KF #24. Persuades Archives - Page 7 of 9 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Dave, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dave Decelle
Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve been excited to chat with you for a while, and I thought we would talk a lot about some of your adventures now and at Netflix. But you said your best job was working as a bike messenger in Philadelphia. What’s the story here?

Dave Decelle
Yeah, so I worked my way through college, undergraduate college, as a bike messenger in Philadelphia for three years, and I’ll tell you, it’s the best job I ever had. And if I could make an actual living at it, I would still do it. And the reason is it was just such a stimulating day every single day. So, three big things. I mean, first of all, just being able to eat a mound of spaghetti and drink a six-pack of beer at the end of every day without gaining an ounce was fantastic.

But what was really fascinating was just imagine biking through Philadelphia downtown traffic in the ice and snow and rain, and just having to constantly be making, like, instant always on the edge life-or-death decisions about, “Should I go left? Should I go right? Should I go around this guy? Should I pass him on the left or not?” that sort of thing.

And probably the most fascinating thing, too, which sort of projected into my future was this idea of visiting every level of society throughout my day. I’m street level all day long so I’m seeing the powerless homeless, I’m seeing your everyday blue-collar worker, but then I’m going up into the 56th floor of these high-rises and delivering packages for high-powered lawyers and that sort of thing. So, that was pretty fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, and the fascination continued over the course of your career as the Director of Consumer Insights at Netflix. And I’ve seen you present consumer insights and it was excellent. So, maybe before we get into the particulars of some of that, I want to hear from an insider, so Netflix has kind of a legendary culture. What was your experience there in terms of what was really cool and noteworthy and you wish all organizations did? And what are some of the drawbacks of that because every pro I find often has a shadow side in terms of cultures?

Dave Decelle
Yeah. I can’t say enough about the Netflix culture. It was something that really fit me extremely well. When I first read the culture deck when I was first interviewing for the position there, I was really taken with the culture deck and I was really pleased to hear in my interviews when I ask people, “Is it true?” Everyone said, “Yeah, we walk the walk here.”

And what was amazing about it was the core of the culture is freedom and responsibility, of course. So, what was amazing about it was the freedom, right, embracing that freedom and feeling just unleashed. In my first year there, when people ask me, “What’s it like to work at Netflix?” And I say, “I finally feel like I’ve been unleashed.” People aren’t telling me what I should be doing and how I should be doing it, right? I’m relying on my own wits, on my own intelligence to do what I think is best to do.

Now, the flipside of that is the responsibility part because never have I felt so much responsibility. I have no one to blame but myself if things go wrong. I can’t fall back on the platitude of, “Well, I was just doing what my manager told me to do,” because I had the freedom to do my job the best way I saw fit. Now that takes a lot of risk-taking, right? But Netflix balances that really well with a really high tolerance for failure.

Being an innovative company, they have very high tolerance for failure and, in fact, one of the favorite things I heard in all my years at Netflix was our VP of Innovation, Todd Yellin. He said something to the effect of, I’m paraphrasing here, but something to the effect of, “If every A/B test that a PM runs is a success, he’s not doing his job because he should be taking bigger risks and he should be failing because risk-taking involves failure,” and, of course, you want to learn from your failures and succeed the next time.
I mean, that’s a lot of pressure, right?

Pete Mockaitis
You just feel that each day.

Dave Decelle
Yeah, and the type of people that really thrive there are self-starters, people that really strive for hitting a really high bar, and so they end up putting a lot of pressure on themselves. But that’s weighed by the incredible amount of freedom that you’re given to do your job the best way you see fit.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I kind of wonder, so I guess there’s sort of like not an official vacation policy as well in terms of, “Hey, take the days you need,” but are like, “How’s that go?”

Dave Decelle
You know, that’s hit or miss and that’s completely dependent on the individual. I’m sure there’s plenty of people for whom that policy meant that they rarely took vacations. For me, personally, three years in a row, I took five weeks all at once, I went to Costa Rica. The very following winter, I took three and a half weeks, I went to Panama. So, I took advantage of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, glad to hear that was an enjoyable experience. And now you’re off doing your own thing. What is your expertise and offerings all about?

Dave Decelle
So, in my 20 plus years of doing consumer insights work, the two things that I’ve become really good at, if I can be immodest for a moment, is being able to tell stories based on consumer insights and being able to craft consumer insights into frameworks, frameworks that become thinking tools for business stakeholders and that they can apply to any problem space, and they work cross-functionally as well.

So, you come up with a really, really good framework and marketers can look at that framework and say, “Now I know how we need to market our product.” Product developers can look at it and say, “Now I know what kind of features I need to build.” Content developers can look at it and say, “Now I know what kind of shows and movies I need to produce.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Could you give me an example then in terms of, “All right, so here’s an insight we got,” and then how that turned into a framework, and how that’s useful?

Dave Decelle
Yeah. So, one of the big insights we uncovered in our work as the Consumer Insights Team for Netflix was the idea that it was pretty common knowledge and common sense that consumers really bought into the Netflix brand and what that brand stood for, right? It stood for innovation and consumer control.

We also saw, once we started creating our own original content, that people, of course, got very excited about certain big individual titles, like Stranger Things and Orange Is the New Black got big cult followings, and people just love those individual shows, right? But reading between the lines of many studies we did and many A/B tests that we did, what wasn’t quite so obvious what’s consumer appreciation for the diversity of our overall portfolio, because as we created more and more originals, we expanded them beyond just your typical sort of like binge-able dramas. We started doing reality and all kinds of things, sitcom, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
The game show Awake I discovered recently. Oh, that’s nuts.

Dave Decelle
There you go, yeah. Always expanding, right? And that started registering for consumers, is, “Hey, they don’t just like great individuals shows, but when I look at the overall portfolio of stuff they’re producing, it’s really diverse.” It’s not just diverse for the different types of consumers we have, but it’s really diverse for the different moments of truth that people have, the different viewing moments that people have. Sometimes I just want to sit down and zone out to a sitcom, sometimes I want to get really deeply involved in a dramatic series, etc.

So, that was something that I felt was being overlooked by the business. The business was paying attention to, “Our brand matters.” They’re paying attention to, “Our individual big titles matter.” But they weren’t quite catching onto the idea of the overall portfolio. We can tell stories about the overall portfolio and just how diverse it is and well it can serve many different types of consumers and many individual consumers’ many needs.

And so, I put together a great story about that and a framework that basically illuminated this notion of, “What if we could sync up all three of those things: our brand equity, the love people have for our individual titles, and the overall feeling people have about our overall portfolio? And what if we could sync those up in both our marketing and our in-app experience? That could be really, really powerful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what happened?

Dave Decelle
Well, I ended up crafting that particular framework as the idea of three turntables spinning in sync, which was actually inspired by one of Netflix’s own originals, The Get Down, which was a story of the early days of the evolution of hip-hop. And there’s this great scene in the show where Grandmaster Flash is teaching one of his students how you spin two turntables in sync to always keep that groove going and keeping the party participants dancing. So, that’s what really inspired us so it became known as the three turntables framework.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then subsequently folks were looking at, “Okay. Well, hey, how does this perform or what does this do for us with regard to our three turntables?”

Dave Decelle
That’s right. So, marketers can look at that and think about, “Okay, maybe we need to integrate our various campaigns, our brand-focused campaigns, our title campaigns. And maybe we need to start generating some campaigns that speak about the overall portfolio.” Product people, designers, and PMs were able to look at it and say, “How do we elevate the brand within the in-app experience? Because right now it’s a big list of individual titles. How do we elevate the brand within that homepage? How do we maybe recategorize some of our rows or even the entire homepage to give people a sense of the overall portfolio and everything we have to offer?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, that’s cool. So, thank you. I kind of understand what we’re talking about here with regard to these terms and how that can be really handy for folks especially at scale with a lot of cooks in the kitchen working on stuff and tweaking and finding, and having some cohesiveness there. I’d also love to know, you really had quite a privileged position in terms of, boy, all that data. I bet that would just be so fun, I’m showing my colors here, former strategy consultant. So, can you share with me, maybe for fun and for edification in terms of folks who are trying to delight consumers, what was maybe a counterintuitive insight, or two or three, that can serve us as we’re thinking about how to create hits for those that we’re serving?

