If we are in the middle of a topic,
I'm talking about communication, and you're like,
Jackson, you got it wrong.
You got to do this.
Feel free to bring that to the audience's attention
because I want my audience to have the absolute best
when it comes to communication and understanding
how visionary communication impacts their ability
to succeed and the cleanliness of your website,
the way you show up as a human being, you specifically,
the way that you received us as our link
to be on the show today even came a little bit late.
You've already exercised certain leadership
characteristics that have me saying, whoa, OK,
we've got to extract as much as we can from you
while we're here.
So thank you for being here today, Dr. Michael.
It's a pleasure.
Great to be here, Jackson.
Absolutely.
So you're going to hit hard, right?
You'll banter with me on this, right?
Actually, Rocky is one of my favorite movies.
And it very much looks like we should dig into that
because there's so much to learn for leadership,
but also for communication from that movie.
So it's definitely a match here.
Off to the races.
All right, with Dr. Gerhards, we're
going to dive right in Rocky style.
So Adrian, all right, so let's hear it, man.
Communication sounds so simple and so
rudimentary, so easy.
Visionaries who love this show, you guys know how hard it is.
You know that we are all babies, basically,
when it comes to communicating.
We've got so much to learn.
Let's hit hard, though.
Where do we start?
You know what?
The irony here is that, well, communication is simple.
And the best communication often is the simplest communication.
But somehow, we've been raised to think
like we need to chase the fancy words, the eloquent language,
the complex sentences.
Well, every time we're sitting on the other side of the table,
we dig those people who will find the simple words
to express complex ideas rather than the other way around.
So that's basically, well, we could call it a day at that,
right?
Well, if you're looking for the best ways
to express your thoughts, just say it plain and simply.
Say what you want to say in the plainest and simplest way,
and that's it.
I love it.
I do almost want to wrap up the podcast.
Yet I hope that those of you listening
pay attention to our behavior patterns, just our habits
of doing just that.
It's hard to create that atomic habit sometimes
of being able to keep it as simple as possible.
Great friend of mine, his name's Matt Lytle.
Shout out to Matt.
He owns 5% of Able Health, one of our clients' companies.
And he earned that working with us.
He introduced Able Health to us.
So Matt and I, yesterday, no, on Saturday,
we were in a deep dive conversation
about the avoidant attachment personality disorder.
And I had never heard of this before.
I've researched a lot of psychology.
And I was like, man, I love finding things
I've never heard of before.
And so I went down this super strong path
of learning about the four attachment types that exist.
And he mentioned something else, some fancy word,
and I said, is that the flux capacitor from back
to the future?
I don't get it.
And we had this exact same conversation
about keeping things simple and being able to,
I think the art of an expert is somebody
who's able to take a complex subject
and distill it down for a child to be able to understand it.
What are your thoughts on that?
I couldn't agree more.
I admire the people who find simple words
to express complex thoughts rather than the other way
around.
But somehow there's this misconception
that it makes us appear professional when we use
like the professional jargon.
Or it makes us appear intelligent
when we're able to juggle these complex sentences
with these fancy words that we've picked up
in the dictionary.
Actually, it's the other way around.
When the people who make us feel smart
are the ones who allow us to see things that might even
have been familiar with us in a much more profound and simple
way, who find those brilliant metaphors that somehow click
because we're so familiar with those
since all of our lives.
And it somehow clicks for a thing that we thought
we had already understood, but now it
makes so much more sense, not because they
found more complex, more eloquent words,
they found simpler examples.
I love it.
Absolutely.
And that's really the point of vision prose.
And why we focus so much on vision
is because most visionaries don't know how to clarify
their message to the world.
They understand it, of course.
If you have your own vision, it gets yours.
And then learning how to express it in a way
that other people can then share and adopt that vision
and appreciate it, it can take a little bit of work
to figure out what are the words that will help do that.
We're going to use one other aspect for you podcasters
out there.
Go ahead.
You got a thought before I go into the next aspect.
Yeah, exactly.
Because there's that trap for visionaries,
for people who are passionate about the things that they do.
That they show up with the desire
that people appreciate that brilliance.
They appreciate all the hard work, the blood, sweat,
and tears that we put into crafting that idea
or building that product.
