093: Making Each Day Count with Robert D. Smith

Pete Mockaitis
Robert thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Robert D. Smith
Pete, I’m excited to be here. Thank you for asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh I’m excited to have you and we’ve already had a lot of laughs before the recorder went on so I think we’re in store for some more and I think it makes a lot of sense because life is too short not to have some laughs along the way and you have a tendency to measure your life by the day in terms of the number of days in your book 20,000 Days and Counting. I’m curious, how did this concept enter your head and what’s the value in it?

Robert D. Smith
Pete, it’s one of those things that was a total accident. So you know when the cell phones come in everybody is wanting to download an app and I’m having to ask them “what’s an app?” You know when they were first coming out.
So one of the earliest ones that you can download for free was a countdown calendar, they’re still out there but this one I don’t think is available any longer but I used this and it tells you how many days till Christmas or your next birthday or New Years or something and that was the purpose of the countdown – counting down.
So I thought I wonder if this counts backwards and I put my birth date in there – 5/5/55 and lo and behold the number of days I had been alive popped up. It was around nineteen thousand nine hundred and eighty some odd days on that very day I thought “oh my god I’ve never seen my life in days before” and I would daresay people have not.
So I immediately thought I need to do something special, not knowing what, on the next big number which was twenty thousand days and on that day it happened to be a Friday. I left not knowing exactly why I was going or how long I would be gone or exactly what I was going to be doing but I ended up staying in a small boutique hotel, a beautiful place, checked in and I sat down and I thought “okay now what am I doing here?” and I suddenly gained an enormous amount of gratitude and appreciation for even being alive. Because in ninth grade I saw one of my close friends that I had from second grade we were on the outdoor basketball court and playing half court basketball. He was running after the ball to keep it in bounds and he tripped and fell flat on his face on concrete and died.
Now, when you’re in ninth grade you don’t think “this could be my last day, this might be my last step” that is not in your brain and suddenly it was in mine. I remember I’m not afraid to die that part of my life I feel is taken care of but not knowing when, that’s the trick.
So as I was sitting down in this hotel room I was so grateful because here I am in the mid of the fifty fourth year not thinking I would’ve ever made it that far and very grateful that I had so I wrote an email to Andy and Polly, his wife, and I just said thank you, it’s such an honor to be working with you. I quoted five scripture references that had to do with time and eternity and not knowing how many days anybody has and I put in some other personal stuff and sent that to them. As soon as I sent that immediately I thought of somebody else that I was very grateful for so I wrote a similar email with those same scriptures and I sent that to them and then I thought of somebody else. For the next eighteen hours I sat there and emailed fifty eight people of which all of them responded, all of them replied, someone of them called, some of them wanted to get with me, wanted to have a meal together or something and discuss this concept of this counting up because none of them had ever heard of this.
So over the next couple years of sharing this principle with others, including Andy’s publisher – I sent him one, and after a while when I had put together this book which was not a book because I didn’t mean to write a book. It wasn’t on my list to write a book but we needed something on Andy’s site because something had just been taken down and we needed something to be put up. You know how you put something up that you can download for free if you give me your email? So this was what we were going to use but then my group, some of the guys decided that this is too big or this is too good or we should print these and not just give this away. So I sent it to Andy’s publisher and just asked how much would it cost to get me five thousand copies of this you know in hard back. But that’s when he emailed and then he called and he said we don’t want to print these for you, we want to print these period and we will publish this book and offered me an unbelievable deal. Is that not crazy?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome.

Robert D. Smith
And by the way you know it never happens that way, you don’t have the publisher calling you. That’s how that came about but that principle is still something that sticks in my brain every single day. I’m still counting my days up.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s the key, you’re counting them up and not down because we don’t know when it’s going to end and so in practice what sorts of benefits or changes in your daily experience emerge when you do this?