Dave Decelle
That’s an interesting question. So, if I really think about that, I don’t think there really are any counterintuitive insights about consumers but there’s plenty of counter-logical insights. So, what I’ve experienced in doing insights work for 20 years with stakeholders is they often approach the assumptions they create about consumer preferences and behavior from a logical mind point of view. And we’ve known for a long time now that consumers are ruled as much, if not more, by their gut and their heart. So, it’s the job of a great insight professional to take the mind, the gut, and the heart all into account when analyzing consumer behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
And can we do maybe a nice contrast, distinctions, like, “When we say mind, we’re talking about these kinds of things, and gut are those sorts of things, and heart are these kinds of things”?

Dave Decelle
Sure. So, as someone who interviews plenty of consumers about how they feel about things, how they see the world, how they feel about products and services, etc. it’s so easy to see when they’re in a rational state of mind. They’re thinking through the answer to their question. But oftentimes you also need to read their body language, you need to read their tone of voice, you need to see when what they’re saying starts to really show up at an emotional level, they start to lean forward, they start to get excited, etc. And you also need to look at their behavior.

It’s well-known for a long time now that you can be in an interview in someone’s home and they’ll say one thing and, two minutes later, you see them do something that’s completely counter to what they just said, right? And that’s kind of their gut. They’re operating at their gut at that point, so you really need to pick up those cues of not just what’s coming out of their mouth because that’s often the most logical thing, but also what they’re doing, which is often driven by intuition, or how they’re either lighting up or not lighting up when they’re talking about something or when they’re doing something and engaged in something, and that’s the heart part.

And so, if you take all three of those together to uncover your insight and explain why consumers behave the way they do, it becomes very intuitive why they behave that way. It may be very counter-logical as to why they would behave that way, but when you take all three into account, you can be like, “Oh, right. That makes total sense why they behave that way.”

Pete Mockaitis
And could you maybe walk us through perhaps an instance of you did an interview and then you’ve got some great perspective on the mind and the gut and the heart to paint a full picture there?

Dave Decelle
So, we were testing out a new concept for a new type of story where the storyline would be randomized from viewing the viewing. And so, they way we did it was we had a group of people watch one version of the story in one room, we had another group of people watch another version of the story in another room, and then we brought those two people together, those two groups of people together, and we asked them to just talk about the show that they watched.

Now they had no idea that they were watching the same show, just different versions of the same show or the same episode, so they started talking about it. And as they were talking about it, on the surface they realized, “Oh, we must’ve been watching the same thing.” But, every now and then, one group of people would reveal a certain detail that wasn’t in the story of the other one, and the other group would light up around that, they’d be like, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That wasn’t in my story. What are you talking about? That sounds really interesting. Tell me more about that.”

Well, then afterwards, when we asked them, when we unveiled the concept of, “You guys actually did watch the same show, the same episode of the same show, but there were random variations in exactly how the story was told throughout. What do you think of that?” And their initial reaction was, “Oh, I don’t like that. We should all be watching the same things so when we get together and we talk about it afterwards we’re all talking about the same thing and there’s not confusion.” And yet 10 minutes earlier, we saw so much excitement and intrigue when they realized, “Hold on. We saw the same story but my story didn’t have that particular detail in it. Tell me more about that detail.”

So, there’s an example where if people thought about it logically, they would automatically say, “No, I don’t want to watch a story that’s a little bit different from the story that my friend is watching because when we get together, we want to know what each other saw.” But when we observed the actual behavior of them talking about it and realizing, “Hold on. Your story was a little bit different,” there was so much excitement and so much joy in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, boy, that’s intriguing certainly and I guess a whole new concept there. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I guess I’d also like to get your view then in terms of we’re talking about story a lot and you’re looking a lot in sort of what’s resonating and what’s hooking people and what’s not hooking people. Are there some universals or foundational principles in terms of, “This is what makes for some captivating stuff”?

Dave Decelle
So, great storytelling, and I’ll keep it to telling great stories based on insights, which is my forte. So, it’s got three things, three things I’ve already mentioned before, right? It’s got the logical appeal, it’s got the emotional appeal, it’s got the intuitive appeal. So, too many times, professionals, when they put together presentations to try to persuade an audience or inform an audience, they stick to just the logical stuff, and they completely ignore trying to hit people at a gut level that helps them to intuitively really get something and also make them really feel it.

So, the way I think about it is whenever I craft a story and I want to appeal to both the logical mind, the intuitive gut, and the emotional heart, is they each have their role to play. When you present the logical data or insights about your topic, what that evokes in your audience is the “Hmm, mm-hmm” reaction, right? When you give them something like a framework that puts that data or that information or those insights into an intuitive visual model that kind of shows how everything hangs together and the inner relationships among things, that’s when they “Hmm, mm-hmm” turns into “Oh, I get it.”

And then when you layer on the emotional appeal, which is oftentimes in my world, “Here’s how consumers light up when you get this right,” that progresses then from “Hmm, mm-hmm” to “Oh, I get it” to the emotional “Oh, my God. Now I see what I need to do.” So, that’s the kind of story I try to craft. I try to take people on that journey of “Hmm, mm-hmm” to “Oh” to “Oh, my God.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that certainly sounds like a smashing performance when you can pull that off. And I guess in some ways that might be an hour-long presentation or it might be much shorter. Could you perhaps walk us through an arc in which we can experience these?

Dave Decelle
Oh, boy. Well, I’ll tell you, one of the things, one of the most powerful techniques that I learned from my longtime friend and colleague Ted Frank.

Pete Mockaitis
A fellow guest.

Dave Decelle
Yeah, pretty much everything I’ve learned about storytelling I’ve learned from Ted Frank. The thing that can tie all of that together and can really progress you from “Mm-hmm” to “Oh, I get it” to “Oh, my God” is tension, so when you can build tension. And oftentimes how do you build tension? When you think about Hollywood movies, how do they build tension? They often do it through foreshadowing, through suspense, through increasing action and conflict, right?

So, with the logical stuff, oftentimes with the logical stuff, you’re sort of setting the, “Here’s the current state of our hero and their world.” And then you start to add more and more insight that sort of ratchets it up and starts to unveil the kind of life they could be living, right? And then you ratchet that up even further and you really make them feel, “Oh, if only they were living that life. This is what the ideal would be like. This is their new bliss.” And I’ll have to give credit of the new bliss to Nancy Duarte right there.

So, building tension throughout your story is one of the most effective ways to progress people from just logical understanding to intuitive “I get it” to heartfelt “Oh, my God. I need to do something about this.”

Pete Mockaitis
And was there a particular application of that with regard to a product or service and then going through those three stages with great effect?

Dave Decelle
Yeah. There was a study I did at Netflix looking at many, many years ago when we first started creating our originals. We thought about, “Okay, as we create more and more of these originals and we start to kind of promote them within the app, always at a very personalized way, how do we make sure that we don’t tip over into this perceived negative advertising, this feeling that we’re just pushing stuff on people that we want them to watch as opposed to what they want to watch?”

And so, we did a lot of research around that, and we ended up coming up with seven factors that play into how you need to conceive of an in-app product promotion. And the story I told laid the groundwork of, “Here’s how people perceive ads today. There are good ads, there are negative ads. Here’s how people describe good ads. Here’s how people describe negative ads. Here are some examples of good ads. Here are some examples of bad ads.” And that was all like very logical stuff.

And then, as a I presented that, I surfaced, “Okay, at a conceptual level then, there are these seven factors that play into whether an ad is received as positive or negative. And here’s those seven factors. And there’s a subset of these that you want to lean into because they tend to have people perceive the ad as being a positive thing for them. And there is the other subset of factors that you want to lean back from because they’re the ones that put your ad into negative territory in people’s minds.”

But then the power of the framework became, “Look, you don’t have to always lean back from the bad attributes.” If you want to dial up one of those, so, for instance, one of those was frequency, you show somebody the same thing too often and it starts to become very tiresome in a negative ad, right? “Well, if you want to dial up frequency, that’s fine. But you also need to dial up one of the positive attributes.”