And so we try to explain everything
and go deep down into the details under the surface,
deep down into the complexity.
When that's not at all what the communication is about.
When we first of all need to make
them curious for that thing.
When they don't show up because they
want to cheer for our brilliance.
They want us to cheer for their brilliance.
And so it's not about us well finding all,
explaining everything that we know,
but finding the simplest entrance for them
into our ideas.
Absolutely.
It's funny communication can be done so well without words too.
And there's a couple of great examples of that
that I'd like to highlight.
One, there's a story of an auctioneer.
And the auctioneer is auctioning off an old violin.
And a couple of people raise their hand for a few dollars,
but it's not going anywhere.
This old man walks up to the front of the room.
And he's a master violinist.
And he plays 30 seconds of the most beautiful song
on this violin.
And then he goes and sits back down.
And the violin gets auctions for thousands and thousands
of dollars.
And it had nothing to do with the words that were said.
The communication transcended the words.
In podcasting, we have an opportunity to do the same thing.
And there's a lot of people listening
that are getting into that space, as you should.
I mean, the presidents, the nominations of the United
States, that whole situation, the campaigns,
they went on a lot of podcasts this year.
And that became a big, big hot ticket item.
There's so many opportunities that exist with podcasting.
And I have nothing against fancy studios.
Fancy studios, in fact, I really like them.
Shout out to Junaid Ahmed of homestudiumastery.com.
He builds amazing podcast studios
that communicates a certain depth and presence and power.
And I like my studio setup.
It's my home office.
I've got my books.
I've got my guitar.
I didn't really plan it out that much.
And when I moved in here, you would
see half the books on the shelf.
And you would see nothing was behind me.
It was just a room.
And I've got my microphone.
It's a lot of fun.
And it's like $30.
We've used it for 10 years.
And so those things kind of matter.
But I think a lot of people get caught up
in the false narrative.
And a lot of people get caught up on the vanity of it.
Then comes Dr. Michael Gerhardt.
And you've got a beautiful black background.
You do your hair well.
You show up professionally dressed.
You got your ear pods.
You're ready to go.
You got a great smile on your face.
And it's that simple.
You look like Joni Ivy with a black background
instead of a white background, the old spokesman for Apple.
And there's something amazing about simplification
that, again, transcends words.
Can you talk about that?
I think that hits on a profound truth that has
so many different angles to it, where simple beats complex
almost every time.
But also passionate beats eloquent almost every time.
And tangible beats fancy every time.
I mean, yeah, you can have that fancy background.
But if the things that you're speaking about or talking
to with your guests doesn't kind of resonate
with your audience, if it's not tangible for them,
then your background and all the fancy things
that you've put so much effort in
won't make it any more resonant.
And that's actually the profound difference
between what I like to call wow versus aha effect.
Because I see that so many people in the communications
industry are concerned with the former, with the wow effect.
And well, that has its place.
But it's also kind of low-hanging fruit in a way.
Because wow effects, in a way, are easy.
It's basically a money problem.
You can throw money at that problem and solve it.
So you want some wow for your presentation?
Hire Taylor Swift.
That's about how wow it gets, right?
And many, many businesses do that.
Like, for example, Samsung have often
put orchestras on the stage to wow the audience.
But that won't get you any kind of aha
unless that's built into the way that you speak,
built into the language that you use,
built into the ideas that you've crafted.
And that is something that money cannot easily buy.
Because that takes thought and rigor and time and effort.
You need to think these things through.
But when you have it, they will get you an advantage
that no wow can buy.
Plus, if you now put the wow on top of that,
you're off the charts.
So well said.
It's much like putting together a fireworks show.
And that's what I try to help business owners pay attention
to when they're building their launches,
is you don't want to have the grand finale first.
You don't want to have every single firework
go off at the same time.
The type of explosion is not super productive.
And it doesn't have any type of climax or flow, language,
communication experiences.
It's a lot like participating in a dance or watching a movie.
And having relationships is like that, too.
Walt Disney World does not have the fireworks show
going on all day long.
There's a singular event that occurs.
And there's a buildup to it.
In fact, my daughter, my three-year-old, we were as for,
no, I had kids six, three, and five, my five-year-old.
