I won't use.
I'll try not to follow your lead on that one,
but it might happen, so that would be totally fine.
I love it.
All right, so brilliance.
Use this word brilliance instead of good to great.
Good to brilliance.
Why?
Teach me.
I mean, have we just gone live there by the way?
Oh yeah, we're live.
We're live, yay!
Woo!
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
I just wanna go through some of the things
that might help you with your visions.
get access to clean drinking water, please help out.
Without further ado, Michael Hepple
is an international bestselling author of eight books,
including How to Be Brilliant.
We were just talking a little bit about that word brilliant
and what that means versus the word great.
We might get into that a little bit.
Now, he had a mission with his wife,
who he's been married to, often on for over 20 years.
So we'll be talking about that story a little bit.
And they had a mission to influence
more than one million people,
and they've already accomplished that.
So we're going to be talking to him about
what the heck comes next.
Where are they headed now?
What type of goal do they have?
His latest book, 17, The Little Way to Get a Lot Done,
was launched in September of 2020.
So we'll want to definitely check that out
after we get the chance to talk to him.
But let's bring him on, let's hear about his vision.
And Michael, thank you so much for being here today, man.
We really appreciate you.
Well, thank you so much.
I'm one of great introduction.
There's not very many people who know about the thing
about me and my wife.
We don't really tell too many people,
but now, obviously on this podcast,
we're gonna tell everybody,
hey, don't bother, it's fine.
We're out there now.
Well, all right.
Well, thanks for letting me be the insider
and our audience as well.
We all respect and honor that.
And I appreciate the fact that,
you guys have made your relationship count.
Yeah, it's the best thing.
I couldn't do what I'd do without my wife.
She's brilliant.
She's the rock.
She's the one who makes it happen.
When I first started, you know,
talking about business vision,
when I first started my company,
I was so excited, I was stoked.
You know, I'm gonna get out there,
I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.
We're gonna make a massive difference.
I'm gonna become a multi-millionaire, blah, blah, blah.
And at the end of the first year,
the turnover for the business,
that's the turnover,
that not the profit was about 12,000 pounds,
so about $16,000.
And then the next year,
I was heading in the same direction,
and things were looking pretty bad.
And then it started to go up a little bit like this.
And then after about three or four years,
my wife was working for a big American company
called Compact Computers,
which who you might have heard of.
And she was a project manager for them.
And she was brilliant, absolutely amazing.
She'd been with Newcastle University,
did some fantastic projects there.
And she used to give me all this advice
and one day I went, what am I thinking about?
Christine, why don't we work together?
Why don't you run the business?
I'll stand on stage, you do all the other stuff.
She did and the business went like this.
Absolutely skyrocketed.
So get the right people around you.
But we had to learn how to work together
because that was from another part of our life.
We hadn't done so well.
So working together, we got a coach to help us to do that.
Dude, that's phenomenal.
I'm glad you mentioned the coaching aspect as well.
And Michael, allow me to monologue a little bit on this
because one, I don't even have apology for revealing that.
I didn't realize that that wasn't revealed.
But I do wanna say that there's so many entrepreneurs
who are either struggling in a marriage
and people can't see it, they don't wanna admit it.
Or it's really tense because they're trying to tackle
giant problems in the world.
And that can be a very polarizing experience
with how hard it is for any real,
relationships are hard in general.
But when you got somebody who's trying to carve a path
that nobody's done before,
that can be a very difficult thing for somebody to support
and want to be involved in.
So again, superpowers to you guys.
Thank you so much for being an example
for the rest of us in the world who wanna be able
to have our relationships and have our businesses too.
Yeah, when we worked with a coach, it was fascinating
because one thing he said is you have to work out
who's going to make a final decision on certain areas.
Because you can discuss it, you can argue about it,
but one person has to make final decisions.
And we agreed that when it came to presenting and writing,
that I would make the final decisions.
And when it came to recruitment and finance,
Christine would make final decisions.
And at home, Christine makes all the final decisions.
Good for you, man.
Thank you so much for that again.
Just the wisdom packed into that one lesson.
I appreciate that.
So let's dive right in.
Michael, what's your vision in 15 seconds?
Well, it was, as you know, from the intro
to positively influence a million lives.
And when I had that vision, when I decided
that's what I wanted to do, it was a game changer
because every decision we made in the business
was based around how close we could get to that.
So we would have the speaking seasons for conferences.
So October, you could speak every single day in October
and kind of the start of a year, that type of thing.
And the first question we would ask anybody
who wanted to book us to do an event was
how many people will be in the audience?
And so if it was 15, and it was a big fancy client
or whatever, but there was somebody else who was
two and a half thousand, but they were a little known,
we're going the little known one, that has two and a half
thousand, because that would get us closer to the goal.
But the big thing that made the difference was this,
that first book coming out, How to Be Brilliant.
