Am I understanding it correctly?

Yeah. The why of why people do things – I call it the back story. I’m a big fan of when I work with people of helping them come up with a story from their background or a series of stories from their background that show why they were born to do the thing that they’re doing.

Seven years ago, maybe it’s eight years ago now, a man called me named Bill Treasurer. Bill said, “Mark, I’m a management consultant. I do leadership development and team building workshops. Unfortunately 300,000 other consultants do exactly what it is I do. When I go into organizations trying to win their business, I always go in hat in hand kind of hanging my head because I have no real way of standing out from those other 300,000 consultants. Even when I win the organization’s business – I occasionally win their business – they always get me way, way down on price. A top week for me (remember this was eight years ago) a top week for me, a week I absolutely pray for was $1800. So he said, I don’t want to keep going on this way. I need your help.”

Bill hired me. I interviewed Bill. I interviewed his colleagues. I interviewed his clients and I discovered something very interesting. Bill Treasurer, before he was a management consultant, was a professional high diver in theme parks. He would climb up a nine story high radio tower, that’s a ladder nine stories

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high. He would spray himself with gasoline when he got to the top. He would light himself on fire and he would dive nine stories into water. Over the course of 10 years, he did that 1500 times.

He was so good at being Captain Inferno that the theme park made him the captain of an entire team of Captain Infernos that went up and down the East Coast performing this gig. The most interesting thing about Bill Treasurer though he was and still is afraid of heights. So I took the idea that Bill did what he had to do despite his fear. We married it to the fact he does leadership development and team building workshops. He made his company Giant Leap Consulting. They build courage in organizations. They help leaders and their employees take the risks they know they should be taking but aren’t.

So all of Bill’s keynotes, all of his workshops, all of his consulting started to revolve around ways of driving fear out of the workplace so that people could take the most significant risks they had to to achieve their top goals.

So what happened for Bill because of this repositioning? I told you a week he used to pray for was like $1800 I think it was. Bill now makes in a week sometimes 10, 20 30, even 40 thousand dollars in a week. He had his first ever 100 thousand dollar month. He’s booked months in advance and his latest book came out from Berret-Koehler. It’s a brilliant book. It’s called Courage Goes to Work.

Bill is brilliant. Bill always knew what it was he was selling but just from a positioning standpoint. He had something elevated to the forefront of his marketing. It wasn’t his distinction. But from looking at his back story, looking at where he came – by the way, Bill again, brilliant guy, he was very cognizant that this was a very interesting back story. It was not like some mystery to Bill. It was just finding the right word, this courage thing, and elevating it to the fore.

Now, Bill is just like – I was going to say on fire but he used to be on fire. Now, his career is on fire. He’s like everywhere. It wasn’t just a marketing difference in his work but the very work he does with clients is so much more high level and worthy of someone of his ability. It’s just a wonderful story because he’s just so great at what he does.

Obviously, everything that you’re saying – instead of the 780 thoughts that you said our minds are getting, I think mine is at 7000. It just triggered something. It seems like one of things that’s the result of the work that you’ve done with him and/or everybody else is a real tremendous boost to their confidence level. Do you obviously in seeing these people before and

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after, although it’s just words, and I know those words have a tremendous meaning. It does have a tremendous impact on our confidence.

Sure because the right positioning — it’s not just cosmetic. It should actually be not just an external drive for marketing but it’s also like an internal drive within the company that everyone now understands who it is that their clients are and what it is their clients want and what their difference is in the world. It permeates everything that they’re doing.

I have a very interesting aesthetic that I like to create positions and languaging for people that helps them be persuasive to strangers. That’s always my aesthetic because it’s very easy for your friends and your colleagues and those people, you know, people in your field like they already have assumptions about things. Maybe it’s not easy to be persuasive to them but they understand in shorthand the kinds of things you’re saying.

Also, they have to be in relationship with you. So it’s very easy for them to say “yes” to you. But when a stranger, when you’re in a room of strangers who have no alliance with you whatsoever, in order to get their attention and hold their attention and get them to smile and get them interested in what you have to say, you have to say something that’s really compelling and very relevant to them.

So when I’m working with clients, I think I’m kind of fun to work with. I hope I’m not overpraising myself but I’m also very, very demanding. In my mind, when we’re talking about stuff, if someone says something to me like, here is what I think in this situation. I say, you know what, I’ve been in rooms with people pitching with C level people surrounding you in a room, you know, when you’re standing there and there is like 30 people and like some of them are C level and they are the heads of divisions and what not. They just want to get through the 12 people from their company that are trying to win their business. They’re not going to be nice to you. In my mind, I’m thinking that.