We went to Disneyland for the first time.
They selected her from the crowd to turn the lights off
at Disneyland for the event to start, the parade to start.
And so she waved her magic wand, and boom,
all the lights went out.
It was the most magical experience for us as a family.
Obviously, for her, can you imagine
what that would feel like for a five-year-old?
It was so cool.
So the theatrics can certainly take their,
they can contribute.
And if that's it, if you don't have a park,
if you don't have other experiences that go along
with it, then it can just, it can fall on deaf ears.
It can look awful.
I'm going to use Larry King as an example for this.
So thank you, Ollie Gardner of Unbounce,
one of the founders of Unbounce.
And he talks about how this is a very powerful slide deck.
It's one of my favorite presentations I've ever seen.
It's about conversion rate optimization.
And what he found was when you look
at that image with the celebrity there,
only 6% of people answered that that website was
about business loans.
And you don't have a long time to capture
the attention of somebody when they go to the website.
But when they removed Larry, 36% answered
that it was about business loans.
And so in this case study, 500% increase
occurred when they got rid of Larry from that page.
Now, that's an oversimplified representation
of how conversion rate optimization works
and what goes into it.
But the point is the variables they can distract.
They can cause people to miss out on opportunities.
There's effective ways to include people.
And there's extremely ineffective ways
to include people like Taylor Swift running
onto a football field during the middle of the fourth quarter.
Not exactly appropriate.
We want to strategically plan things out
like this as visionaries who have
visions to communicate with the world in order
for them to understand.
So we might come back and actually look at some examples.
I want your permission for that, Dr. Gerhart.
If we do, I've got some sizzle reels from past guests
that might be kind of fun to analyze.
Would that be a good use of our time?
Or would that be a distraction from what
you want to talk about today?
I want the audience to get the most out of what we do.
Well, I think you know your audience best.
So if you think that that's what your audience would
love to see, well, why not have some fun with that?
We might play with this.
We might absolutely play with that.
So let's first find out.
Let's make sure to extract some resources from you.
So for the visionary leaders listening in,
you've been on your journey.
I don't think you were born with all the things you've learned
and know today.
So what's gotten you to where you are?
What are three resources that can
help other visionaries along their path that have helped you?
So what certainly has contributed to bringing me
to where I am is writing, writing down and putting
your thoughts on paper.
Because while you're circling them in your mind,
thoughts have that tendency to, well,
stay a little bit fuzzy.
It feels like we have that inner clarity.
But at the moment that we try to articulate them,
well, we feel like it's not that clear.
And when we explain it to our best friend, or even
to a colleague, or worse, a customer for the first time,
somehow it feels like, well, they didn't get that.
They might even respond with a blank stare.
But when we write it down, we have two tools immediately
available.
First of all, we have committed to one way of saying it.
And then our logical brains can analyze that.
So does that really make sense?
And also, our guts can help with that.
Because they can kick in with the feelings and emotions.
So does that feel right?
And more importantly, does it make me feel excited?
Because if I'm not excited, who else would be?
So writing it down is certainly the first resource.
That's huge.
Nobody has said that.
I think we've had over 1,000 guests.
And nobody has ever said writing.
But the person who I remember last saying that over 10 years
ago, John Aserath, who's on The Secret,
he's got his NLP program.
He talked about the neuro thingies
that connect our brain to our physical body.
And it's different than typing.
Because when you draw the letters,
you're registering to your memory and to emotions.
And I was like, whoa, that just felt right
as he talked about it.
So thank you.
Writing, what else?
So the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
is certainly a resource that you can't live without.
I mean, first of all, it has that important front page
where it says in bold letters, don't panic,
which is about the most valuable advice you could ever get.
But it also teaches us one of the most profound lessons
that I think any entrepreneur, any visionary, basically anyone
can learn in their lives.
And that has to do with, so I hope I'm not
spoiling for too many people, because I
think it's a very well-known book.
So by now, you probably heard that 42.
You are, and I want you to.
Here's why.
I somehow, one, nobody's mentioned it.
Again, nobody has mentioned that book.
I have not heard about that book in at least 15 years.
I want to say, maybe I'm wrong.