Because that did two things.
One, we sold a shed load of books, so that was great.
But also it catapulted everything else that we did.
So we've got on the biggest stages, we got to more people.
We were invited to do TV work, we did all sorts of stuff.
And so we hit that million target quite quickly.
And then of course, what's next?
You've positively influenced a million lives,
you've measured it, you've counted it.
Are you going to go for 10 million next?
Are you going to go for 20 million, what you're going to do?
And we said, no, let's just now take it to the next stage.
And this is what we want to do.
We want to influence every person we connect with.
So this talking to you now, my job is to leave you
feeling more positive, more up for it, passionate about life.
If I can do that with every single person
I connect with, I'm winning.
Oh, dude, I love that. And so now you've,
ultimately it sounds like focused on the one.
Being present, which is such a gift as well.
That's super awesome.
Well, I'm going to ask you a strange question.
So why do you care, Michael?
What, where did your depths of caring
to influence others come from?
Well, you know, it's interesting that you're right.
I do care, I over care about this stuff.
I care to a point where I will make crazy decisions.
I work hard on really small things
where other people would have stopped.
And I think it's because, you know,
I was a youth worker in the past.
So before I started to do this, I was a youth worker.
Originally with family business as a roofing contractor,
did that for seven years, worked for my dad.
It was great, but it wasn't ever what I was going to do.
Then I became a youth worker.
And then after that, I became a fundraiser.
And when I was fundraising, I met some amazing people.
And one guy was somebody called David Brown,
the guy who invented the catapally,
you know, the big split axle trucks that you see in,
yeah, horrible things that I might have been in at his home.
And he gave me 250,000 pounds as a donation.
And I started to ask him questions
as I would with every successful person.
You know, how do you do this?
How do you do that?
And he started to talk about the impact that you can make
by doing something really, really well.
And I got excited about this.
And then he said, let me ask you a question.
And he said, what was the last book that you read?
And it wasn't the personal development book,
it wasn't a business book, it was, you know, some fiction book.
And he said, okay, I suggest you start to read books
that make you better.
I thought, oh, that's good.
And I started to read.
And the other thing he asked me was,
what was the last course that you went on
that you paid for?
Not work that you paid for.
And I hadn't paid for anything.
So I started to invest in my own personal development.
And I saw people change.
And I thought, my goodness, imagine being able to do this.
Imagine, you know, not being in the audience,
being the person on the stage.
And so I did a lot of study, I had a lot of work.
I got a chance first of all to teach kids
and then got a chance to teach teachers.
And let me tell you Jackson, after you've taught teachers,
you can teach anybody
because teachers already know everything.
I was so happy to believe.
And then I got the chance to start my own business.
So that's how it all started.
Right from going back to thinking, you know what?
I see that people can make a difference in somebody's lives.
People have made a difference in my life.
I need to pay it forward now.
Oh, that's brilliant.
That's amazing.
So let's talk about today's episode.
So who should be listening?
Everybody that just heard what you said
is going to benefit tremendously
from the nuggets of wisdom that you just threw down.
For the rest of the episode, who should be listening?
Why should they listen to you?
And what are they going to get out of today's show, do you think?
Okay, I think people who should be listening
are those who are dissatisfied with doing a good job.
Good is no longer good enough.
There's a new benchmark.
I see the benchmark as brilliant.
And if you're one of those people who you think,
you know what, but I'm doing a good job.
You know, I'm working hard.
I'm a good dad.
I'm a good mom.
I'm a good partner.
I'm a good friend.
I'm a good employee.
I'm a good business owner.
Whatever it might be, good isn't good enough.
And if you can get that step between there and there
and just work on that gap between good and brilliance,
the rewards are huge.
It's totally unfair.
It's absolutely unfair
because I know some people who are very, very good
at what they do and they don't get rewarded for it.
And I know a few people who are brilliant at what they do
and it's disproportionate.
They get huge rewards.
So that's what I think people can get out of my message.
I love it.
Let's play the semantics game a bit further.
So you got good, better, best, great, awesome,
genius, brilliant, right?
A lot of different interpretations.
Mine are these, right?
You've got poor at the bottom.
Poor?
Nobody, you know, if you're happy going out
and doing a poor job, you deserve to go bust, right?
You don't deserve it.
That's true.
You're not gonna win.
You're gonna win it like that, forget it.
Then good is the next level
and good is where people think,
you know what, I'm doing a good job.
I should get good results.
You end up getting poor results.
And then the next one is to go between good
and up to fantastic.
Now, a lot of people love the idea of being fantastic.
It is semantics with words.
I know, but this word fantastic is,
it's an interesting one
because you can do a fantastic job
and still get good results.
The difference between fantastic and brilliant
is between there and there.
Did you see it?
There and there.