So like what it is you’re saying is not going to work in that situation. It’s got to really work for you internally but it also has to get – it’s almost like people in the world wanted to dismiss you. They’re indifferent to your claims and what not and the step that we come up really has to break through that indifference. Until it does that I’m very reticent to say, “Oh yeah, that’s good.”

I think what that leads to is when you know that the result of whatever it is – obviously, you’re tremendously fun to work with but if you are demanding and if I know going in that what the result is going to be for me is first and foremost I see the success in business is a by-product but the confidence

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level, closing this fear gap that most people have about what they do or what they want to do and the stories that you’ve shared with me before about somebody who was not perceived as an expert. That’s priceless because sooner or later people will recognize that and then financial rewards will happen but that confidence piece is a huge piece.

Right. Again, confidence is an important part but it’s well founded confidence. People who are confident without reasons for being confident to me are delusional. We don’t work on anyone’s – like when I work with someone I don’t work on people’s confidence whatsoever. As a matter of fact, if they’re not confident about something there is probably good reason for them not to be confident about something.

A story that I was telling you before we got on the phone, I was speaking to this really smart owner of a company. They had written a book that they wanted to use as a skyrocket for their business. So I read the book and I thought it was great. I genuinely thought it was a very, very valuable book. But there was a big thing bothering me about the book.

The big thing bothering me about the book was that they didn’t explain like who they were and why they were qualified to write this book. They explained it in a very brief way. I said, the book is brilliant, you did an amazing job but here is the big problem, you didn’t explain who you – you didn’t set context well and so that hurts people’s understanding or their willingness to try the ideas in the book but all you have to do is explain who you are like it’s a very easy fix. It will just take you like a page or something.

This owner, the person who wrote the book said, you put your finger on exactly the thing that was bugging me because they had written it with a co-author. They both said like we don’t have PhDs in this field. Who are we to write this book? But they wrote the book.

It ends up from talking to this owner – forgive me for being ambiguous – for talking to this owner, they had tremendous background that was totally applicable. They weren’t confident but sometimes you need to look at where you’re not confident, like where you’re scared. Sometimes that very thing is one of the very things that you can lead with.

For instance, this person, this owner said it took them a long time, it took x years for them to write this book. I said, you know why it took you x years to write the book because you didn’t want to write garbage. What you had to do was you had to try out the techniques and the population that you worked with

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tried out these techniques. You used some and you discarded other techniques and all these stuff.

Now after five years, the book has evolved, the techniques in the book have evolved into stuff that you know works. So that’s why it took you all those years. This is not a game. This is not me being like some swifty like the music man, like putting a positive spin on stuff. It was the truth. It’s just that this person was looking at all those years as, if we really knew what we’re talking about we would have written it instantly. I said, no, you took this journey and now you know what you’re talking about.

The same way in another client of mine. I’m blessed to work with such really good people. Another client of mine, he had said in my industry, the elephant in the room is this - I won’t say what it is. He said the elephant in the room is this. If me and my competitors were in a room and the client asked us about “X”, about this elephant thing in the room, everyone in the room would take a step back. We’re terrified of being asked that question. I said to him, if everyone in the room is taking a step back, you have to take a step forward.

So what we did was condition him around that concept. In other words, he wasn’t that concept yet but we decided to take it head on and create capabilities around that thing that made everyone shutter so that it would be elevated to the fore of his business so when everyone was taking a step back, he would be the only one front and center. It was the question that was on all the client’s minds so like why pretend that it wasn’t there.

Again, to go back to what you said before, confidence is great but if you’re nervous about something, you should probably be nervous about it and you probably need to address it and you may need to preemptively bring it up in your positioning or in your competitive advantages or what not and there is ways to do it.

I had the great privilege last week of interviewing the great Hollywood produce Peter Guber who is coming out with a book I think on Monday called Tell to Win. The whole purpose of the book is how important stories are in life and in business and as persuasion tools. I see stories as great persuasion tools. Do you see that they strengthen our positioning if we’re telling real authentic emotional stories about relevant things?

Stories create context. You could just tell me a fact straight on and it may have no impact on me whatsoever. But if you told it to me about how it worked within a story, I could actually change my life around that fact. It’s that dramatic the difference.

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They say human beings learn in stories. If you know the principles of story, they make your life so much easier in getting your points across to people and in persuading people to deal with you and dealing with your business. Everything you do in business it all contributes to a story. It’s all about story.