Robert D. Smith
Well I think it creates a sense of urgency. Another one of those things knowing that my friend had passed away in ninth grade I thought I need to prepared this day to exit this planet just in case. So do you know what Pete? Never since I left home since that day in ninth grade have I left with my bed being unmade.
Now my mom always wanted me to make my bed but suddenly I was motivated because I thought what if I don’t come back? Now I’m happy to to say I’ve always come back. I’m sure I’m going to be wrong one day and I will be prepared. So I want to say living this day as if it were your last now that ramps up this count because one day you’re going to be right, correct?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Robert D. Smith
So and you can read the obituaries everyday on the news, somebody has passed away. You know I want it to be a long life but many times it is not and there’s many freak accidents that happen at the most unexpected time so you just never know when a person’s time is.
So I think that creates a sense of urgency in everything I’ve done including with Andy. Meaning I manage Andy Andrews, a New York Times bestselling author and speaker and I’ve been doing that for thirty eight years. Even in the early days not knowing what we were doing and to this day by the way we don’t have a contact between us because I never thought this was going to go that long. I thought I was just going to help out him out until he found somebody and I think he has stopped looking.
So the idea, I think that’s what it is, if you do all you can every single day and not anticipate that tomorrow is going to be available. So I think even in the early days I kept our finances in order, I kept the contracts in order, I really knew where we were everyday business wise and amazingly I still do.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow that’s powerful and so when you do a daily count that kind of makes me think of prison now, “you’ve got to show up for count.” Do have to do a count like we’re on day number twenty thousand four hundred and six or you know kind of what happens in that ritual? Like what are you actually doing? I imagine it’s more than just noting the number like “oh how about that, that’s the number.”

Robert D. Smith
Well I’m not sure I look at it virtually every day as far as the count, as far as the number like I think I’ve had fifty two thousand three hundred and forty two today. So that’s awareness but it’s the mindset of counting down this day and even I’ve got alarms and my computers and my office announce the time every thirty minutes. I’m just very aware; I’m not wasting time of redeeming the time. There’s two ways I do that, there’s only two questions I ask myself all day long on how I create what I do off of a to-do list which is very minor. But the questions are: what is important now and what’s next? If you ask those two questions throughout the day whenever you feel like you’re stuck, when you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know where to begin on a project, when you don’t know what project to begin.
What’s important now? And as soon as you do that what’s next? Do you see how that will never end?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah.

Robert D. Smith
So those two questions, as simple as it is, seems to work. Now I taught that to the guys I work and it ramps up everything they’re doing because I’m very, very results oriented and I would daresay any successful person has to be or you’re not going to be successful.
So it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, where you are, what job you’re doing if you’re working for someone clean off your desk before you leave. Get your inbox empty. Now that may be not be possible for everybody but you know what I mean, you can get it down to beyond manageable and reply to everybody that need a reply that day.
There’s many projects that you can work on after hours, you may say “now wait I’m not getting paid for afterhours,” oh yes you are. Everything you do if you are getting the results you will get paid, the money may come later but it will come.

Pete Mockaitis
I would love to hear a little bit more – you kind of went there already – inside the world of career and work and thinking about those days as they emerge. So you got your two questions, you’re asking those and so can you maybe make it real for us? You said you shared that with folks you work with what sorts of changes and transformations have they seen in their daily work lives? Like “no longer do I worry about this but instead do more of that.”