And if you listen to this,
it's that tiny inch, that little bit.
And it's where you do pick up the phone
rather than send an email.
It's where you really do follow through.
It's where you care.
It's where you take notes.
It's where you relive those notes.
It's where you invest in yourself.
It's where you, rather than sitting watching TV
for three hours on a nighttime,
you think, I'll tell you what,
it's gonna be a treat once I've finished doing this.
It's that gap between there and there.
And when you do that on a consistent basis,
that's when you can be brilliant.
Now you can't be brilliant at everything.
When I do a course or do a keynote,
I say, what do you want to be brilliant at?
And there's always somebody who goes,
I wanna be brilliant at everything.
You can't do it.
If you'd have a look at elite athletes
who are brilliant at something,
there's other areas of their life
that they decide I can't be brilliant at that.
So you get other people to help you with those areas.
So I want it to be a brilliant dad, brilliant parent.
I want it to be a brilliant husband.
And I want it to be brilliant at presenting.
You're saying, wait a minute, Mike,
but you've written eight books.
Yeah, they're fantastic books.
They're not brilliant.
And I'm happy with that.
I'm happy to be at that level
because writing eight books takes a lot of work to do that.
And some people spend 10 years writing one book
to make it brilliant.
I haven't got 10 years.
I wrote my first book in four days.
You know, I was racking my brain.
It was David Sandler.
And you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar
that talked about how you,
I think it was his book where he talked about
you can't have an A plus performance every time.
You know, you're not gonna have that.
And so if you live that expectation on yourself,
you're kind of, you're kind of hurting yourself.
You're kind of talking about that same concept.
The other thing that came to mind,
you talked about one of our core pillars
at first class business, which is consistency, right?
So I want to go back to this gap
between fantastic and brilliant.
It's such an important realization.
It can be hard to imagine my mission president
taught this concept.
And he said, water, if you want water to become vapor,
you have to get it to the 100% point
of boiling for that to happen.
You can't be one degree off and have that water turn
into steam vapor, whatever you want to call it.
And he talked about how once the water
makes that transformation, it expands to 4,000 times
of volume of what it was because of one degree difference.
The right degree, right?
So that sounds kind of like what you're talking about
in terms of fantastic to brilliant.
Do you mind shedding light on a few more examples?
Do you have any more on hand of what's that difference
between somebody who's fantastic and brilliant?
Because you listed several that were lights out like,
oh yeah, turn the movie out or reward yourself
with the movie by doing those three to five tasks
that you don't want to do.
What else does that look like?
Let me give you two, I'll give you,
the classic one is sport.
So if you take, I went to the Olympics in London in 2012
and I watched the men's 100 meters final.
And I was just past the finish line.
And there was a guy went past that finish line,
a fraction of a second faster than everybody else.
And then he went like this.
And he did that classic.
And everybody knows it's Usain Bolt.
Who came second?
Nobody knows.
Nobody cares.
Well, the one who came third,
I mean, you're getting bronze for third,
fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth doesn't matter.
And we sit at home, we look at them in the audience
and we're thinking, from the audience,
and we're thinking, didn't they do well just to qualify?
And they're thinking, shit, I came fifth.
Yeah.
Now you need to have that belief that fifth isn't good enough,
especially in business.
Being the fifth best at something
is not going to be good enough.
Even if you are fifth,
still believing that fifth is good enough.
Yeah, well, we're doing all right.
We're fifth, we're the fifth best at.
That goal has to be number one,
because that's where all the rewards are.
Usain Bolt made $50 million in sporting contracts
after that with endorsements.
Opportunity to run anywhere in the world, do whatever.
Now, I've coached a guy for the last 15 years
called Andy Alderson,
who built a business in the UK called Vanorama,
doing vehicle leasing.
And that business, when he started it,
it was out of a porter cabin,
you know, just like a roadside cabin.
One, it was him and three other guys,
and they're on the phones and doing stuff.
And he had this incredible vision
about making the process for the customer absolutely seamless,
because everything about it before that was difficult.
So he would wake up every morning and think,
how do I make this smoother?
How do I make it better?
How am I gonna take that process?
How am I gonna remove all the headaches?
And he made it faster and smoother
and better and better and better
until he got to the point last year,
where he thought, you know what, I've just about got it.
I think we're just about there.
And he was ready to sell the business.
Now, on paper, that business
probably was around about a 25 million pounds business.
He sold it for 200 million.
Why?
There to there.
That little extra bit,
the company who bought it couldn't do that themselves.
They didn't have the vision,
they didn't have the technology,
they didn't have the foundation underneath,
they didn't have the belief of the staff.
All those things that Andy had created,
weren't there and they had to buy that.
They couldn't create it themselves.
Now, that to me is brilliant.
That's what brilliant looks like.
And that's the type of rewards that people can get.