For instance, one of the things I do is I coach people to write business books. I tell them your table of contents when people open your book your table of contents is telling a story about the book. They are going to look down your table of content and if you have headings of chapters that don’t seem to make sense or that don’t seem to flow, they’re herky-jerky then you’re ruining their appreciation of your book. They should be able to look at your table of content and get the story of your book from the table of contents.

For instance, I told you that story about Bill Treasurer. I could have instantly just said to you Bill used to make $1800 a week now he’s made up to $40,000 a week and he had a $100,000 month. That would be interesting. You might find that interesting. You might want to continue to talk to me about that.

But when I tell you the entire story of Bill Treasurer including setting the scene like how did I begin – 8 years ago, a man called me named Bill Treasurer. I gave you the time. I gave you where we were like we were on the phone. Not to get too detailed about it but this is a step you have to take into account. Eight years ago, I got a call from a man named Bill Treasurer. Bill said, “Mark, I’m a management consultant”

We start knowing who Bill is or we start seeing. Stories, they have conflict in them. I do leadership development. I do team building workshops. Unfortunately, 300,000 other people do exactly what it is I do. So when I go into organizations, I always go in hat in hand, kind of hanging my head.

Bill he’s going on the Hero’s Journey. Here’s who he is. Here is where we are. Here is the problem and then I talked about this insight, this thing that I saw that was very interesting about him. That he used to set himself on fire and dive nine stories and not only that he was afraid of heights. He did what he had to do despite his fears. Now we created the solution which was to make him this courage builder. Here are all the things that happened for him because he was this courage builder.

So now this idea of going from $1800 a week at best to $40,000 or $100,000 a month, it adds so much more resonance because you have seen the journey that the idea took. You saw in that story not only did you saw how amazing Bill was but you saw like an x-ray of my mind and how I thought. You saw the story of my thinking and you saw Bill take this Hero’s Journey.

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So like all these stories coalesce there and hopefully at least. Again, maybe I’m selling myself too well. Maybe it wasn’t as effective as I thought. But I’m hoping at least people say, who else would think like that? That’s really interesting. I should know more about this guy.

You know what’s interesting is whether or not people have heard about the work that you do whether or not they have just kind of stopped after they read Accidental Genius. I know this is going to be an ongoing dialog with us, your great positioning grabs attention and really starts important conversations. How do you take it to the next level to help keep that attention beyond that first interaction? What do you do to coach people to do that?

So they’ve gotten someone’s attention and their starting to do the work with them?

Let’s assume I grab somebody’s attention. I’m this consultant. I’m Bill and I grab somebody’s attention and ultimately they hire me. How do I keep that attention going around this whole notion of me helping them build courage and me helping them grow their leadership team so they don’t forget that positioning. I don’t want to obviously bring it up all the time with them but how do I keep that positioning top of mind to continue our ongoing dialog?

There are so many different ways, like people will take their process and they’ll make each step around what their dominant position is and they’ll let people know like what part of the process they’re in. They’re always letting them know what it is they’re striving for.

Another interesting thing that some people do is – it depends what kind of business you’re in but like let’s say you are in a service business. Let’s say you’re a consultant. Let’s say you’re an executive coach or something like that. One thing to do is to have your client keep a project journal that you’ll give them exercises and you have them write about the actual sessions themselves in the project journal. I’m not saying anything formal just like scratching out these ideas. And then you can review the project journal with them each week.

One of the things that this does – I’ve actually done this with some pretty good success – one of things this does is that it helps people like lock in the learning because sometimes from week to week even when they’re trying your ideas and they’re making your ideas work they kind of forgotten how far they have traveled in the process. They have become acclimated to the success that they’re getting. It’s kind of like, “Oh yeah, I’m doing better.” Also, sometimes

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people have this future oriented mentality where they’re always looking ahead of themselves.

You know one of Marshall Goldsmith’s ideas that I discussed with him was the fact if you’re not happy now, if you’re always looking for something better then when you get to the next better thing, you’re still going to be looking for something better. Forgive me if I’m maligning Marshall’s thinking here, if I’m not saying it properly. What he said was so beautiful with this idea of if you’re always looking off into the future, then you’re always going to be dissatisfied with today. That was my understanding of it.

So with the project journal, given the fact that lots of people are that way I find, we’re very striving, we’re very goal driven that we often forget where we started and where we’re going.

So by talking over the project journal especially even previous sessions past, you can kind of keep the idea of what it is that you were trying to accomplish like why did this whole thing started. What are you trying to accomplish? How far have you gone? What have the obstacles been? How have you overcome those obstacles? What things have you tried that worked? What things have you tried that didn’t work? How can you apply the learning in other situations that you haven’t applied it in yet? The reason why I bring that up is very few people use that and I find that to be a really, really awesome tool.