Robert D. Smith
When you say worry I think that comes out of fear and most people have a fear of not accomplishing or they look at it as a problem and I don’t look at it as any problem. I mean nobody ever walks into my office and says we have a problem, we have a possibility. We have an opportunity, we don’t even have challenges – this is another opportunity. So I don’t look at problems I look at projects and that’s why I’ve got whiteboards which are not white, we need the glass boards, you know now they come in frosted and white and black even, throughout the office here. But that we can quickly analyze what needs to be done, what’s important now and what’s next, so I think it’s really making it slick. When I say slick it’s almost like a slip and slide, you do not use a lot of effort to slide on a slip and slide you see what I’m saying? Now all of us have been to a playground or seen little kids or you might have been the little kid when you went to slide down the slide and you didn’t make it? Meaning you stuck or whatever it is. A lot of people are doing that on a daily basis with their life, they’re stuck in a slide, that’s crazy.
So I’m saying that if you overcome or know that you want to get to the bottom and you prepare for that ahead of time by knowing what’s important and what’s next you will get the results that you thought were going to take a long time. I also had another teacher in high school that assigned us a term paper and he gave us weeks to do it and midway through that time period walked by my desk and said “Robert how are you doing on your term paper?” and I said I haven’t started yet and he just said one thing. He said starting is half finished, I have used that every week of my life on so many things that I simply try not to, we do big things – I help get books published and online courses and these are things that you can’t do today. These are things that months or years to put together so I have to be admiring results from way down the road but I look at minor results, what I can do today and those are critical to get to the result I want at the end. So if I have to walk a mile today might as well take that first step, it’s only made up of steps. It’s made up of from one mailbox to the next so I’m not afraid of walking from one mailbox to the next and I’m not afraid of doing a little bit, meaning all that I can, on that project today.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, thank you and so when it comes to the to-do list and placing things on there, is there a particular way that you manage that? So you’ve got some of the frosted glass like a whiteboard style things so I’m thinking you know some folks would say only put one thing or only put three things or only put five things but what’s your take on how you’re actually sort of documenting the plan, the mission, the commitments for a given day?

Robert D. Smith
That is a great thing because I had some of those people in my office. One day I said we need to do this, we need to do this, oh I’ve got another idea and they said “no we can’t do that, we’re working on this, and we can’t work on more than three things at a time.” So that created a whole other whiteboard session and it is called pots, platters and plates because you just have a plate of things to do and it’s just a plate size – a normal food plate but some are like a turkey platter. Those are bigger; they’re going to take longer.

Pete Mockaitis
Those projects are a lot like platters?

Robert D. Smith
Absolutely and some projects are even like a pot. It’s big like writing a book that might be a pot, that’s going to be a lot of things involved in. You’re not going to spend that really easily, that’s going to take some time and so the whole concept once we did that I was able to expand how many pots, plates and platters that we were spinning.
Now it’s pretty insane and I’ve hired a full time guy just to oversee on the projects we’ve got going.

Pete Mockaitis
So you came up with a fun alliterative framework there in terms of what’s the size of a given and so I don’t know if I’m quite following though how did arriving at this set of distinctions changed things so you could take more at once.

Robert D. Smith
Okay the idea is remember I said you a little bit on a certain thing that “what’s important now?” Well on let’s say a book, that’s a big project, so today we might just write down a dozen titles and that’s all I’m going to do today. Tomorrow what’s important now is the content so we’re going to write a Table of Contents, which may be a simple outline of what the book’s going to be like but there’s going to be one day that what’s important next or what’s important now is the cover. So I’m meeting with the graphic designer to go over that and that maybe either a pot or a platter but I’m doing the plate’s work every single day on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Robert D. Smith
Okay, I’ve got lots of those things going on. As you know designing a web, if anyone has put together a webpage, that’s one of those projects that you’re not going to do that today not if it’s a good one and got lots of content and if you add a store to it then it’s even more. It’s just more time so there’s so many little things like that and I would daresay most jobs have a variety of these things in it and everybody knows what I’m talking about. There’s going to be the end of the year financials, your tax returns. Okay that could be a pot unless you treat it monthly like a plate because if you gather all your information on a monthly basis it’s easy including all your receipts and that type of thing and when you can easily give it to your accountant at least quarterly by doing little plate’s work during the year then you’re not swamped with this big pot of stuff to do at the end of the year.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good so you’re saying it’s all about identifying what’s a reasonable piece to bite off today and so is that kind of a ritual or process where you have it at in terms of the beginning of the day you establish these are the plates that I’m committed to or how do you?