It's that far back in my registrar.
I don't know what it is.
You've got to read it.
It's the most hilarious, most profound book
that you'll read, at least for the rest of this year,
if not for a very long time.
So the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
is that brilliant book by Douglas Adams, which
has so many hilarious things happening to the main character
Arthur Dent, but also to Earth, which unfortunately, well,
explodes.
So it's just in the way for an intergalactic highway.
So it's just that hilarious.
But I think the point that I was up to,
and the reason I mentioned this book,
is because of the conclusion of the book, where it leads
to that, well, finally, we get to learn the answer
to the ultimate question about life, universe, and all
the rest.
And it turns out that after millions of years of computing,
that supercomputer that was built to answer that question
replies with a very simple answer.
And it's 42.
So that's the answer to the ultimate question about life,
universe, and all the rest.
Oh, no, I lost you.
I lost you.
I wanted to ask about that.
We'll see if Dr. Gerhardt is back in just a second.
While we're wondering what happened with the technology
here, we're going to actually start the review process
of these sizzle reels.
And we'll start with Pete Saina's sizzle reel
of digital surgeons.
Then we'll go into Misty's sizzle reel.
And then we'll go into Karim's.
So I figure we take a little break on the sizzle reels
while you're out.
But did you say the answer is 42?
Yeah, so and of course, until the point
is that finally, everyone realizes, so wait a second.
What is the question, actually?
So no one bothered to ask the question, right?
So this is the answer to the ultimate question.
But what is the question?
And that is so spot on to the times that we're living in.
I mean, everyone's got an opinion and answers
to basically everything that you throw at them.
But we take too many occasions to take a step back and ask,
so wait a second.
What's the question that we're trying to answer here?
What is actually the problem here?
So we don't take and spend enough time
agreeing on the questions, but spend so much time
on arguing over the right answers
when we haven't figured out the proper question.
So much time.
Such an opportunity.
I can't wait to read that.
And you know what?
I was going to go into the B-rolls, the B-roll for,
what do they call?
The sizzle reels for people.
But you got one more awesome resource.
What is it?
Well, it's another book.
It's The Power of Habit, because that's really
what drives us humans, right?
By Charles Dike.
And where we learn how, where he makes
that brilliant case of how habits work,
how profound an impact they have on our lives,
and where we need to attack these habits to actually have
a shot at modifying them.
It's kind of the prequel to the atomic habits, which
has stormed the bestseller lists.
But I found The Power of Habit to be a little bit more
satisfying to read, because it has a little more background
on why these things are like they are.
And well, man, that author is just
such a brilliant storyteller.
And his new book is also a phenomenal resource,
Super Communicators.
So very, very appropriate and very good match
to today's show.
That is just a brilliant read that helps you understand.
So wait a second.
How do these beasts that we call habits actually work?
And why do they have such a profound impact?
And why are they so hard?
And where can we use communication
to actually counter those?
Love it.
So we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, right?
And that's what these books represent as well.
And it doesn't take away from the current status,
because there is a certain level that
has been achieved through modern ingenuity
and what all of you visionaries are up to
and what we're up to and super grateful for the resources
of the past that make it so much easier
to move our lives forward.
So without further ado, some sizzle reels with Pete Sena,
Miss T, Kareem Abul Naga.
We'll come back after we watch a little bit of each one of these.
I believe that creativity and curiosity
are fundamentally broken.
I think they're broken in the world, but more importantly,
I think they're broken in business.
How do we growth hack our brand into success, right?
In order for us to engineer best in class,
we have to first look at best in class.
We have to deconstruct best in class,
define a stake in the ground as to where
we're going as a business.
One thing I learned a long time ago, I will never quit.
Her name is Tamara Sandberg.
She's a typical entrepreneur who's
just landed on the Forbes magazine.
Typically, when you get on a Forbes list,
it's about how much money you make.
They're specifically pointing out
50 different business owners who are also philanthropists.
There's no such thing as I can.
This is just stuff that it took me years to learn,
but if you can learn it now, you'll
be able to manage a class and pull excellence out
of anybody that you're working with,
which you want.
Standing beside me is governing board member Kareem Abunaga.
Kareem Abunaga is CEO and co-founder
of Practice Makes Perfect.