That is an awesome example. Give me an example of someone that you don’t work with who you think is really well positioned.

There have been so many people. Many people have been successful in life without my help.

No one will be offended just give me one that just jumps out.

Jim Collins.

I agree totally.

Good to great and built to last. Jim, he’s a professor at Stanford. He’s a wonderful speaker and he has these great ideas. Because he is a researcher his concepts are always built around the research question. When he talks about the ideas that this is what the research says. This is what you should be doing. That it’s not our opinions. It’s entirely from the research.

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He’s in tremendous demand. He’s very clearly positioned with large organizations, organizations that have been built to last. You don’t necessarily think of Jim Collins with like startups or so. You normally think about him at least in my mind. You would know that if he was to do client work, you know who would it be for. It would be for this mega-successful long-standing company. He may work with other companies for all I know but I’m just saying in my mind from a positioning standpoint. He is just so clearly defined in a great way.

Great example. I think that one of the things that you do as well as the positioning is the advice that you give on writing. I have always felt that writing is a tremendous skill that all kinds people, business people, students should literally pick up. Can you share with everyone some of the better advice that you have received on writing that people can take away here and apply right now?

Writing what kind of thing?

Anything. Writing that fascinates.

The first rule I would say with writing is that you can’t necessarily get to your best thought right away. The things that are right as top of mind is not necessarily your best thinking. When I’m writing something that’s important to me, I do a lot of – as you can imagine from my book Accidental Genius – I do a lot of free writing which is writing that’s done for myself. I’m the audience for it.

I will set a timer for let’s say 10 minutes and I’ll go and I’ll open up a Word document and I’ll just start doing a brain dump. I will experiment on the page. I will write as quickly as I possibly can because as Ray Bradbury says, “In quickness there is truth.”

When you write very slowly that’s your internal editor kicking in trying to give you those same 780 thoughts or in your case 7000 thoughts, giving you the same stuff over and over again when you write very slowly and deliberately. Occasionally, you can certainly do that but I’m just saying when I’m first thinking about something I write as rapidly as I possibly can.

For those 10 minutes, I do not stop for any reason whatsoever. I write continuously. So if I write continuously, and I’m writing for myself, I know I’m not going to have to share it with anyone, that means that my writing is sometimes going to be odd. It’s going to be mundane. It’s going to be tedious. It’s going to like come apart like some of my sentences won’t make sense.

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Maybe I’ll start digressing in my thinking and talk about things that aren’t even part of the problem. Maybe I’ll misspell, maybe my grammar will be bad, my punctuation will be bad. All those things are absolutely fine especially digression because again, you’re trying to get away from the 780 thoughts that you have over and over again.

So if you’re trying to write about let’s say some business problem that you have or you’re trying to write an article or a blog post or something. You want to disengage from the normal things that you usually think about when you think about that problem. Name something Moe. What’s something you might write about?

I would want to write about how do you position yourself in your business for example. Let’s assume this is a topic that’s going to be really critical.

I would set the timer for 10 minutes and I would start telling myself a story. I would say – I’m you so I would say, “Okay” – me while I’m writing everything that I’m saying – “Okay, I’m Moe here. Here I go. I need to write about positioning your business and things that are critical to positioning your business. What are all the things I know about positioning right now? I remember 15 years ago I read the book by Al Ries and Jack Trout Positioning.

It was a wonderful book. I don’t remember a lot from it but two of the things I remember from it are this, x and y. What do I remember about that? Like you’re writing all these stuff. Who do I know? I asked Mark Levy on my show the other day – meanwhile, you’re writing this – I asked him the other day, who did he think was well positioned? He said, Jim Collins. That was interesting. Let me see if I can come up with four people I think are well positioned and why they’re positioned. The first person who comes to mind is blah, blah, blah. Why do I think that? You’re telling yourself the story.

As you are writing about this stuff, you might start thinking about the fact that you just saw True Grit like it might just enter your mind as you’re writing like maybe wrote down the word ‘grit.’ Like Jim Collins has a lot of grit. That reminds me of True Grit. I just saw True Grit the other day. That’s Jeff Bridges.

You’re telling the story of that and then you realize in the writing that I was working on my positioning. You’ll start writing, I’m writing about True Grit right now but I was supposed to be writing about positioning. Let’s pretend that True Grit has something to do with positioning. What positioning lessons can I draw from True Grit or from Jeff Bridges or from the Coen Brothers?