Robert D. Smith
I would know what’s important now and what’s next for me and you can easily write those things down. A lot of that kind of stuff might be dictated by calendars meaning I’ve got deadlines to meet also and then I like to be unreasonable with the team and before what we’re doing with promotions and websites and everything else so I’m always giving deadlines that don’t work.
You want to be unreasonable because you want to push yourself  and I just know that if I told everybody listening that next Monday we’re all going to Switzerland, Zermatt, Switzerland on an all expense paid trip. Now how many are going to say I can’t go because they’ve got too much to do? No they’re going to get their work done, they’re going to negotiate with their boss, they’re going to find a babysitter, they’re going to arrange somebody to watch over the house, they’re going to do more in the next few days that they probably would have in the entire month.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, yes. So they’re meeting the challenge, yeah?

Robert D. Smith
Every day of my life Pete, figuratively I’m going to Zermatt, Switzerland.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool.

Robert D. Smith
Are you excited already?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, St. Anne here. Now so you tell me that in practice that means that you’re just like working a ton at the risk of exhaustion or burnout or how do you manage that element of things?

Robert D. Smith
No because Pete sometimes what’s important next or now is going out to eat. Sometimes in forty days I leave on a cruise with some friends so I schedule that as that’s going to be what’s important now and I’ve already got a couple trips next year so I book far out those fun things, those trips – I do love to travel. So I’ve got an eight days trip to Yellowstone and the tee times with the tour group and a bunch of friends and then I’ve got a trans-Atlantic cruise and coming back I’ve got a flight to Barcelona and coming back I take the ship to Fort Lauderdale next October. So those things I’m adding in constantly, I’m going to call that playtime and fun time with friends. Now there’s a definite time you stop and I’m looking for results constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely.

Robert D. Smith
And sometimes you’ve got to work out. In five out of seven days I’m in a gym and working out in a variety of ways to keep the cardio, to keep the muscles, to keep it all working.

Pete Mockaitis
So Important especially with stress management you know that alone not just like with muscle tone it’s just keeping your sanity.

Robert D. Smith
And since most of us possibly listening to this have sit down jobs inside and a lot of us are on a computer the physical activity cannot be negated. That has to happen and many people go and you can get by with it for days or even months and a lot of people try to get by with not doing it for years and it always shows up as a problem somewhere later.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, well now I would like to touch base on a few of, I just love the teaser bullets in your book and I can’t resist if you can tell us about each of them. What is it that you have to say about motivation being a myth?

Robert D. Smith
Most people waiting to be motivated, they’re waiting to get inspired, and they’re waiting to feel happy. I say that you do happiness, that you do inspiration. It’s not how I feel that dictates what I do it’s doing how I want to feel. I want to be happy so I act happy. ‘What do you mean you act happy?’ Well what do you look like when you’re happy? You smile, your voice is up, you’re taking deep breaths, your head is up, and your chest is out, you’re walking tall and you’re smiling – that’s happy. Look at yourself in the mirror, if you just became what I described if you just did all of that you can’t be sad. Now if you hold on to that long enough then that feeling will catch up. So I created, I do excitement daily. All day I’m doing excitement and therefore my friends wonder how do you stay excited? What do you mean how I stay excited? I do excited. I do happiness and I think that is a huge key now a lot of my sad friends and I don’t have many but those who are sad they don’t want to hear this because it works. It works!

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe they feel like of guilty?

Robert D. Smith
Some people want to be sad, they do sadness, they do lack of motivation, they do lack of accomplishment.

Pete Mockaitis
I think a lot of professionals particularly motivated and ambitious professionals it’s like we do stress and it’s like we do busy and there are, it’s like a fact, more demands than one can handle in terms of the hours available but there’s renegotiating your commitments and choosing what’s in and what’s out and all that. So it’s sort of like we do stress and I don’t know if it’s something that we’ve conscientiously chosen or such that maybe kind of rising up within us and we feel kind of important. What would be your reflections with all your high achieving friends about doing stress and what’s behind them?