Kareem was named to Forbes 30 under 30 list.
His TED Talk was named one of the most inspiring speeches
of 2017.
Clap three times if you can hear me.
Seven years ago, I started to reform our public education
system.
What's even more exciting is that if we can prevent
five months of lost time just by redesigning two months,
imagine the possibilities that we
can unlock by tackling the rest of the calendar year.
All right.
So those are three sizzle reels we've
received from people who come in.
And all of them are fantastic leaders, by the way.
They're people I greatly look up to,
who have tackled amazing world problems
and are continuing to contribute to society in great ways.
I want to hear from the art of communication specialists.
What can we learn?
What can we take away from as visionaries who are maybe just
getting started or don't have sizzle reels like that,
that we can pay attention to to have that type of impact
with our visions?
I think one of the most obvious things
that I saw in all three of those is
that they talk about a profound desire in the audience.
And that might bring us back to Rocky.
Because Rocky works basically very much the same way.
The thing with great movies is that we
look at the hero, but what we see is basically us.
So we see ourselves in the hero.
And we could be that guy that, well, we,
I mean, Rocky is that guy that feels like he's got it all in him,
but he just, well, never got the chance
and life's just been unfair to him.
And if only he ever get that phone call
and he would show the whole world how that he's
got the champion in him.
And he's that lucky guy for whom the phone finally rings.
And so when we watch that movie, in a way,
we somehow think like, well, that could be us.
So if the phone rang for us and the New York Times rang up
or let's say Oprah rang up and we would get the chance
to show the world our brilliance,
we would, of course, give it our all just like Rocky did.
And I think that those reels use the same principle,
that they position the three guys as the heroes of the reel.
But they also allowed the viewer a spot in that story.
Like, I could be the one who refuses to quit.
I could be the person who says the sentence I can
doesn't exist in my world.
And that is something that we want for ourselves.
And so what those reels did is that they gave me
a spot on the hero's pedestal rather than kind of claiming it
solely for the person who's advertised here.
We give them, we share with the audience.
And that's so much more relatable for them.
Huge.
The sharing aspect.
As a musician myself, the choice of music, too,
is a massive impact in these types of sizzle reels.
The timing of the impact of the music,
it shifts the emotional importance and perception
of what's being said.
And that can be used to manipulate, of course.
But music is a resource just like anything else.
Water can be used to destroy and drown.
Water can also be used to uplift.
And so we do have a responsibility as visionaries
to combine the right message with the right music
with the right movement with the right video, all that
at the same time.
And if we don't hit it, you won't
have the impact that you want.
You talked about better words mean better business
on your website.
I love that tagline.
And how you might be one call away.
There you go, back to that Rocky reference.
You've also got the new book, The Path to Strategic Impact.
And so do you have a path?
That's a dumb question.
Is there kind of an outline of how do we get from,
I think I've got a vision and I feel good about it,
to I'm ready to share my vision the right way as fast
and as efficient as possible?
What's that framework look like for somebody
who's trying to put that together?
Well, first of all, I think it's important to appreciate
that this is likely a journey.
It's not about having that stroke of insight and just,
well, having it immediately figured out and being right
and once and forever.
It's much more a process about getting it right
eventually, where conversations with your customers,
with your audience play a huge part,
but also the conversations with your friends who
might not get your idea.
They play a huge part in finding those better words.
So one tool that I found very, very useful,
and one question that I will ask you very early on
if you would work with me is, so what's
the pass along of your communication?
So let me explain that concept.
So suppose you're caught on the TED stage
and you get the chance to give that keynote, that TED keynote,
and there's like 6,000 people in the audience,
but also like 2 million people watching it on YouTube.
And now if they come home from the conference
or they meet their friend after having watched the video
and they ask them, so wait a second,
you've watched that talk by Jackson,
but what was it actually about?
And so what are they going to reply?
And that's what I call the pass along phrase.
What are they going to pass along?
And the thing is that this is never
going to be like 30 slides with six bullet points each.
It's never like a 12-page report that they've read from you.
It's always more like one or two sentences
in very simple language, language
that they are familiar with.