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So you’re experimenting on the paper. At the end of 10 minutes, your alarm goes off and you stop writing. You look over what it is you wrote and you underline interesting passages and you boldface particularly compelling ideas, ideas that you didn’t have before. Now if you hit save, you have that writing for the rest of your life. You don’t have to duplicate it. You don’t have to go back to the 780 thoughts over and over again.

So you look over that writing that you did for 10 minutes and you look over it and you say what can I say in the next 10 minutes about free writing that’s new? Is there a story here that I should have told that I didn’t? Is there an idea here that I now know that’s wrong or that I now know that’s right. Where can I go with this? You want to force yourself into a new place.

So you get a new starting thought in your mind. It doesn’t have to be some great thought. It can just be any kind of thought. Now you hit 10 minutes again and with that starting thought, okay, by looking over my old writing, there was a story I wanted to tell myself about positioning that I hadn’t remembered. Here is the story. And you just start writing and at the end of 10 minutes, you look over it again and you underline interesting stuff and you boldface particularly compelling ideas and you want to go in a new direction.

Sometimes, by the way, that new direction sometimes you kind of run out of things to say of stories and ideas and what not but you want to force yourself into some new direction. I might say maybe – I’m making this up – maybe you charge $300 an hour to consult. So just as an experiment, you decide that you’re going to charge $3000 an hour to consult so that’s where you would start your next bout. Again, you’re just forcing yourself to get into the new territory.

So you would begin like that third bout of free writing, okay, I ran out of things to say at least I think I ran out of things to say but I charge $300 an hour. Let me pretend I charge $3000 an hour. What would happen in my business if I charge $3000 an hour? Who would I be dealing with? What would I have to be telling them? What would they be buying? What would my services be? What would my products be? Would I have any guarantees? What good would happen? What bad would happen?

You’re typing all these stuff out and you just keep on going and going. Sometimes I do that writing for 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Sometimes I do it for 5 to 8 hours. That’s how I actually use free writing to help me come up with new ideas when I’m positioning someone or when I’m writing a book or so because doing that kind of writing, it forces you into new directions. You come up with ideas that are so much better than your normal sit there and contemplative ideas could come up and you come up with some great pros too.

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If I do this stuff long enough for hours, I then look over everything, I hit a ‘save as’ I create a new document and I just start cutting away all the stuff that’s off point and all the stuff that doesn’t work. Now I’m left with a whole bunch of interesting pros and ideas and I start rearranging it.

Literally, from these free writings some of it becomes my blog posts or my chapters or so. I don’t mean in a wholesale way. I don’t just like publish it like that. I’ll say, these four different pieces of pros are interesting. I could start a chapter with this and then segue into this and then there is something missing here so I’ll have to write some transitional thoughts about x and y here and then I can go into this last piece. Now, I’ll have to write a conclusion but I least I have these new ideas and these new pros to begin my writing from.

It’s a wonderful way if you feel frozen about a topic, if you feel that you have no new thinking about a topic. I think I call it a writing marathon in Accidental Genius. If you do that writing marathon thing, it forces you.

I particularly use it in situations where I don’t know where I think I have come to the end of my thinking or in situations that I don’t want to approach. Let’s say it’s a very difficult problem and every time I sit there and try to think about it, I allow myself to get distracted. I start looking at new stories about the Mets or something like that and I don’t address this serious problem. I’ll say, wait a minute, I’m going to put an hour aside to do this writing.

So I’ll write for 10 minutes look it over for five minutes, write for 10 minutes, look it over for 5 minutes write for 10 minutes and see what I come with there. It allows me to get engaged with the topic and with my thinking in an unintimidating way because I’m not going for quality in any of these writing. Quality is a by-product. It’s purely a behavioral contract. It’s like me saying Mark, I want you to write about this 10 minutes at a time for three bouts of writing. 10 minutes writing, look at it, if you do that you are a success. I don’t care if what you write is awful and if it goes off point or anything like that. I come away from these writing sessions having accomplished something because even if I came up with nothing really important I at least kept that behavioral contract.

Mark I want to make a suggestion. You should take that word ‘amateur’ in front of that word ‘magician’ on your website because you really are a magician with words. I really appreciate this opportunity not only to speak with you but to develop a relationship with you that is going to be most beneficial to anybody who has access to your stuff. I can’t really thank you enough for the time and the effort that you put in to sharing your ideas.

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I am so honored by that Moe. I hope your listeners got something out of this. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to speak to people. Thank you.

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