Robert D. Smith
Well I must say this, I’m not sure if people, I think it’s natural to be slow, it’s natural to not run so it might come up on you in a natural way but I don’t want to stay there. Fear might overcome somebody but I don’t want to do fear so I want to do certainty.
And it’s a totally different thing. It’s almost the same actions maybe done differently. I mean you can frown or you can smile, it’s the same thing but done totally differently. Stress, I’ll go back, you’re going to be stressed because you think you’ve got a problem or you’ve got too many of them but going back to looking at it as a project and write this down: tell me why you’re stressed. What’s on your mind right now? What’s causing you uncertainty? And when people write this down usually you can come up with an answer to it right then and even if you don’t know the answer tell me what you think the answer should be. Everybody’s got an opinion, I may not know the answer but Pete you know I’ve got an opinion and everybody does.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you and if I can hit another teaser bullet, what’s the story associated with you only have two choices – yes and no?

Robert D. Smith
See so many people around me I’ve been noticing including myself ‘oh I don’t know what to do’. How many times have do hear somebody say that? ‘I’ve got a problem but I don’t know what to do’. Well there’s only two choices, this isn’t real hard. If you take a piece of paper in the top right write the problem down that’s holding you back, write yes on the left and no on the right and you’ve got to choose one. Now you can say what if I say yes here’s what’s going to happen, if I say no well here’s what’s going to happen. Those are the only two you’ve got; now you could say maybe I’m going to wait and all that stuff. The bottom line is that it’s only yes or no so if I’m asked to go out to dinner tonight I can feel stressed, I can say yes I’ll go or no I won’t. Am I going to work late tonight? Yes I will or no I won’t. Am I going to find a way to make more money this year for the company I work with and therefore myself? Yes or no. If you put that out there you will find a way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay so you’re saying don’t overcomplicate things in terms of all the ins and outs and get yourself sort of stuck in a rut of non-action but rather just make it very clear cut and sort of eyes wide open here are the trade offs and consequences and this is the way I’m going

Robert D. Smith
Absolutely and you’ve summed it up great by just saying non-action. Don’t stay at the stop sign. You just don’t sit there forever. At some point you’ve got to go, that’s a yes. The no would be sitting there. So at some point move and a lot of people they see a dead end ahead of them, it’s not a dead end if you keep going. Keep driving till you get there you’ll notice it’s a curve, it’s just a turn left or right so keep going that’s the way it is in life. There’s many times I don’t know how to do what I’m going to do, as a matter of fact that’s what I specialize in – doing stuff I don’t know how to do because then I’m more curious. Then I’m at peak state looking for answers, that’s when I’m asking more questions, I’m seeking more advice, I’m look for mentors – people that have done it already. Then my ears are wide open and nowadays everybody’s got access to Google, you can ask Google anything. You’re going to see videos, you’re going to see answers, you’ve got Wikipedia yet most people are simply lacking some kind of information to help them move forward and once they’ve got that information then they can go.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, I like that and now can you tell us a little bit about another bullet you talked about on conquering rejection forever and you’ve got some experience in the book game and so it seems to be rejection after rejection after rejection and I’ve had the same with my first book. I thought it was a very rewarding experience going to the mailbox repeatedly to see people tell you no, it didn’t hurt as much after that. It was like okay, no big deal. So what’s your take on the rejection piece?