And then, you know, you can look at it
in many, many other areas as well,
whether that be in presenting, being on stage doing stuff.
You know, it's whether you wanna be a brilliant parent
and want a brilliant husband,
anything at all, it's that little extra bit,
that extra effort,
that's what's gonna make the difference.
Absolutely.
And I would add, you know, good luck in marriage.
You know, if you're not aiming
for the brilliant side of what you do.
And that leads me back to something
that comes from that same book by David Sandler.
He talks about your I versus your R.
I want people to really hear this
because I think so many people trap themselves
by over focusing on the R.
I is identity, R is role, right?
And sometimes we associate our identity with a role
and that's where we get into trouble in life.
You know, we are inherently valuable individuals
and I think the most important brilliance
that you can find is being brilliant at your own identity.
Right, that's helped me so much,
balance out who I am and appreciate who I am.
When I was over focused on being brilliant at a role
that wasn't necessarily meant to have,
that leads to disaster in life.
So if you're doing something right now
and you're not feeling called to be brilliant at it
for your career or you're in a relationship
and you're not being called to be brilliant in it,
you might be in the wrong relationship,
you might be in the wrong role.
You should really feel an enjoyment
and something pulling you in this direction
of wanting to find that brilliance
and you should also feel a slight disappointment
within yourself or even a profound like,
wow, I didn't give my best at that.
That to me is kind of what reminds me
if I'm aligned with my identity
or if I'm doing something
where I'm not meant to be brilliant at.
Michael, what are your thoughts on that?
You feel free to debate me on that.
No, I mean, I think it's true is the answer here.
Definitely.
The way to test it is when the alarm goes off
on Monday morning, do you wake up
and are you stoked about a jelly about a bed
or are you thinking nine more minutes and hitting snooze?
And the day that you start hitting snooze
is the day you got to ask the question
and you have a couple of weeks at hitting snooze
and that's it, you got to find something else.
And it's so easy for me to say that,
it's very, very easy to say.
And anybody who, you'll interview loads of people
who do the type of stuff that I do.
If any but of them ever say to them,
and all you have to do, get them off the screen
because there's no all you have to do.
Everything I'm talking about,
everything I'm sharing is a scrap.
To get up towards brilliance is an absolute fight.
It's a daily fight.
There will be people who will be wanting to put you down.
There will be circumstances
that are so beyond your control,
you will think, is there anything I can do about this?
Just give me a break for goodness sake.
You'll have the rug pulled from under you
over and over again.
Those things are going to happen.
But if that vision, that's what you talk a lot about.
If that vision is strong enough, you will be driven.
You'll be, it's like a magnet's gonna pull you towards it.
Now, don't believe in any of this,
cosmic ordering stuff and the secret and all that.
I think that's BS, all that type of stuff.
You've got to do the work and it is hard work.
So if you're good at doing it,
you might as well enjoy the hard work.
It might as well give you a buzz.
It might as well give you a better energy.
So focus on that.
Well, it works a virtue.
Works a virtue when you are doing the right work.
And work, again, it can be a semantics game too.
And I think it's why I tease the idea of semantics.
Most people, I think, fear it or don't know what it is
and don't like it.
But language and nuance is super, super relevant
and important.
And as we get ready to dive into elevating,
those who are listening, elevating your writing
beyond good and achieving extraordinary results
through your writing, I want to go back to that original book
that you launched.
Do you remember how much that cost you financially
to get that book published and to get it out there?
Do you have any insight into that for authors?
Because that game has changed over time.
And I'm curious if you remember how much that cost.
It didn't cost me anything because I
was paid to write it because it's published by Pearson,
the second biggest publisher in the world.
So but I got the deal.
What?
That's interesting.
I'll tell you how I got that deal.
It was it was quite something.
So you got paid to write your first book.
Yeah, yeah, I got paid.
I've only self-published two out of the eight.
OK.
So let's hear it.
Wherever I'm.
I'm all ears now.
Do I got the deal for the first one for How to Be Brilliant?
It was I want to write a book.
I set a goal.
I will have a book published by the end of this year.
And you're not thinking about putting it out there and meeting
people.
I met somebody called David Bell.
So it's a David Brown and David Bell
had these big impacts on my life.
And I recorded a set of six CDs.
So you might remember that he's times when we used to buy
these Nightingale Conan CDs, you know, the six CD packs
and listen to them in the car.
So I made my own and I gave this guy David Bell a set of CDs.
And he said, Michael, is this a book?
I love the title.
And how did we bring it?
What a great title.
I said, no.
He said, I'm going to introduce you to a publisher, somebody
called Rachel Stock.
And I think you'll like what she is about.
And at that time, in the top 10 business books in the UK, six
of them were published by Rachel at Pearson.
That's how good she was.
I mean, she's amazing.
So I met her and I did this whole pitch about this book
and what it was going to be.