And what I observe so often is that so many communicators,
especially those who are passionate about the things
that they do, they delegate the task of figuring out
that pass along phrase to the audience.
They basically throw everything they
are passionate about at the audience,
hoping that something sticks, and basically delegating
that task of what's the pass along here to the audience.
And I think that's almost always a bad choice.
You should take ownership of that.
You should spend a lot of time thinking about,
so what do I actually want them to pass along?
And once you have that, then you can build a path.
You can bridge the gap from where they are today
to what you need them to see so that they will actually
pass that along.
My goodness.
That is huge.
I've never heard anybody teach this before.
Maybe I've had my ears closed.
It's possible that I've just overlooked it,
and I wasn't ready for this type of information.
In fact, I can see how scary that can feel.
Because if, especially for somebody
with an entrepreneurial mindset that's
built around the laws of scarcity,
I'm like, no, my gosh, I don't want people to know about this
because somebody is going to take my concept or take my idea
and run with it.
That's going to limit anybody from wanting
to do this, those people.
And then the second side of it is
that there's a responsibility factor that comes with, man,
if my message gets passed around the world,
what is that?
What's going to happen to my reputation as that takes off?
There's a huge factor of fear of failure, fear of success
that can come along with the responsibility
of this type of thinking and hitting a message like this.
The weight of what that means, we
design irresistible messages ourselves.
I love the title of your podcast, by the way,
Irresistible Communication.
And you got that Keanu Reeves effect going on,
the John Wick style.
So it's a good looking photo, man.
So irresistibility is something that Video Power Marketing,
we learned a lot about.
I learned a lot about it there.
I learned a lot about it at VideoPower.com.
They designed some of the most viral video ad
campaigns of all time.
But I've never thought about combining that aspect
with what you're talking about.
But you make it so clear.
It's like Sir Ken Robinson, I think his name is,
the one that gave the most popular TED Talk of all time.
What's his pass along?
Reform child education.
I saw that 15 years ago or so.
And I remember that, and other people whose TED Talks I've
seen, I may not remember their name.
Johan, I can't remember his last name.
Everything we know about addiction is wrong.
What's the message?
Fix it.
Create belonging.
And get people involved in communities.
Those concepts are so easy to remember and regurgitate.
And you have a framework for helping us do that.
And you just shared it.
And I'm extremely honored.
That's amazing.
Anything you want to add before I cut to a break?
Because I almost don't want to go to a break.
I just want to use your time to find out more.
I think, well, yeah.
But first of all, thanks that you like that so much.
And I hope some of your audience can make good use of it.
But yeah, I think that.
We will use that every day at First Class Business.
We will be using that every day, Dr. Gerhards.
I really think that that's one of the most profound things.
And it helps you swallow a bitter pill in communication,
which I like to call rule number one.
Basically, I think the only real rule
that there is in communication.
And that is if they didn't get it, they didn't get it.
So if your audience didn't get it, they didn't get it.
There's no use in arguing that you meant it slightly
differently or that you mentioned it on slide 13,
bullet point six.
They didn't get that.
And they didn't get your pass along.
And so that's nothing to, well, shy away from or feel bad
about.
That's just what happens at times.
But it's also information.
It's also information.
It helps you find the weak spots.
So digging deep on.
So what exactly did they not get?
Why did they miss that important piece
that I gave with that anecdote that I shared?
Why did they miss that?
And then we can refine it and tweak it and ultimately
and eventually arrive at something
that's way more profound than our first take.
Huge.
I have a dream speech by Dr. Martin Luther King
was not his first speech, as far as I'm pretty sure.
Exactly.
You know, Elon Musk, Model 3, right?
The Tesla Model 3, he was still scrutinized.
The market was bare on what he was doing.
They said he was never going to succeed with it.
And now nobody can even fathom the idea of drug Tesla failing.
And that is so true.
And that's the misconception here.
I mean, that first failed attempt, that scares the hell
out of a lot of people.
But the truth is, you've got to get your worst effort
behind you.
Because, well, that's just the truth.
Your first speech is not going to be your best speech.
At least not if you dare to make a second or a third one.
But you've got to get that first speech out.
You've got to give it.
But if you have the courage to learn from it,
to learn from the blank stares of your audience,
to blank from the polite applause when you expected
the standing ovations, that's where growth happens.