So, I’ll give you an example. One of the positive attributes was relevance. Is it relevant to their taste? So, if you’re going to go high on frequency, you better make sure it’s extremely relevant to them. So, the framework was, “Look, you can be setting these dials in combination with each other to create a really powerful promotion that not only helps promote the great original content that we’re creating but also pleases and delights the customer at the same time.”

So, creating that framework was the “Oh, I get it.” And then the emotional part was then being able to show stories of consumers reacting negatively when Netflix or other services got it wrong, and when they really lit up and reacted really positively when either Netflix or a service got it right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Thank you. And then I guess, maybe      to sort of back up in the chronological sequence of things here, do you have any favorite questions that you’re asking consumers in surveys or interviews that often seem to yield great stuff that’s super useful?

Dave Decelle
Yeah. So, I’m a qualitative researcher by nature. I know enough about quanti to be dangerous but I grew up as a qualitative researcher. So, that’s a lot of face-to-face interviews in people’s homes, in facilities, focused group sets sort of thing. And I’ll tell you, the most effective question that I ask is actually not a question. It’s a statement. It’s simply, “Tell me more about that.” And people just, they start to expound on their initial logical answer and you just get them talking about that, “Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that.” And it starts to unveil so many underlying psychological drivers and motivations and feelings. It’s the most powerful statement in consumer insights as far as I’m concerned.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Certainly, as opposed to, “All right. And the next thing in my script I will execute.” It’s like, “No, no, you’re going to hang there for a while.”

Dave Decelle
Well, no, worse is they give you their initial answer, and you say, “Why?” because what are you doing? You’re only engaging their logic then because then they’re like, “Oh.” “Well, why is that?” And they go back into their heads and they to figure out why as opposed to just simply, “Tell me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
That totally makes sense because, “Why?” they’d go, “Because that is what I’m looking to accomplish,” versus, “Tell me more about that.” It’s like, “I get such a rush out of…” you know, whatever.

Dave Decelle
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
A totally different pathway. Cool. And then so I want to talk a little bit about sort of like the presence part in terms of what you’re bringing to your delivery of the story if you’re presenting in sort of a group or a meeting. Any pro tips there?

Dave Decelle
Yeah, definitely. So, when I think about presence, the best piece of advice I can give to someone is be bold yet humble. So, when you know what you know, be bold, have conviction, have a strong point of view. When you’re not sure or when you don’t know what you don’t know, be humble enough to admit that.

So, I’ll give you an example. I was in one of the product-strat meetings at Netflix a few months ago while I was still there, and the topic at the time was an extremely technical data science topic.

And I was listening to the whole thing, and we were debating whether this was a good direction to go or not in terms of data science analysis and ways of evaluating our A/B tests. And I raised my hand and I was very nervous when I did so, but I started with, “Look, I am way over my head when it comes to the technical aspects of this, I’m barely keeping up with this conversation. But if I understand the underlying concept of what you’re trying to do here, what I like about it is that this is a much more forward-looking analysis as opposed to simply relying on how we may have changed behaviors currently in the short term. And this is much more looking at how do we think we’re going to be changing behaviors in the long term. And we’ve always sort of wished we could do that, and so I’m glad that you guys are taking this step to really go out on a limb and try to predict the future, so to speak.”

So, I was humble in saying, “Look, I barely understand what you guys are saying, but I had the strong conviction that I think the concept of what you’re trying to do is a bold concept, and I’m a 100% behind it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that also will do wonders for your credibility in terms of when you know something you know it, and when you don’t, you don’t, so they just don’t suspect you of yes-ing ever.

Dave Decelle
That’s right, yeah. And, in fact, that was one of the big a-ha’s for me, is that people find you more credible when you do exhibit that humbleness because they see you as more human, right? And when they see you as more human, they see you as more like themselves. There’s plenty of times that people are sitting in meetings feeling like, “I’m in over my head here. I’m barely understanding what’s going on.” But if someone else has the courage to admit that, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that guy is like me,” and that just makes you that much more credible in their minds just simply because you’re perceived as more human.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. I also want to get your take in terms of, just super tactically, what your top do’s and don’ts when it comes to slides. You got a lot of rich information, you’re presenting it, what should we do and what should we not do?

Dave Decelle
Oh, my God. Do not put more than one thought on a slide. The most powerful thing you can do with slides is build. So, oftentimes I’ll create a slide that does have a lot of information on it or has a big concept on it with a lot of elements to it and a lot of moving pieces and a lot of interrelationships. And I create that slide, that one single slide, but then I copy it, however many times I need to, five times, ten times, whatever, and I build it up.

So, I create the ending slide where all the information is on there or the full-blown concept is presented, but then I create five or ten copies of it, and I delete what’s not needed until I get to that point. And so, I introduce the first point, and then I show how that point leads to the next point, and how that point leads to the next point, and how things hang together. So, by the time they do see the big slide that has it all, you’ve taken them on a journey and they understand it all.

The worst thing you can do is just put a slide up with a lot of words, or one big, like even if you come up with like this amazing visual model, putting that visual model up on the slide all at once. Because as you’re talking people through it, it’s human nature, they’re already trying to decipher the slide on their own and they’re not listening to what you’re saying. They’re looking at the slide and they’re trying to piece together everything that’s on the slide and trying to draw their own conclusions or interpret it themselves.

But if you can break it down into bite-sized chunks and introduce one piece at a time, and you show how that piece leads to this piece leads to this piece, they’re understanding and they’re grasping of it increases tenfold.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Well, I had a feeling that you had a lot to say about slides. So, anything else leaping to mind in the do’s and don’ts?

Dave Decelle
Let’s see. Do’s, yeah. Use a lot of light space, and in presenting, so this comes more to the verbal part, in presenting you need to use body language and you also need to be comfortable with and know how to use silences. Silence can be a very powerful tool, especially a powerful tool for building that tension I was talking about earlier.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Dave Decelle
So, for instance, in my presentations sometimes, oftentimes I use the tactic of throwing a hypothetical question out to the audience with a nice long pause and I let them think about it in their own heads how they want to answer that question. And then I show them how the insights we gathered answer that question, and then they get to see in their own heads, “Whoa, I was way off, or where they were off, or where they were relying with what consumers were thinking, for instance.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And much more engaging in terms of you are way less passive in terms of your brain is getting the wheels turning there.

Dave Decelle
Yeah. And with slides, the only thing you want to do is just keep it moving, and that’s why a build is so powerful. I’ll give you a truly counter-logical counterintuitive ratio. The fewer slides you have, the longer your talk is going to be. So, I presented a 20-minute presentation with 122 slides. When you do the math there, I only spent about 10 seconds on each slide, and so I kept it moving. There was always this feeling of forward progression, and there was always this sense of, “You can’t look down at your phone. You can’t look at your laptop because you’re going to miss the next thing. And if you miss that thing, you’re not going to understand the three things that follow that.”

And people cannot help but like lean forward, sit on the edge of their seats to see what happens next if the slide is changing like every 10 seconds, and you’re giving them something new every 10 seconds, as opposed to splashing one big busy slide up there and then talking about it for seven minutes straight, right? They’re going to zone out after the first one minute.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Thank you. Well, Dave, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we talk about some of your favorite things?

Dave Decelle
No, I think I’ve covered it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, could you tell us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dave Decelle
Yeah. So, my favorite quote is actually the poem “Our Deepest Fear” by Marianne Williamson.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite study?

Dave Decelle
One of the most intriguing ones to me is there’s a famous study, multiple studies that actually show this, where charity donations are increased if you tell individual stories. So, if you present sort of mass statistics about one in four people suffer from such and such, you’ll get a certain level of donation out of that. But if you can then tell the story of one or two people who are suffering from that thing, individuals, and you show their photos and you tell their actual life circumstances, donation rates increase. So, that’s the power of storytelling as opposed to just presenting mass statistics.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Dave Decelle
Any book by Peter F. Hamilton, my favorite science fiction writer of all time. He’s amazing. In each of his books, he takes some kind of central technological breakthrough in the future and illustrates how that technological breakthrough changes so many things about society and culture when people take that breakthrough and they apply it in multiple different ways.