Robert D. Smith
The rejection piece, first of all years ago when I was in college I sold the books door to door with the company Southwestern Publishing. Amazingly they’re still in business, they’re located in Nashville. They recruit students all year long and during the early part of the summer they train them and send them out across the nation to sell books and I did that for ninety long days. It was possibly the greatest experience of my life business wise that I’ve ever done and the goal was to show your books to thirty people a day. Now they didn’t talk about selling your books they just knew that if you showed them and went from beginning to end and kind of gave your pitch that the law of averages was in your favor that you were going to sell somebody. So I took that same principle away when I left and I was booking Andy as a comedian in colleges so the goal was sitting there at home on the phone simply I got a legal pad named one to thirty and crossed off every college I would call. The goal that day was to call thirty schools that did not want a comedian.
I know that sounds crazy but my energy was up, I was excited because we find more no’s that you can yeses. So I thought let me go after the no’s and do you know in months of doing this never once did I get thirty no’s in a row without someday saying’ you know we are thinking about a comedian, we would like to have Andy come in and present at our school and I’m thinking I’ve asked are you sure you want Andy? No I’m saying that facetiously but you know I really did have the yin to yeses but the fun part of it was really getting the no’s and to this day even as I started the business with Andy and he wrote a book called The Traveler’s Gift and I thought oh my god this book is life changing.
I just know there’s going to be a bidding war on this, by the way that’s never happened to me and so I started pitching the manuscript to it and finding out later that’s not quite the way you do it but I wasn’t afraid and I started doing this and I got no after no after no and I thought I’m doing it wrong so I’ll get a literary agent. And then they got no after no and no and I thought maybe I got the wrong literary agent so after a year we got another literary agent and they got no after no after no. And I’m thinking three strikes and you’re out so let me try one more literary agent and you know another year went by and they got all these nos. By the end of the time we had collected fifty one no’s that they didn’t want to publish this book.
Finally I meet with a publisher that had written an article how to write a winning book proposal and I’m thinking ‘oh my heavens what if I’ve been going about this all wrong and maybe it’s my proposal that’s bad and not the book’. So we worked at it and in the process he helped me get it right and in the process as a publisher, he was at Thomas Nelson, he came back and said Nelson wants to publish his book and I thought wait a minute I wasn’t pitching the book to you. I think there’s been a mistake; these guys might be too Christian I’m not sure and at that moment he thought I was negotiating so he offered me more money. No I didn’t want the more money, I really didn’t think you were the right ones. Well he ended up being the right one, they printed the book, released it and six months later Good Morning America started their book of the month called Read This and they picked Andy’s book as their second book of the month and they had Diane Sawyer, Robin Roberts and Johnny Gibson all talking about Andy’s book, four minutes.
That’s a lot of time on Good Morning America and they even had some interviews with people that had read the book and as a book of the month club. That afternoon Nelson had put in the bookstores had pumped up the bookstores with forty thousand copies and all forty thousand were sucked out of the bookstores that afternoon.
They started printing twenty thousand a week and for seventeen weeks it stayed on New York Times now it’s in thirty five different languages and twelve years later it is still in the top twenty of books being sold every single week from the publisher. So you see why I eat no’s for breakfast?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly you’re right absolutely and it’s like you had some good sense along the way in terms of switching things up. In terms of okay if I find a different agent, okay if I reworked the proposal that’s great and then it’s like the actual receipt of a no it seems like it doesn’t have much of an emotional charge.

Robert D. Smith
It’s not a negative thing to me, it’s just another opportunity, another way to find it and you know one that was my goal. Really I’m not losing and winning except the game got set back a little bit further that’s the first and only time that I got thirty in a row and then I thought ‘oh no what do I do now? The game broke’. Then I heard myself saying no just play the game again so that’s why I started playing it again. I said okay good I’ll get thirty more.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. It reminds me a little bit of episode sixteen with Andrea Waltz who was talking about Go for No and how no is also an indication that you have reached the end of what you should be asking for. It’s like you got it, I’ve got nothing more and so that’s just a nice little indicator, you’re finished there and so now we can sort of move on and you won’t know it until you hear it.

Robert D. Smith
Right, excellent.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you also share with us what are the three sentences that will change your life immediately?