And then when you did your 20th speech,
that's when you start to get good.
And when you're at your 100th, yeah, you're pretty good.
But the truth is that every one of those brilliant keynote
speakers that you've seen at shows,
they give that same exact keynote,
like 100 times a year at least.
So and they've done like 1,000 speeches at least.
That's how they became good.
This is so important.
Let's cover another couple of angles on this.
Imagine being Charlie from Charlie Bit My Finger, right?
One of the first original YouTube hit videos out there
is Brother Finger Gets Bit.
And he's like, Charlie Bit My Finger.
And having to try to carve a legacy out after being
known as that kid.
It's like, how many people are going to walk up to him
and be like, hey, bite my finger?
I'm like, I annoy the heck out of you about that.
This is really a true thing, guys.
Breaking Bad, Jesse from Breaking Bad, if you look up
interviews, he was pretty traumatized and frustrated
with society that they wanted, people wanted him to walk up
and say his famous quote.
It's something obscure and dark, but he hated the fact
that everybody wanted him to come up to him on the street
and say the quote or say the quote to him derogatorily.
And that messes with you.
So the first failed attempts, I'm
grateful that my first failed attempts are not
what I'm known for for the rest of my life.
I've got other things that I need to do.
So sometimes we might have the blessing slash curse
of going famous and viral on day one.
And sometimes we might have the blessing and curse
of it taking a bit longer.
One thing that Dr. Gerhart talked about earlier
that we honor a lot at First Class Business and Vision
Pros Live is the journey, learning
to be present in the moment and enjoy where we're at,
not feeling so drawn to have to focus on the destination,
to be addicted to a destination that controls us
that we aren't even there to enjoy yet.
So let's shift gears.
I'm going to skip the entire break today.
I hope you're OK with that.
This is more important.
So if this was your last chance ever to share something
with an audience, what powerful lesson can other visionaries
learn from your experience?
I think if there's one thing that I can leave a trail with,
then it's that I learned that resonance beats persuasion.
So I'd recommend to stop persuasion.
Don't persuade harder, but resonate stronger.
Because, well, if you're honest with yourself
and you realize that someone, well,
tries to sell you something that you didn't originally
want to buy and he tries to persuade you,
he will probably succeed with that.
And it might even make you happy, right?
But it also never feels like, well, that
was a great experience here, right?
And, well, I might not have a good memory of that exchange,
of that transaction.
While when that same person approached
the same conversation from a point of curiosity,
from first of all listening to, so what matters to me?
So what are some of your struggles?
So where do you want to improve?
Or how does that fit into your life?
And then finds the common ground, the path
that we both share.
So that they might even lead me to the point of no return,
where I've seen something that I didn't realize before in a way
that I cannot unsee anymore.
So that they wholeheartedly can leave the choice of whether I
want to buy from them or not to me,
because they've made their case.
They know that they've listened patiently.
They paid attention to what matters to me.
They've made a great product.
It's a great match for that.
So I'd be a fool not to choose them, right,
if you did that work.
And if more people approach communication,
entrepreneurship, building companies
from that perspective, I think the world
would be a better place.
100%.
Y'all may have noticed, if you are watching me
sinking in my chair, as I pondered, meditated,
fought back tears related to what Dr. Michael Gerhart just
said.
My first marriage and divorce was
a byproduct of me persuading harder, not resonating stronger.
And when you convince somebody to marry you,
when it's about, I don't think this is about,
I want to honor the mother of my first three children as well.
I don't think it was about my eye color.
There's certainly many people who were attracted to me
because of my eye color.
It wasn't about how I played the trumpet or the guitar,
although there's certainly many people who
saw that side of me and wanted that part of me,
and not necessarily the whole Jackson.
And when I faced the opportunity to court
and see who my spouse was going to be,
I had extremely strong skills of persuasion and charisma
and charm.
And I'd worked so hard on impressing people.
That word of impress, it bothers me these days.
Because if you think about it, if you're
thinking about the definition of impress,
it's to make an indent on something.
And if you're impressing others, you're
making an indentation on another human being's free will,
on who they are, their identity.
That's not my right to do.