So, his latest book, for instance, is Salvation, and the underlying technology there is this idea of twinned wormhole portals and that just changed the world in innumerable ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Dave Decelle
My favorite tool is other people’s perspectives and ways of seeing things. So, using other people as sounding boards, especially when you’re creating frameworks and stories. Bounce those off as many people as you can and learn from that, “What are they not getting? What are they misunderstanding? How are they interpreting it? Are they interpreting it differently than I wanted them to?”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Dave Decelle
My favorite habit is my daily visits with humility. So, what I think anybody can do is, on a daily basis, or at the very least a weekly basis, go and visit something that is so vast and so much greater than yourself or even than humanity, to give you that sense of humble perspective. So, for me, that’s the ocean. I happen to be lucky enough to live on the coast of the Monterey Bay in California so just about every morning I ride my bike down to the ocean, and I’d walk along the ocean for half an hour to an hour, and I just look at the ocean and I just ponder how vast the ocean is, how deep it is, how dynamic it is, and how old it is, right? So much more vast. And it’s a power that’s so much greater than myself. You have to be humble in the face of something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks and they quote it back to you often?

Dave Decelle
Well, I haven’t had the fortune of people quoting it back to me, but I like to think that one of my favorite nuggets that I try to pass on to other people is this notion of, “Celebrate your strengths and let go of your weaknesses,” because too many people try to fix what they perceive to be wrong with themselves at the great expense of not building upon what is right about themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dave Decelle
Well, as pedestrian as it sounds, LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach out to me, at least initially.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love LinkedIn. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dave Decelle
Yeah, I would say this is relevant to anybody who’s in a role that wants to persuade other or that needs to persuade other people. Make sure that in your message and in your point of view, you target people’s heads, guts, and hearts, all three.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Dave, this has been a treat. Thanks so much for sharing the good word and good luck in your adventures.

Dave Decelle
Thank you, Pete. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Brian, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Brian Ahearn
It is my pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one thing I learned about you is that you were born on April Fools’ Day. What has been the impact of this over the course of your life?

Brian Ahearn
I tell people I may be a fool but I’m not stupid. It was always nice to grow up and have your birthday be memorable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, certainly because they just won’t forget, “Hey, when is your birthday?” It’s sort of locked in. Now, were there extra jokes, like, “You’re going to have a party. Nah, I’m just kidding”?

Brian Ahearn
No, I was usually the one who made the jokes because my mother told me I was supposed to be born on St. Patrick’s Day, so I did fool everybody by staying in the oven for an extra two weeks. And I always said it was good that I wasn’t born on St. Patrick’s Day because I’d probably be a drunk if I was.

Pete Mockaitis
And I don’t know if there’s any real research on this, but I’ve just kind of imagined that having extra time in the womb is probably handy with all the development that’s going on there.

Brian Ahearn
I don’t know. I never really thought that much about it but I was always revolving around, “You were supposed to be born on this day but you were born on this other day.” So, I’ll ask my mom. I’m sure she’ll take a lot of credit for my development.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here with regard to influence and persuasion. And so, I think we’re going to get into a lot of great stuff. But maybe, as a starting point, how might you suggest we kind of gauge where we are today with someone’s influence skills in terms of like, “How do I know if I’m amazing in influencing or terrible at influencing or in the middle?” Because I think all of us just in real life, no matter how amazing you are, sometimes people are going to say no. So, how do you interpret like does a given person have a lot of room for improvement or not so much? And what are the telltale indicators?

Brian Ahearn
Tremendous amount of room for improvement. I’ve been teaching this for more than 15 years, I wrote a book on it, and I still am growing, or I still sometimes have somebody point out something, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a great point. I didn’t actually see that.” So, I think if I can be deeply immersed in it like this and still say I’m growing and getting better all the time, well, then people who haven’t immersed themselves, they’ve got even more room to grow.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. Well, maybe could you sort of establish our appetites a little bit by sharing maybe a dramatic transformation, or a before or after story, like what can be possible if you dig your teeth in and learn this stuff?

Brian Ahearn
Well, there’s a lot of things that we do, Pete, every single day that may not seem monumental but they are very important to move the ball ahead in our job, and I will give you an example. In my former corporate life, part of my responsibility was to help with the recruiting of insurance agents to come to the company that I work for. When we learned about…

Pete Mockaitis
That’s not always easy. Selling insurance doesn’t sound like a great gig for many people that you might be reaching out to.

Brian Ahearn
I’ve not yet met somebody who grew up and said, “I want to be an insurance agent.” Everybody’s got a story about how they fell into insurance. But it’s actually a wonderful industry, and if you do it well as an insurance agent, it can be very lucrative, so they are usually looking for good companies to represent. And part of our job was to help recruit them.

And when we learned about the principles of scarcity, which alerts us to the fact that people want more of what they can have less of, that we value things more when we think they’re rare or diminishing in some respect, well, we had been prospecting to these agents for many, many years and never thought to incorporate this principle.

And so, here’s what we did, Pete. We always had a limited number of agents that we would bring on any given year, let’s say it was 50. And we never thought to really promote that number. Fifty is not a lot when you’re only in 30 states. And so at the end of the third quarter, we sent a mailing, or an email message out to prospective agents, and the last paragraph would say, “Pete, part of the reason I’m contacting you today is to let you know we’re only looking to appoint 50 agents in our 30 operating states. As of today, we’ve appointed 40. We hope you’re one of the remaining few we appoint by year end.”

As soon as we sent that email, within the hour, my boss came over to me and he said, “I can’t believe it. I’ve already had eight agents call or email in response to that communication.” He said, “I have never had any respond within the hour.” And we knew the only thing that was different was that last paragraph, alerting them to the fact that there were going to be very few slots left by year end, and those agents who were considering it, all of a sudden had moved the needle. That was a big win for us. Not monumental in the scheme of the world but for what we were doing, that was darn important for our goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, that is exciting when you can pinpoint a result to a little change, and so that’s leverage. I mean, that’s exciting, that’s powerful, and I guess it makes sense if some folks were thinking, “You know what, maybe I’m looking to change industries or careers, get to another company,” as opposed to, “Oh, shoot. I actually better get on this right away or I guess this opportunity will disappear for me.”

Brian Ahearn
Exactly. And we all respond to it. I know sometimes people say, “Oh, that stuff doesn’t work on me.” But we’ve all had those times where we got off the couch on a Sunday, and we went to the store because we heard “Sale on Sunday,” or maybe we got there on Friday because we heard “While supplies last.” And the reality is we probably never would’ve gone to the store were it not for being alerted to the fact that something was going to be limited.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so that’s one principle. Let’s zoom out a little bit. So, you unpack a lot of this in your work, in one of your books Influence People: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical. So, how would you maybe organize or share kind of the main message as we dig into this?

Brian Ahearn
Well, the subtitle, as you said, “Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical,” that’s really foundational to what I talk about because I tell people it’s powerful because it’s research-based. This isn’t somebody’s good advice. This is backed by empirical data. It’s an everyday skill. I mean, most people realize, if they want to be successful at work, they need to get people to say yes to them. But when they go home, life is more peaceful and happy when they can get those people around them to say yes. So, it’s an everyday skill.

The real opportunities are the fact that, going back to what you asked at the beginning, “Do people have room for improvement?” most people don’t know the language of influence. And until you can label something, you usually don’t start seeing it with any consistency. But once you learn the language and you can label things, you would be amazed at how often you understand how the salesperson is trying to get you to buy, marketers trying to get you to store, politicians trying to get you to vote for him or her, so you begin to see these opportunities.

And then even when it comes to persuasion, most people don’t really have a handle on what that is. If I ask people, “What is your definition of persuasion?” What I hear most often is to convince somebody or change somebody’s thinking, and that sounds good, Pete, until you ask this follow-up question, “If you tell your son or daughter, ‘Clean your room,’ do you want them to say, A, ‘Mom or Dad, that’s a good idea,’ or, B, get in there and clean the room”? And everybody gets it. They want them to change their behavior.