Robert D. Smith
Three sentences now these are not original and I’m assuming you’re talking about the story of William Borden. Everybody knows about the Borden fortune – the milk and ice cream and all this stuff well this might’ve been like a hundred years ago and it was. It was in 1904, so this guy kind of turned away from the wealth and he went away and he felt very inclined to help people. He started a Bible study on campus and then he wanted to become a missionary and in the early 1900’s you didn’t have the communication nor the travel ease that you have today. So if you went overseas you were really gone for overseas and mail took forever and he carried his bible with him and throughout everyday he would read it.
He was over there and got malaria and he passed away well this is big news back in America that this wealthy family’s son had died but yet he had died doing something that he had wanted to do and that was making a major impact. And they found the six words or three sentences in his bible about no reserves, no retreats and no regrets and those three ideas made me want to release my brakes. I don’t want to hold back anything, no reserves by the end of the day, I do not want to retreat and go back. If I thought the book was going to work, if I thought this was a great book I am not allowing another no to make me cower and go back and then no regrets. I don’t have any regrets, I’m pushing forward and I think everybody that’s listening to this has that in them right now. They want to do all of these things but somehow they too have their brakes on and to me this is one way of releasing your brakes and moving forward. Don’t be afraid of the no’s, don’t be afraid of holding back, do not hold back, go full force, don’t retreat back, keep looking for the yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, yes. Well Robert this is so much good stuff. You tell me is there anything else you want to make sure we cover off before we shift gears and hear a bit about your favorite things?

Robert D. Smith
I just wanted to say what we talked about, Battle Tested Branding and the free book – No Brand is an Island. If people want more of this type of information for themselves –  how to manage yourself, how to look at yourself as a brand because we all are one and how I think and how I work with the brands I work with that they would never come up with on their own. That thinking is written down in these little books.

Pete Mockaitis
Very handy thank you. So then can you start us off by sharing a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Robert D. Smith
Let me see that one from William Borden was a great one right there because I’ve certainly used that for a long time. I want to say this: William Blake, he was a British poet and painter, in my book as you know there’s a bunch of quotes; each of them I knew when they were born and I knew when they died so William Blake he lived exactly twenty five thousand four hundred and fifty eight days and he said “The hours of folly are measured by the clock but wisdom no clock can measure.”
I remember Og Mandino wrote something in The Greatest Salesman in the World that “Experience is overrated by old men who nod wisely and speak stupidly.” So if you were young and you have these great ideas do not let your youth hold you back. Don’t you put the brakes on because you’re young, now is the time to move forward because what you have you may not have the experience but you can still have wisdom when you’re young in making the right decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you and how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Robert D. Smith
I want to say my whole life is a study so I’m going to tell you my life is the study. Can I tell you that?

Pete Mockaitis
You can.

Robert D. Smith
Because I’m always intrigued by what works, what doesn’t work, the amount of pots, platters and plates we’ve got spinning. So I’m constantly studying how many more can we put up there? How many more people can we reach through our membership classes? How much more can I motivate Andy and Jerry to write more? And how can we reach more by writing the kind of books people want to read indicating or creating more best sellers like the Left Behind series? Now many people tell us ‘oh you’re not going to make that happen again’ I just can’t accept that. Now they might be right but I’m not going to hold back in trying and when Andy’s book when The Traveler’s Gift hit New York Times people say ‘wow that’s a great gift for your first book, that’s unbelievable, that will not happen again’. Well it’s happened two more times and we’re not done, you know we’ve got another one coming out in March and am I holding back? No, I’m going to be pushing to see how many people it’s not about New York Times Pete, it’s about how many people can we reach with this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool and how about a favorite tool? Something that you use that boosts your effectiveness?

Robert D. Smith
Can I say my iPhone?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure.