And she gets had lunch together and she said, look, I love it.
It's great.
Let's do it.
You've got a deal.
I was like, yes, brilliant.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's going to be superb.
And then she said, so and we think that probably next summer
it will come out and I will wait a minute.
And now this was this was the Thursday before Easter weekend.
And so I said, no, no, it can't be next year.
It has to be this year.
And she said, well, why?
I said, because I've set a goal.
I'm going to have a book published this year.
She said, but it takes at least a year to publish a book.
The whole process takes that long.
And I said, no, no, it's going to happen this year.
And she said, well, no, Michael, there's no way we could do it.
And I said, there must be a way.
There's always a way.
And she said, the only possible way
would be if you'd already written it.
Because we have another author who's actually just
hasn't hit the deadlines.
I'm about to sack him so you could have his slot
in the publishing process, but only if you'd actually written it.
And I went, Rachel, I have written it.
And I looked her in the eye and it was a complete lie.
I hadn't written it.
But I just got it in my head that I could write it.
So she said, you've written it.
I went, yes, I'll need the manuscript by Tuesday.
I said, yeah, no problem at all.
I'll just review it at the weekend and I'll get it down to you.
And I left that hotel and it was a city called Leeds.
What day was this of the week?
Sorry.
What day was this?
The Thursday?
It went Friday?
Thursday.
Easter weekend.
I rang my wife from the car and I said,
Christine, cancel everything.
We're writing a book and we wrote this book in four days.
And there was so many things.
Yeah, it was crazy.
And a couple of things.
First of all, one of the chapters,
I didn't think it was long enough.
And we sat there, I was saying it Sunday or Monday night.
I can't remember which one.
And I said to Christine, I'm going to write some extra words.
She said, it doesn't need it.
I said, it does.
I'm going to write an extra thousand words.
I wrote these extra thousand words, slotted them in all
over the place.
In those days, you used to get an editor's red pen copy.
So you print out the book, then they write all over it,
and then they give you a back to do the corrections
and the things that you've got to work on.
And Rachel at the front of this chapter four, she said,
Michael, there is a problem with the beginning
and the end of this chapter.
They're too far apart.
Lose a thousand words.
And that was the one where I added an extra thousand words.
So this is the 10th anniversary edition of How
to Be Brilliant.
And I wanted to tell that story at the beginning
of the book.
And so I got in touch with Rachel,
and I said, I want to tell this story, blah, blah, blah.
And she said, yeah, OK, that's great.
I said, but can I ask you, when I said I was going to do it
in four days, did you know I hadn't written it?
And she said, of course, I knew you hadn't,
but I knew you would.
And that was the thing I knew you would.
And How to Be Brilliant went into the top 10 business books
in the UK, and it stayed there for two years and four months.
The revised edition, the personal development version,
went into the top 10 personal development books
and stayed there for a year.
It's now in 27 different languages.
And by it on the shelves in 80 countries around the world,
it's quite something.
Oh, that's amazing.
That was my first book.
So after that, it was like, oh, where do we go from here?
So brilliant.
OK, so diving right in now to elevating the writing of those
who are listening, going beyond good and achieving
extraordinary results.
We're all ears, Michael.
What do we do?
What's our step?
This is the next.
This is you actually said that 17 was my last book.
This is actually my last book.
This is just out.
It's called Write That Book.
When did it come out?
It just came out about two months ago.
Oh, cool.
Well, that's shock me.
So write that book.
Write That Book, How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Book.
So the reason that that book came out was like a lot of people.
You know, we had a global pandemic.
I promised my wife we would do less traveling that year.
That kind of worked out.
We did a lot less traveling.
Oh, man.
I did an event, an online event called How to Be Brilliant.
And a group started from it.
And it was really positive.
And it was a beacon of positivity.
And then I asked the people in the group,
if I could teach you anything, what would it be?
So I could teach you how to save an hour every day.
That's one of the books.
I could teach you about customer service.
That's another book.
You know, I had all these different things I could teach.
And then I was doing it as a survey.
One of those survey monkeys that was sending out.
And then just as I was about to press send,
I clicked How to Write a Book.
And 70% of the people clicked How to Write a Book.
And I realized that this community that I had,
they loved the idea of writing books.
But they didn't know how.
So I set up a little pop-up thing.
And then I set up something called Write That Book Master
Class.
We've had 3,000 people go through our one week course.
We've had about 400 go through our three month course.
And those people who are watching this on video,
this shelf up here, all of the books on there,
all the way around there, all the way along to there,
they are all published by people who are members
of Write That Book.
Yeah, all of them.
Fantastic.
And I've got to tell you, when you talk about why you want
to keep on giving, feeling, I could cry about this.
When you see somebody open that package for the first time
and see their name on the front of a book,
it is the most joyful, joyful thing to watch.