And when I talk about persuasion, it’s about changing behavior, getting people to do something that they wouldn’t do if you had not asked. So, it really comes down to the ask. And if we do it well, it can have a lasting impact on people, and certainly we want to be ethical when we do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when it comes to ethics, why don’t we hit this right now in case there’s any resistance in the listener? So, ethics, I mean, I think we all like ethics. Can you share what are some kind of maybe golden rules that you keep in mind when it comes to using influence and persuasion ethically?

Brian Ahearn
Sure. First one is good for me, good for you. I can’t ask you to do something that’s not also in your best interest, otherwise I am only out for me. And I think any person listening to this, if they said, “That person is only out for themselves,” they wouldn’t want to do business with them. So, whatever I’m proposing has to be good for you, has to be good for me. If we use Stephen Covey’s term a win-win.

Second, we need to be honest. And not just honest in what we say, but also honest in what we know because it’s not enough to look you in the eye and say, “Well, Pete, I answered all your questions.” And you look at me and said, “Yeah, Brian, but you didn’t tell me when you sold me the house there was a crack in the foundation.” Me saying, “Pete, you didn’t ask that question,” wouldn’t cut the mustard. You’d say, “Hey, if I’d known that, I would’ve made a different decision.”

So, we’re honest about what it is that we’re talking about, what it is that we’re offering, but we’re also confident because even when there’s a shortcoming in something, if we are honest and we bring that forth relatively early in the conversation and deal with it, we gain credibility as a trustworthy person, and then we can segue into more of the strengths of our product or service.

So, we create win-wins, we are honest, and then the third thing that we talk about is we only use the psychological principles that are natural to the situation that we find ourselves in. And I think a good example of this is anybody who’s listening to this who’s a homeowner has probably had people who tried to sell them roofing, gutters, siding, painting, whatever, those things we all need for our homes. And they probably had people say something like, “Pete, if you sign today, you can save 15%. But if I have to come back at a later date, I can’t offer you that same deal.” They’re trying to invoke a sense of scarcity, like, “Oh, if I don’t act right now, I’m going to lose this great deal that he or she is proposing.”

And most of the time that’s garbage because whatever they’re offering is probably not in short supply. They’re only doing it to manipulate you into making a decision right then and there so they don’t have to come back or you don’t rethink it, so that’s not being genuine in terms of how you’re using the principle. There’s no scarcity there, but they’re trying to squeeze it in to change your behavior. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that. That’s a nice piece there in terms of like it’s natural and it makes sense. And so, not to trash talk but let’s trash talk, shall we, Brian? I think that there’s a lot of sort of online sales stuff with the funnel and a launch and a deadline, and it doesn’t feel so good. And I guess I’ve done it too, although there was a real reason associated with the deadline, it’s like, “Hey, everybody is starting the class at this time. We need to gather a sort of critical mass to have a community, and there’s going to be some live sessions, and you would miss them if you didn’t sign up by this deadline.” So, that was real.

But a lot of other times when it’s sort of like there’s a digital training course, and it is available for, I don’t know, 24 or 72 hours, I’m just like, “’Why?” And it just seems like the only reason that that deadline is there is to make me do this thing now, and I don’t like it. Now, at the same time, I guess it could very well be win-win. It’s like, “I know this is what you need to do in order to get off your butt and make something happen because I need to have a little bit of pressure here, but it doesn’t feel so good on the receiving end.” I just want to get your take on this.

Brian Ahearn
Well, I think that’s a good example that there’s probably not something in short supply because you can access it 24/7, 365. It’s not like they ran out of something. Or your example of holding a class. You might say, “Early registrants are going to pay this price. If you register by this certain date, it goes up. And by this last date, it’s higher.” And somebody might say, “Well, a seat is a seat. Is that fair?” Yes, I think it can be because you’re having to plan, you’re having to ship materials, you’re having to secure a room with certain seats, so, yes, there can be additional costs for you.”

Pete Mockaitis
I buy that, absolutely, yeah.

Brian Ahearn
And so, you’re passing that on. It makes your life easier so you’re going to make their life easier by putting a deadline like that. I think deadlines are legitimate when you know that those deadlines will also help people. So, there were some work I read from Dan Ariely where they looked at students who were either given no deadline, “You have six papers all due at the end of the semester. You’re adults. Do them at your leisure.” There was a group that could choose their own deadlines, and then there was a group that was given deadlines.

And, contrary to what people might want to think, those who were given the deadlines actually performed best because we all, I mean, probably every person listening to this, had times where they delayed all their studying and crammed. And they had all kinds of times and it is such a common human phenomenon to do that. So, I think imposing deadlines there, you can say, “Yeah, you might’ve had to the end of the semester but it will be beneficial for most students if we set these deadlines and adhere to them.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is helpful. Thank you. I dig that. And then when it comes to products, let’s talk about digital products in terms of like, “Hey, I got this thing. I can flip the on/off switch whenever I care to, and I care to flip it on for three days once a year, and then flip it off to keep everyone in a ladder.” It doesn’t feel great to me. What’s your take?

Brian Ahearn
I would want to know more about the details of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it before just making a blanket statement to say, “You could create something and put it out there.” People could argue that there are a lot of things that are not truly scarce. You know, time. Somebody might say, “Hey, if you’re not doing something on this day, isn’t it better to come and speak for this and throw out some low fee than to get nothing?” They might say that’s fair.

Somebody else who’s a speaker might say, “Well, no, I’ve already charged other people a particular amount. I’m not going to go ahead and lower that just for you. That’s not fair to those people.” So, there’s always a tension there that you have to understand what’s behind it. So, I would want to know why are they only making it available for three days. Is it tied to something else that’s part of their offering or their services?

Now, if they’re laughing in the backroom going, “Oh, yeah, we just make it available three days every year, and people go crazy, and then we pull it from…” I don’t know that that’s really a very ethical way to go about doing things. It’s like you remember the Disney Vault? That’s all that was. It’s out for limited time, then it goes back into the vault. And the imagery was great because the vault is closed and the only people who know the combination worked at Disney. But the reason they did it is it worked. People would flock to buy those videos or DVDs, and they would always change them every so slightly. Blu-Ray Digitally Remastered with two scenes never seen before, then you’re like, “Oh, gosh, I got to have it. And if I don’t get it now, it goes into the vault and who knows when they’ll open the vault again.”
Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I think about DeBeers, that’s sort of their whole game with diamonds is that they acquire much of the supply, and then they trickle it out as they so choose.

Brian Ahearn
Well, we see it with tickets to concerts, right, where people go online, and they’re like, “I can never buy anything because these major corporations go in and buy them all up and then they jack the price.” Yes, so they buy them, they have the purchasing power, and then they leverage scarcity after that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s good rules of thumb for the ethics, and so even if there’s an on/off switch being flipped for additional good or the sales of a service, there very may be a nice valid reason in terms of the life of the provider and sort of the conveniences they get to enjoy or not, or it could be some folks cackling all the way to the bank as they’re utilizing this.

Anyway, so we talked about scarcity. Can you share what are some of the other most powerful principles, when you said once you see have a label for something, you can use it and identify it? Can we hear some more useful labels?

Brian Ahearn
Okay. Well, one of the principles that we talk about is called the principle of liking which tells us that we prefer to say yes to people that we know and like. Now, listeners might be saying, “Well, duh, we all know that.” What a lot of people don’t think about though is how to make that a reality. And most people will go into situations and work really hard to get people to like them, and that’s better than doing nothing.

But the most powerful thing you can do is to go into a situation to say, “How can I come to like this other person? And I’m going to, therefore, connect in what we have in common. I’m going to listen. I’m going to try to take it in. And when I hear something we have in common, like we grew up in the same town or cheer for the same team, I’m going to start talking about that because I want to like the people that I’m networking with, working with, supporting, etc. Or I’m going to look for things that I can genuinely compliment them about because I know that if I find those things, I’ll start thinking more highly.”