Robert D. Smith
Let me get specific on the Iphone, this is a thing that I do that I can’t find anybody around me that’s doing this. I think everybody’s got Notes on there and so you can pull that up and you’ve got the little microphone and most people type. I talk. Rarely do I type even an email, I talk it and then correct it because Siri is not hearing me correctly all the time but I’ve gotten better communicating with her or him or whatever she is. That would be my favorite tool it’s Notes and being able to talk my thoughts out.
As a matter of fact I do a page I create one that says thoughts and it says September 2016 and for the whole month I will talk, talk, talk, talk, talk usually in the morning but I don’t hesitate during the day and recently I’ve gathered up last year’s and put all of them in Word documents and I have over a hundred thousand words written out.
Now that is like seven or eight of my books worth of content. I assure you that’s a lot of content and I haven’t gone through it or scrubbed it or rearranged it or looked at my topics, no. They’re just thoughts but I get tickled when people ask me ‘oh you’ve wrote a book’ no not really, I talked a book and Andy when he first read it he said ‘oh my gosh you’ve so captured your voice’. Now what do you mean? What are you talking about? He says well very few authors ever capture their voice or get a rhythm of going that sounds like them and I’m thinking well ah and then I let the cat out of the bag. I said you know I really did talk this book, I didn’t write it and he got tickled because he can’t do that. He can’t talk his book see and he’s a talker but he has to write what he does so all of you that want to write a book and you think you can’t. You can write it if you can talk, how do you like that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good and how about a favorite nugget of yours that you share that really seems to resonate with people in terms of them taking notes or retweeting and nodding their heads?

Robert D. Smith
I want to say that recently I’ve really let this one idea several times in the last week and reminding or telling, I’m not sure which, my entire team and that is a lot of people think they run into somebody in a bad mood you know they didn’t learn to do happiness and they say ‘oh my so and so got off on the wrong side of the bed’ and my hallucination is they went to bed on the wrong side. So I like to, it’s what I do at the end of the day that sets my morning so by listing gratitude like crazy and saying thank you, thank you, thank you and listing all the things I’m grateful for and then I wake up in that same mode. So like first of all I woke up, remember I went to bed thinking it might be my last day. I wake up and I’m grateful, excited, another day and I love to get up in the dark. I think that’s just before everybody else is getting up although there’s still a lot of people up but you get it started. You can’t get up too early, you can’t spend too much time alone, and you can’t write too much notes of this nature about yourself about life in a journal. It’s just empowering when you do.

Pete Mockaitis
And what would you say is the best place for folks to learn more about you or see what you’re up to?

Robert D. Smith
http://www.therobertd.com

Pete Mockaitis
Alright and do you have a final challenge or parting words or call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Robert D. Smith
First of all know that you can and know that you can help. First of all I would look to be, here’s a unique thing and I can’t tell this to the two acts that I manage because it’s too weird although they know how I feel about this but some people say it’s a lot of work but in my brain I serve Andy Andrews, I serve Jerry Jenkins. In one weird way Pete I actually serve the seventeen people on our team. The more I serve them, the more I’m interested in their lives and I remind them that this job is not their life. That are called to a higher purpose that they are here to make an impact, that god put them here for a special person, they’re to find out this is a vehicle despite being a safety net for them to create something amazing on their own.
Although a lot of them have joined our forces in creating, they are a massive integral part of what we’re doing and I want to encourage every employee to know that you are critical to the company you’re working with and ask, go and take a survey with your boss, with your manager, with the president of the company – hey what can I do to better serve you? What are looking for? What are the holes that need to be filled because they’re looking for people to fill those and there’s no limit to what they will pay as a rule for somebody that keeps serving people because it’s so rare and yet it’s so needed.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, well Robert this has been a real treat. Absolutely inspiring and you get some good positive vibes flowing and I appreciate this so much and I wish you tons of luck in all that you’re up to here.

Robert D. Smith
Absolutely Pete and thank you for doing what you’re doing. You’re making a big impact on a lot of people and I appreciate all your efforts to reach out to so many.