And people say, it's better than having kids.
It's better than when I won this or I did that.
It's just the greatest feeling that you put your words
into a book and they've been published.
Now, as you alluded to earlier on as well,
it's never been easier to publish your own book.
Yeah, you can do it.
And you can do it reasonably economically.
But don't get caught out.
And what I wanted to do with Write That Book
is to show people, look, this isn't just
about how to write a book.
This is how to write, publish, and sell your book.
And all these people who say, I don't care if I only
sell a hand full of copies.
Yes, you do.
You're just copying out.
You're just cushioning yourself for the blow of doing it
the good way, not the brilliant way.
Absolutely.
So we show people how to do pre-sales,
how to sell through, how to do stuff in multiple formats,
how to create audio books.
We have the whole lot.
And it's been the most wonderful, fulfilling experience
with that.
And hopefully, maybe with the notes,
we can put in a little link on where
people can get some free stuff about how to write books
as well.
Absolutely.
Well, and you mentioned that it's,
while it's easier to publish the book,
that means the competition to write the book is much higher.
And that means there's less readers for you
to be able to get your books in the hands of and get
their attention.
So you have to be more on point with a strategy
than ever before, in my opinion.
Couldn't agree more.
And you know what?
There's some people who have done a brilliant, brilliant job
with that.
Now, think about things like The Miracle Morning, which
is self-published and just sells through all the time.
And then you've got other books where it's the best idea.
It's really fantastic.
And it's sat there in boxes in people's garage
because they haven't managed to get the message out there.
Absolutely.
My stepdad wrote a book.
We still have boxes.
To this day, it's been 25 years.
And he put his heart and soul into that book.
And it's not a failure by any means.
But had he known more about the strategic process,
he could have done way better with it.
And he'd feel a lot better about it himself
out of this day.
But we didn't have the same access to resources back then
that you have now.
And that's his legacy to worry about now mine.
I've got to make sure you listen.
You have to make sure are you allowing yourself
to make excuses for your own life?
Or are you looking at the opportunities in front of you
and saying, you know what?
I should call Michael.
You know what?
Jackson's also hosted Ashley of the Tale Publishing.
Jackson's also hosted Amber Wilhauer of No God's No Glory.
Maybe I should call all three of them
and see what my options are and get a better
scope of the lay of the land and figure out,
how is this going to work for me?
So it's huge.
So let's dive in a little bit to write that book.
You know, a little bit of the Cliff Notes version.
Michael, what practically, if I were to sit down right now
and let's say that I've tried to write a book by drafting
some pages, gotten into that process,
and I've learned that Amazon has a self-publishing process,
what would that person who's kind of in that spot,
what should they do next?
Number one, you should start building the tribe of people
who are going to buy your book long before you've written it.
You should be communicating with people,
talking to people, being the best person at a party.
You know, if you've got a room full of people,
you don't go watering and going, hi,
I've got a book coming out in three months.
Nobody wants to be that person.
You go in, you go, hi, who are you?
What do you do?
Oh, that sounds amazing.
Just chat with people, talk to people,
start and build up a list.
Second thing is treat writing a book like a job.
Like you are being paid to do it.
So you've got to show up
and you've got to write something every day.
You know, I say if you just write for 17 minutes every day,
you will write a book.
You could probably do a bit more than that,
but 17 minutes is the minimum that you need to be doing
every single day.
Isn't that sad?
The standard of work has gone down so far.
Well, yeah, but I mean, that's...
I'm teasing, but...
The reason for saying 17 minutes is that
people in their minds are going,
oh, I could do 17 minutes and then they write for longer.
They always will.
Right, right.
If people think, oh, I've got to write for two hours,
it's overwhelming.
The next thing is, pardon my language here,
but is write, shite.
I have this mantra, write, shite,
because as long as you're writing something,
it doesn't matter.
I promise, if you sat down and you wrote 500 words
of SH1T and then the next, and you review it,
and then you look at it again.
Create crap, okay, there you go.
Absolutely, I mean, that's it.
There's loads of words for it,
shitting first draft all the time.
It doesn't matter.
Basically, what it's saying is,
you're better off doing that and then reviewing it
than sat there being paralyzed,
trying to write something that's perfect,
because it won't be.
I love it.
Can't be true.
You know, there you go.
Exactly.
And then the next thing is...
I mean, it's laughing at me down there.
I can see him.
He's like, Jackson, shut up.
Be ruthless with your edit.
Okay.
Especially if you're doing something
that's an autobiography.
That story that you think is really funny
that you filled 48 pages with, probably isn't.
And if you get slightly bored reading it,
other people are going to.
If you're writing a business book,
put all of your best stuff in first.
This idea where people go,
oh, I'm gonna write a book to promote my business.