And here’s why this is so key. When that other person believes you truly like them, and you really are coming to like them, it opens them up because we all believe deep down inside that friends do right by friends. And the good news is we do right by friends. If you’re truly a friend, you’ll never want to manipulate your friends. And this is a powerful way to remove that whole question about manipulation because when I look to the people that I know and like, I want to help them. They know I want to help them. And it creates this really good virtuous cycle, so I think it’s a very, very powerful principle. But that key is don’t try to get people to like you. Try to come to like other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And so, then so part of that is just doing the research and zeroing in on commonalities. And how else can we get to like them?

Brian Ahearn
Well, there’s things like, I mean, certainly if you mirror and match. When you are with somebody, and you consciously mirror their body language, you kind of get into sync, when you make a conscious choice to pace your speaking along the lines of theirs, not to manipulate them or anything, but to say, “I want to make this person comfortable with me and I want to be comfortable with them,” because the more we see ourselves as similar, how we stand, how we talk, the things that we have in common, etc., all of those start to create this sense of rapport, like, “Hey, that person is like me and, therefore, I kind of like them.” It’s much easier to like people who are similar to you in multiple ways.

And then, of course, I mentioned paying somebody genuine compliments. Another thing that we talk about at times is when you work together in cooperative ways, and you have success, you tend to high-five and really look more positively upon each other, especially for people who are leaders who are listening to this. If you have employees who might not get along so great, put them into situations where they have to work together. Don’t put them into situations that would be hard to be successful in. You want them to kind of take baby steps. But as they work together and they have success, people pretty naturally start looking at the other person and say, “That was great. You did a good job,” and they start passing compliments. So, those are natural ways to make liking come about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And how about some more?

Brian Ahearn
One of the really interesting principles, for salespeople especially, is the principle of consistency. People always ask, “What is the most powerful principle of influence?” And I always say it depends because it depends on the situation you’re in, and these principles aren’t always available, or at least every one of them are not always available. But if you’re a salesperson, the principle of consistency is paramount because the principle of consistency is predicated on asking good questions.

And we define the principle this way. We feel an internal psychological pressure but also an external social pressure to be consistent in what we say and what we do. So, to drive this home. Pete, have you ever given your word to somebody, friend, family member, someone, that you would be somewhere or do something with them but had to back out?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m certain that’s happened and I’m trying to recall a specific instance but I’m with you.

Brian Ahearn
Okay. You know, when I ask an audience on this, almost we can all recall a time where, “Oh, gosh,” we forgot it’s our kid’s recital, or, “Somebody got sick and I need to stay home.” Legitimate reasons that I’m sure when somebody says, “Hey, I can’t make it, and here’s why.” But friends say, “Don’t worry about it.” But the reality is how do we feel? Most people I ask that question, they say, “I felt terrible having to tell them I couldn’t be there. I felt bad or guilty.” And what do we do? We don’t like to feel those feelings. We work really, really hard to try to keep our word.

And when you understand that, then rather than telling people what to do, you start asking, because when you ask and they commit to you, it triggers that internal sense of, “I want to be consistent with what I say and do because, first and foremost, I will feel better about myself. And, oh, by the way, I’ll look better in your eyes.” So, it’s a powerful motivator of human behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, then when you are attempting to be influential and persuade, knowing that this is a powerful force within us, what are some key ways that this can be utilized?

Brian Ahearn
Okay. So, it’s very common for people in a business setting to tell somebody what they need. I may walk by you and say, “Pete, I need the sales numbers by Friday.” Now maybe you’ll get them to me, maybe you won’t, but I know this from the research, I will be more effective if I were to say, “Pete, would you be able to give me the sales numbers by Friday?” because if you say yes, the odds that you’ll do it are significantly higher than if you don’t say anything at all.

But a smarter way to go about doing this would be, “Pete, would you be able to get me the sales numbers by Tuesday?” Now, if you tell me you can’t, then I have fallback positions. I might say, “Pete, I realized it’s really busy around here. Any chance you could get them to me by the end of the day Wednesday?” Now this is tapping into another principle that we call reciprocity. And, people, when you come in with another request immediately after somebody says no, there’s lots of research that shows people will be more likely to say yes.

So, by starting to think about what it is that you need, how can I ask, how can I set fallback positions so that if that person says, “No, I’m too busy,” well, I can retreat to Wednesday, I can retreat to Thursday, I still can even retreat to Friday. And so, the manager who gets into that habit of asking instead of telling and setting themselves up with fallback positions will get what they need far more often than somebody who just tells people what they need on the due date.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also wonder, and I guess this could be risky, but if you were to say, “When can you commit to completing this by?” And then they generate their own due date, does that have even more power because it came from them?

Brian Ahearn
Yes, anytime somebody self-generates their own reasons, goals, they will be more committed to those. You may look at me and say, “Well, Brian is an expert in influence.” And if I tell you what you should probably do, you’d give that some weight because you’re like, “Hey, Brian knows what he’s doing, he wrote a book.” But if I asked you to write questions and you come up with the very same idea, you own it because you feel like, “That’s my idea.” And we all think our ideas are pretty good.

And so, that becomes another skill too, which taps into this principle, but asking those right questions to get people to come up with the answers themselves, it’s a huge part of the coaching process because coaching is about teaching people to think for themselves. And when they start coming up with their own ideas, then they feel more confident at generating their own ideas down the road, and they don’t need as much attention through coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Well, so we’re really kind of taking down the six greatest hits here, we got the scarcity, liking, consistency, reciprocity. I guess we also got to hit the authority and social proof to round that out.

Brian Ahearn
Okay. Authority tells us that we defer to people that we view as more wise or experts when we’re making decisions. I mean, if we’re standing around at a cocktail party and we’re all complaining about taxes, and then somebody says, “Well, I’m a CPA,” and they start talking, we give that more weight because we know that person knows far more about taxes than we probably do.

Funny story that happened quite a number of years ago, my wife is a really, really good golfer, and when I say really good, she’s a single-digit handicap, usually she’d shoot in the upper 70s. She’s very, very good. I came home from a sales training event and I told her about a golf example that I had used during the training. A few weeks later, she’s reading a book, and she says, “Listen to what Corey Pavin says.” For those of you who are listening, Corey Pavin won the US Open in the early ‘90s, and he finished in the top five in all of the major golf championships.

She reads this paragraph, Pete, and it’s almost verbatim what I said. So, of course, I had to let her know that, and I said, “Jane, I told you that.” She said, “No, you didn’t.” I say, “Yeah, a couple of weeks ago. Remember I came home from the training event?” “No.” I go, “Come on, we were sitting right here having dinner. You don’t…?” And she had no recollection that I had told her that. So, finally, I threw my hands up and I go, “Oh, I guess if Corey Pavin says it, it’s true but when I say it it’s not?”

But here’s the reality. Because he was a golf pro and won the US Open, who would you believe? Corey Pavin or Brian Ahearn, a trainer? It’s a funny story but it really drives home the point. Two people can say exactly the same thing, the person who’s viewed as an expert, believed far more than the person who has no credibility at all in that area, and yet it can be every bit as true the statements that’s made from both people. So, it’s really, really important that people do what they can to get their expertise in front of other people.

Pete Mockaitis
And now I’m intrigued, do we think that this is the explanation for the mysterious phenomenon in a meeting, one person says something and it gets no response, and another person says just about the same thing, and other are, “Yes, yes,” and it’s are sort of all behind there? Do we think this is primarily driven by authority or there are some other elements that explain this situation?

Brian Ahearn
There could certainly be some liking that people might say, “Oh, yeah, you know, we love Joe.” And when Joe says something, everybody likes that. But it probably leans more on the authority thing. And in my corporate job, when I was reporting at one point to the vice president of sales, there were times when he would come to me and he’d say, “I’d like you to draft this and then send it to these people,” and I’d say, “I will draft it, but I would like you to send it,” because coming from the vice president of sales it will mean a lot more than coming from me. And he knew this stuff well too, and he’s like, “You’re right.”