And in marketing, we try so hard to be impressive.
I say it as a world.
We don't.
Not at First Class Business.
And sometimes to hilarious consequences.
I mean, I've had clients who, when we finally kind of dug out
their diamonds, were blown away by the beauty of that diamond.
Because what they actually did with all their marketing
and with all them trying to impress people
was that they decorated the diamonds, right?
They put stickers on it.
And painted it in fancy colors.
And then they put it on their pedestal
with all these dazzling lights and so.
And when they finally removed all of that,
until they got to the core, polished that core.
Because that's what you do with diamonds, right?
You don't decorate them.
You polish them.
And when you let it just shine with its truest brilliance,
that's what attracts people.
Not that overly impressive thing.
That's what attracts the right people, right?
I'll add that word in there.
It's because you can attract all of the jokers and jesters
who have all of their decorated stickers and stuff, too.
And think that you're winning.
But then there's far more pretenders
in the market who will gravitate towards you
than there are true contenders in the market.
So yeah, not everybody understands
the value of a diamond.
And that's OK.
We're blessed.
Those of you listening in, we all
understand the value of the diamond.
I hope there's somebody who's going,
why is a diamond valuable?
I'm looking that up right now.
Good for you.
Go and find that.
But when it comes to business, people often
value the facade, the material, the vanity, the external.
And you can build a very lucrative business model
going after that type of a market.
Bruno Mars does.
He made a song about it.
Today, I don't want to do anything.
What a liar.
He works 60 to 80 hours per week easily, maybe more.
But he knows how many people will buy that song.
And so he produced a song knowing full well
that a bunch of idiots will buy that song.
Bunch of people who aren't thinking straight
and understanding the value of life itself,
like they're going to dive into that.
And he manipulates the market with it.
And I know, Jackson's rude for using a trigger,
politically incorrect word.
I'm not singling out a demographic.
I'm not singling out an individual.
It's called the agentic state.
If you want to learn more about it, Stanley Mildred,
I think his name was, they got a great movie about it
called The Experimenter.
90% plus of the world, in my opinion,
is stuck in an agentic state following
leaders who are not exactly who, they're not
who I want to follow normally.
So Dr. Gerhard, thank you so much.
This quote and the importance of it, the resonance.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't get to help the world see with a title like that.
And yet, you don't leverage your status as doctor either.
I tell my entrepreneurs, look, the person who says,
trust me because I'm a doctor has lost all credibility
with me.
Because if you have to say you're
a doctor to persuade me that you know something,
what do you really know?
You're already failing in that capacity.
And so you don't do that, but you emulate
and you just bring a gift of knowledge
that I'm super grateful for today.
Those of you listening in, the action steps
will be below the video.
We'll do our best to make sure that the right action steps are
there so that you guys can get in touch with Dr. Gerhard
and the best ways possible.
We'll also have the resources below this episode too
so you can see where all these resources we've talked about,
a follow up with them and use them.
Maybe it will help you on your journey
to speed up the process of finding the paths of most
enjoyment as you continue to move through life
and appreciate the scenery and the circumstances
when it's harder.
That's going to happen.
In the top right corner, we've got one more call to action.
It's going to say be our guest.
Take the chance.
Come on our show.
You don't have to be as well articulated as Dr. Gerhard says.
You don't have to have a phenomenal book
to come on the show.
If you're out there trying to help and serve others
and uplift others, we'll feel it.
We'll see it.
We'll walk through it together.
We want you on the show if you're giving back
and helping others along their journey.
Dr. Gerhard, I'll let you close out today.
Any final thoughts?
Anything you want to share?
Yeah, I mean, since this is the vision, the vision prose show,
perhaps I can share mine.
Because I imagine a world in which those of us
who have an important story to tell,
a story that has the potential to change the world,
that they find the words to make that happen.
I think we've spoken about a couple of ideas that
can help you with that.
And so my wish for today would be that as many of you
as possible take those tools, find those words,
and make their ideas happen.
That will be phenomenal.
I love it.
You heard it from Dr. Gerhard.
And we've all been blessed with wisdom
on how to share our communication as visionaries.
We'll see you on the next episode, everybody.
Bye bye.
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.
This is going to 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.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a vision.