So they leave all the good stuff out,
hoping that somebody's gonna buy their book,
read it and then go, I wanna know more about this person.
And then by that, it doesn't happen.
You want your best stuff in your book
and you want it right upfront.
There's a lot of people don't finish books either.
So you wanna be really, really putting great stuff in there.
Great content.
And if you think, well, people are gonna buy it
for $10 or whatever, so what?
You know, that's it.
If they buy it and then they don't do anything else with you,
that's the purpose of being an author.
You share your knowledge.
You share what you've had the fortune to learn
over the years, you're gonna share that.
And make sure if you're thinking about your book
as your best business card,
make sure it's a great business card.
You would never hand out an old raggedy business card
with spelling mistakes on.
So invest a bit in the production side of things.
Make sure it looks great.
You know, if you're giving out promotional copies,
it's worthwhile getting some hardbacks printed.
Make sure it's typeset beautifully, that type of thing,
rather than thinking, well, you know what?
I could get them printed by Amazon.
They all come, they're a bit floppy, they're a bit shiny.
They don't look nearly as good.
About 13 years ago, an author introduced herself
to me at a networking event as a best-selling author.
And I was very impressed with how she presented herself.
She gave me her business card.
I flipped it over and it said,
get my book free at.www.
And she lost all credibility with me whatsoever.
Like, what are you doing,
telling people you're a best-selling author
when you're giving away your book for free?
Like, how hard is it to sell a free book?
And then I go onto her website just to check and see,
maybe this is just a promotion for now.
Nope, she's got three reviews on the book.
Okay, I don't mean to judge her,
but I hope the rest of you are listening.
You've got to consider the perspective of an audience.
When you see somebody that's launched a book,
says they're a best-selling,
they've only got three reviews,
there's something that should sit wrong with you
as somebody promoting that book.
You've got to get people to like it.
You talked about building that tribe up front,
but you also mentioned,
don't just go like tell people right away,
like, hey, I've got a book, I want you in.
So, do you not tell them you're writing a book?
And how does that work?
It depends.
Some people, it's worthwhile letting them know
you're writing a book up front
and you can say, I'm gonna drip feed some stuff to you.
You know, I'm here to help.
Ask people for opinions on,
do you think like this cover or this cover
or all that type of stuff, it's all marketing,
but you've already decided which cover,
but always ask people which cover they want.
But the other thing is,
that just, it's gonna pick up on something you said there,
that description of best-selling author.
People get themselves on one very niche category
of Amazon for an hour,
and they describe themselves as best-selling author.
Now, fair enough, look, if that's your thing, that's fine.
This book, flip it, you see what it says at the front?
The number one bestseller.
That's a Sunday Times,
that's equivalent of your New York Times,
number one.
I was gonna say, I hadn't heard of the Sunday Times,
so I was gonna call it out, but is this a British thing?
The Sunday Times is the big,
it's your equivalent of your New York Times,
it's the Sunday Times in the UK,
the Sunday Times is the chart.
And it's put together by, it's Nielsen's chart,
so it's not even the S chart.
So it's literally how many books were sold
at bookshops during that week.
And that book, flip it, got to number one.
Now, I'm not saying that to impress you, right?
I'm thrilled, I'm absolutely thrilled with that.
But that, the work to get to that particular point
was extraordinary, but it was the luck in the last minute,
because a radio DJ, a guy called Chris Evans in the UK,
eight and a half million listeners, read that book,
and he got me on his show,
and he said, this is my Christmas book recommendation,
everybody should go out and buy 10 copies.
And I've got the author, Michael Hepple on the show.
And after that, boom, the whole thing exploded,
and we sold literally tens of thousands of copies
in the weeks that follows.
Every week we were selling-
Well, and that little bit of luck followed.
All of the diligence, all of the brilliance
that you put into making that happen,
the same as Mark Victor Hansen, right?
When he sent those books to the jury
of the OJ Simpson case, you know,
and that's ultimately what allowed them,
but that was two years of following
what he called the Power Five,
where they were contacting and getting into any bookstore,
anything that they could to promote their book.
They were doing five things per day
to make that distribution happen pre-internet.
So yeah, the luck factor only plays out
when you've planted enough seeds, you know,
and the vineyard for everything to start
to really take off.
But the thing is, a lot of times people go,
oh, well, yeah, I wanna do that.
Yeah, I wanna do,
but they're not prepared to put the work in.
I mean, that was my fourth book.
I was very lucky with my first one.
My second book, I thought this was gonna be brilliant.
This is gonna be huge.
This next book that I'm gonna do didn't do very well.
Third one did okay.
So it was like, a lot of people at that point
would have been, well, I just could have quit.
Or just, I'm gonna be known as the Heart of the Brilliant guy
and then leave everything else.
I was determined I was going to make it happen.
Absolutely determined.
And yeah, it worked out.