And so, I had the satisfaction of knowing that the messaging was coming from me, I was building my skill, it helped me write the book and do other things, but I was humble enough to say, “The goal here is to move the ball forward, move the agenda forward for the company, and my saying the very same thing won’t help it as much as you, so I will save you time, craft the message, and together we will make this thing happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s so dead-on. And, yeah, this reminds me of just recently I started up a new training program with a group, you know, run it through The Enhanced Thinking and Collaboration Program, and so there’s some pre-work to be done and the majority of folks had not yet done it. And so, I have all the participants’ email addresses but they haven’t met me yet. So, I proposed that exact same thing, it’s like, “Hey, here’s the rundown of who has and has not yet finished the pre-work. I’d love to have them prompted, which I could do, but I think it would be much better coming from you.” And, sure enough, she prompted and the pre-work came rolling in, and mission accomplished.

Brian Ahearn
Yep. Hey, I think it’s just a matter of some people being humble enough to say, “It’s okay if the message doesn’t come from me. I’ll have my time, right? If I do things right and I help the corporation move the agenda forward, I’ll get my praise, I’ll be that one who’s looked on for the promotion. I will eventually probably be in that position where I’m the one doing the messaging.” But develop your skill at creating the message but allow the right person to bring that message forward.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about social proof?

Brian Ahearn
So, social proof tells us that we look to other people to see how we should behave in particular situations. We are heavily impacted by what other people are thinking, how they’re feeling, what they’re doing. And I always tell people the word to remember here is crowds. Large and small, crowds of people impact how we think, how we feel, and how we behave.

Now, it’s interesting, Pete, that in America, because we are more of an individualistic society, sometimes when we talk about this, people push back. And I’ve heard people say things like, “Nothing great ever came from following the crowd.” And I don’t disagree with that. Medical breakthroughs, great leaders, great things happen when people break from the crowd. But I would challenge people who are listening, how often in the day are you trying to accomplish greatness? And how often are you just trying to get your day moving along?

And in most of the time, if you’re driving home from work, and you see that the traffic is backing up and people start getting off on an exit, without even looking at a map, a phone app, you might just decide, “I better get off the exit too.” Why? “Everybody else is, it’s probably the right thing to do. It has nothing to do with greatness. I just want to get home quickly.” And we are confronted with those choices every day all day long. And humans have evolved to know, “Hey, if other people are doing something, yeah, it’s probably the right thing to do the vast majority of the time.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so that’s a nice lineup there. And I’d also love to get your perspective in terms of when you’re crafting the message, when you’re delivering the message, sort of what gets in there to see if you could sort of appeal to these dimensions? I’d also love to get your view on how can we sort of just grab people’s attention in the first place and sort of get them listening to our persuasive appeal?

Brian Ahearn
Well, a couple of things come right to mind. First is uniqueness. People are drawn to things that are unique. If I’ve got seven red balls and one white ball, people are going to notice the white ball, that’s the one that’s going to stand out. It’s unique among that. So, putting forth what is unique is going to help you in that regard. But this is where understanding the psychology of persuasion becomes really handy because it’s not always about touting, “Look at this unique thing here.” Sometimes it’s saying, “Nobody else has this.”

It’s the same thing kind of in reverse. It’s utilizing that loss frame, it’s part of scarcity, but by talking about what somebody is going to miss out on if they don’t come to your training, read your article, buy your product or service, is far more powerful than saying, “Buy our product or service because of this one unique feature.” The uniqueness, when it’s framed as, “And nobody else has it,” far more powerful. So, that’s one way.

Another way to grab people’s attention goes back to that principle of consistency by asking questions. So, here’s an example, Pete. Many, many years ago I was in a training session, and the trainer came in after lunch, about 40 people in this room, and he says, “Hey, before we get started, anybody know a good place to go for dinner here in Columbus?” And people start shouting out answers, and some people had their hands or waving their hands in the air.

He lets it go on for just a few seconds, and then he says, “Okay, time out. I come to Columbus all the time, and I know exactly where I’m going to dinner. I asked a question to prove a point. When you ask a question, people feel compelled to answer.” And he said, “Notice how many people shouted out answers and look at how many of you raised your hands.” And then he said, “For those who didn’t say something or raised your hands, were you thinking of a place?” And they started smiling and nodding. And he knew every person had answered that question either in their head or out loud.

So, the point here is if you ask a good question, it’s going to stimulate people to start thinking about what that answer is, and if it’s creative enough, it might have them really wanting that answer, in other words, open up your email, take a look at your brochure, something, whatever it is that you’re trying to promote.

Pete Mockaitis
And in the book Pre-Suasion it’s got all kinds of fun questions with regard to, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person? Or do you consider yourself an adventurous person?” So, then there’s some identifying of self in that, and then they’re kind of primed to if you happen to have something new that can appeal to adventure, and if you are asking for some help, if they’ve said, “Yes, I’m helpful,” yeah, that can line up there. I’m curious, what makes a great question? Because I think I see this a lot, and maybe it’s effective or maybe it’s not.

But when I say, “Are you looking for a way that you can improve the tidiness of your home without spending a fortune?” I don’t know. And when I hear those questions, I mean, maybe they’re very effective but I’m just like, “No, I’m not.” And then maybe it’s mission accomplished, they’ve sort of excluded me and they’ve pre-qualified the others who are. But I don’t know, what’s your take? Is a yes-no question like that fine or what makes an optimal question?

Brian Ahearn
It depends on the context. So, I think asking a question in marketing and the way that you just described is very different than asking somebody at work so that you can get something accomplished. When I talk about like leaders, and stop telling and start asking, some of the elements of a good interaction with somebody is to change a statement into a question, to give yourself the fallback, to use the word because.

There are studies that show when you use the word because, significantly more people will say yes because we’re conditioned from childhood, right? Parents say, when you dared to say, “Mom, why do I have to do this?” “Because I said so.” It’s not a valid reason but we started to learn, “Once I hear ‘Because I said so’ I better get going.” So, instead of making a statement, ask a question, have a fallback position, use the word because, tag it with a reason, that is a great way, in a corporate context, to get people on board and do what they need to do as opposed to, “Give me the sales numbers by Friday.”

When it comes to marketing, I’m with you. I don’t like some of those things that are just so overt that I think most people just probably start to shy away from it. One terrible example is “Ninety-seven percent of my friends won’t have the guts to repost this. Will you?” Nope, I will not because I feel like that’s manipulative, it’s probably a completely false statistic, and it actually works against people because if 97% of the people aren’t doing something, then why should I? It’s a terrible, terrible way to try to get people to take action.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d also be curious then, so we talked about being ethical. Is there anything else that you think is just a mistake that folks are making all the time with regard to, “Hey, this is an easy lost opportunity, so stop doing this or start doing that because most people are doing it wrong, and this is a quick fix”?

Brian Ahearn
Yes. Another example would be when we go back to that principle of scarcity. I will talk about this, we’ll talk about loss framing, they’ll all understand, like, “Yeah, I’m more motivated by what I might lose versus what I might gain.” But then they go back out and they do things completely wrong. So, here would be an example.

Sometimes I work with financial investors and wealth advisors. If I were to say to you, “Pete, given your age, your current income and how much longer you say you’re going to work, if we can find a way for you to save just 1% more, by the time you retire, my calculation show you’ll have an extra hundred thousand in your retirement account.” That’s pretty motivating, right? One percent of your salary to get an extra hundred grand.

But the smart wealth advisor would say this, “Pete, given your age, your current income and how many years you say you’ll continue to work, if we don’t find a way for you to save just 1% more, by the time you’re retired, you will have given up $100,000 of your retirement savings.” It’s the same a hundred thousand, right? But talking about it as loss frame, like it’s right there, it’s waiting for you, but if you don’t take this action of saving 1%, you’re giving it up. That will be far more motivating to get people to invest the 1%, and yet people go back and they always say, “Rah, rah, rah, look at all the positive things. Do this and you’ll have this wonderful life.” Sometimes they need to honestly say, “If you don’t do this, here’s what you’re going to be giving up in five years or 10 years,” and that will stimulate more people to get on board.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, Brian, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Brian Ahearn
I will just say I appreciate the emphasis that you have on the ethics. If it weren’t for ethics, I wouldn’t be doing this. And my story on that is simply this, when I came in contact with Cialdini’s material, when I was enthralled by it, it was a Stanford video. And when Stanford sent a marketing piece several months after I’d seen that first video, they used the word manipulation in the advertising for his video despite the fact that he was very clear about non-manipulative ways to move people to act. And I felt so strongly about that that I emailed Stanford to basically say this, “I don’t know anybody who wants to be manipulated, and I don’t know anybody who wants to be known as a good manipulator. That word cannot be helping your sales but it really could be hurting.”