It worked out very well.
I've all of all ones, flip it.
You know, it sounds flip-int, if you will.
That's great, man.
Well, any final thoughts?
If you were to share any final elements of wisdom
or you have a program or something
you wanna tell us about that's coming out,
by all means, Michael, the stage is yours.
Well, I always think when people do these things
at the end, they start pitching stuff.
It always feels a bit, eh, to me.
If you like what I'm about, you'll find me.
You'll find Michael Hepel, connect with me on whatever format,
whether you're on LinkedIn.
See, here's the thing with LinkedIn.
I love LinkedIn.
I get these people who connect with me
and one of two things happens.
They either come straight in and pitch me on something
within 30 seconds.
Well, I'm not gonna buy anything off you in 30 seconds.
Or they don't ask me for anything at all.
Well, what I want is I want people
to genuinely connect and have conversations.
And then if I can help you with something, I will.
And I do that all the time.
You wanna have those you in person knows these people.
So I was like, Michael, do you know such and such?
Yeah, I do.
Would you do an introduction for me?
Yeah, I will.
If I know them, if we've had interactions.
So LinkedIn's a great place to connect with me.
It is a great place.
It's a spam jungle.
I would agree with you, Michael, on that.
And I don't think we have too much of a shot
of changing the human behavior, the human nature,
and the marketing nature that exists on that.
At the same time, those who are listening,
what Michael's saying is just reach out and say hi.
Be nice.
Be nice, be a friend.
Comment on somebody's, if you've written an article
and you see a name that you don't recognize,
and it goes, hi, I really enjoyed this.
I really enjoyed your take on that, Michael.
Thanks very much for doing it.
I love that person.
Yeah.
You know, I'm thinking, oh, wow, I've never met them before.
They've said something nice.
I'm straight away thinking I want to connect with them.
I want to help them.
It's that law of reciprocation, you know, to do that.
So that's one thing.
We have, you know, MichaelHepel.com,
we do a 90 day program where you get lots of emails
and we get videos sent and all that type of stuff.
And this is all about me putting deposits
in the emotional bank account.
I want people to really love me from the get go.
So we don't sell anything.
We literally just send out great stuff.
We send out a weekly newsletter.
One time it's personal development.
One time it's customer service.
That's my other area of expertise.
And if it's about write that book,
we have writethatbook.co.uk.
And on there, again, I just give loads of stuff away.
You know, just go in there and just say, hi,
tell me about the stuff, put your email address in.
And honestly, because authors need confidence boosts
all the time.
They are so terrified of doing something
that's going to fail.
So part of my job is to say, look, it's gonna be all right.
And here's why.
And just do this today.
And if you're worried about something, just do that.
You know, and oh yeah, there's writethatbook, the book.
And that's the site, yeah, write that book.
And these are different things.
So I did a book in 90 days, you know, voice that book,
how to create audio books.
Be the first to know sticky details in there
and we'll send some great stuff through.
And just see this little video.
I don't know if you can play that video.
We won't be able to-
Can you play that for me?
We'll take an extra minute, go ahead and play that.
Just have a look at this person receiving their book.
Yeah, just click on there.
You know what I was saying about the feeling?
Look at how much joy she has.
Woo, look at that.
That's her book being published.
That's it.
That's what we want to help people to do.
And look at them, they're crying.
Oh, that's cool.
You know, look what I've achieved.
I've done it, I've done it.
And I think when you can have that excitement
and that passion, boy, I mean,
write that book is just being a joy.
Or I've coached all of those people.
I've helped them to achieve what you're seeing right now.
It's fab.
Oh, I love that.
It's quite emotional actually.
You could sit and watch that and, you know, get quite-
Yeah, keep that on.
I mean, keep that on for a minute and to summarize.
So in terms of-
People smelling it as well.
Right.
When they get their first copy of the book,
they get it and they smell it
because it's that new book smell.
Yeah.
If you're in two minds about writing a book,
let me help you to do it.
Absolutely.
So as we've heard, when it comes to writing the book,
one of the things I love about the tagline
that Michael shared with us on the
Achieving Extraordinary Results, you know,
he focused on more so remembering that
your writing doesn't have to be perfect.
You want to focus on the results that you want to drive, right?
Get your strategy in place and your goals.
And then once you get to the editing process,
that's the opportunity to be ruthless
by making sure that the writing adds up.
So, well said, super wisdom packed into that I know
from experience firsthand and my own efforts
to try to get published as well as my efforts
to help tail with theirs.
So wonderfully said, Michael.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Visionaries, you connect and reach out to them on LinkedIn.
You can connect and reach out to the website.
We'll have all the information in the show notes, of course.
Thank you for joining us and we will see you
on the next episode.
Everybody have a blessed day.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
We optimize them as the months go by.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention
and have an excellent time building out your vision.