I never heard from Stanford but several months later, my phone rang, and it was Robert Cialdini’s office. And one of his assistants called to personally thank me on his behalf for having sent that email to Stanford. She said, “They’re changing the marketing of our material because of you.” And I was like, “Wow! That is really cool.” And as fate would have it, he ended up coming to my company a few years later, and speaking to insurance agents that represented us.

So, the point here, Pete, is if it hadn’t been for that ethical part, I would’ve never sent that email, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today, and you’d be talking to a different guest right now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you.

Brian Ahearn
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Brian Ahearn
When I read Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the quotes that stood out to me was, he said, “In the end, they can take away every freedom except for the last human freedom, which is the ability to choose to where to place your thoughts.” And that just really resonated with me, that nothing happens in life where we can’t shake our head and say, “Wait a minute. I can choose what I’m going to think here. They can break my body, they can do anything they want to me, but I can always choose where I will place my thoughts.” And that’s a pretty lifechanging concept when you really meditate on it.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Brian Ahearn
Viktor Frankl’s book is one of the top five books that I think that influenced my life and, primarily, it was that quote and several other things that I read there. But his overcoming and his ability to believe that there was a future beyond living in the concentration camps, and the fact that he made it, and there were certainly some luck involved, pointing one line or the other kind of thing, but he really was a huge influence on the world because of what he went through and how he kind of dissected it and what he had to share.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Brian Ahearn
Every day I get up and I work out. I run and lift every single day, seven days a week, and I’ve done this since I was very, very young. I feel like it gives me a huge edge when I’m up very, very early in the morning, and I get done running, and I get done working out. And that’s usually an hour and a half or so of my morning to get things going. It’s a habit. I mean, I’ve done it every single day for 25, 30 plus years, but it is also a tool that I use because when I’m done, I feel like I am way ahead of the game, and I’m ready to roll for the rest of the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate and gets quoted back to you often?

Brian Ahearn
I think the biggest a-ha that I share that people come back and mention is the subtlety of not trying to get people to like you, but really trying hard to come to like people. And I see that play out for my life because people talk about what a good networker I am. And I don’t consider myself a happy go-lucky backslapping meet people all over the place, but I’ve learned to be social and I’ve learned to really focus on the other people, try to get to know them, allow them to tell their stories because it also helps me come to like them. And so, people just seem to naturally respond to me because of that, and that would be the nugget.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Brian Ahearn
Well, anybody who’s listening, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you don’t put a message in there, like, “Hey, I heard you on the podcast,” expect that you’ll see a message coming back saying, “Thanks for connecting. How did you find me?” I just like to understand why people are connecting with me. Certainly, my website which is InfluencePeople.biz, and out there you’ll find all kinds of resources, you’ll find my book, blog, videos, all kinds of information, podcasts that I’ve been on. There’s a wealth of information to continue learning about this.

Pete Mockaitis
Brian, thanks so much for taking this time. This has been a treat. I wish you excellent results in all the ethical ways you are trying to get people to say yes.

Brian Ahearn
Thank you, Pete. I appreciate it, and you were a very fun host to speak with.

Pete Mockaitis
Brian, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Brian Kurtz
Great to be here. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to be awesome at my job after this but it’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have a heck of a track record for being awesome at your job. And I’d love it if maybe we could start by you orienting us a little bit to your story. What’s Boardroom? What’s direct response copywriting? And where does Brian fit into all this?

Brian Kurtz
Well, I had a pretty standard trajectory or career because I worked for 34 years for a company called Boardroom which was a newsletter publisher, book publisher, direct response marketing, meaning when I say direct response, I mean measurable marketing, making sure the media you buy pays out and everything is measurable.

And it was a very kind of a gradual trajectory and I ended up, by the time I left, I was running the marketing department and I was an equity partner. You know, I’m not a bootstrap entrepreneur by any means but it’s been a great ride because I was able to learn direct response marketing from the most amazing copywriters and consultants and everybody that Boardroom worked with, because Boardroom was kind of an iconic brand in the marketing world.

And so, when I left five years ago, I went out and launched my own thing and, I guess, it’s a classic case of those who did it have a responsibility to teach it. And that’s been my second career, which is as a direct marketing educator and teacher. So, I went from, in business to consumer marketing, mailing 2 billion pieces of mail and different kinds of messages to consumers to then going out in a business-to-business environment, and training, and creating mastermind groups, and working with some of the top direct marketers, and teaching what I had learned and also realizing that there was also still so much to learn.

And so, bringing in great speakers to my mastermind groups so that I can learn as well about all the new media. Because when I was growing up in this world, there were only so many media choices. You had direct mail, you had space advertising, you had TV, radio, but, now, advertising opportunities are infinite. and so, the ability to know what’s going on and choose properly is mindboggling but it’s also exciting. And that’s been the premise of my new work as an entrepreneur and an educator.

So, that’s kind of the career in a nutshell, and you can pick apart that or ask me any questions on that if you think it’s applicable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that my favorite thing you said there, for those who are not as familiar with Boardroom and its sort of legendary status, is 2 billion pieces of mail, so, one, because I love numbers and, two, that just kind of really paints a picture of what we’re talking about here, is that this is a big scope of operations. And what I find so exciting and intriguing about it is that this is really kind of live or die by how persuasive and effective your words are in the pieces of mail that you’re sending out and you’re measuring the results on that.

Like, if your words are converting at a high percentage such that many people are buying then, hey, you’re profitable and you’re growing. And if they’re not, well, then, you’ve just burned a whole lot of cash on stamps and envelopes and pieces of paper.

Brian Kurtz
I will say this, though, and you did ask me about copywriting, and I’m not a copywriter but I have a good sense of copy and I’ve worked with the best copywriters in the world. And what’s interesting is that you could have the best copy but you have to make sure that you have the right list and the right offers to make that copy sing.

And so, I always talk in my book Overdeliver, I talk about the 40-40-20 Rule, which was a rule of direct response marketing, and it’s not exact, but it’s basically that the success of a campaign is 40% the list, 40% offer, and 20% the creative or the copy. Now, that makes it sound like the copy is half as important as the offer or the list, but it’s not. What it’s saying is that you could have the best copy but without your list and offer dialed in, you’re probably not going to get any response.

Whereas, if you have your list and offer dialed in, and you have mediocre copy, you actually are going to make some money because the list is, I think the list to me I call the 41-39-20 Rule because the list is the most important. And the proof is in people who do affiliate programs today. They get somebody who has a list of people who might like their product or service, they endorse it, they tell you how great it is. And you could have any kind of copy in that but that list is so perfect that it’s going to get some response.

Now, the trick in direct response marketing and why creative and copywriting and persuasiveness and all of that is critically important is that if you get copy that’s world class, and you have your list and offer dialed in, then you’ve got direct marketing nirvana. There you’ve got the ability to persuade, the ability to move people to action. And the best copywriters, it’s funny, my first book The Advertising Solution where I profiled six of the great advertising men of all time.

And the interesting thing is that they’re all copywriters and they all always talk about the audience and the list more than they talk about their amazing copy because they knew that if the list was right, it made their job easier and then they knew who they were writing for.

So, I just wanted to make that distinction of, not that copy is the least important, it’s actually, in some cases, the most important for big breakthroughs but you have to have your list and your offer dialed in to make it as impactful as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, and I find that encouraging. So, you have had a front-row seat there at a big player in this game, and you’ve seen their revenues go up 30 times during your career there, which is pretty cool, 5 million to 150 million. Kudos. And so then, I think there’s, what’s that expression, like, “Oh, boy, he could sell snow to an Eskimo.” It’s like, “No, actually no way he can really do that. The Eskimo, that audience member, that person on the list, is in no need of snow and so it doesn’t matter how persuasively brilliant the words are, it’s not going to happen.”

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, like I’ve had many, many failures and many terrible direct mail programs and marketing programs. But the beauty is that everything is testable, everything is measurable, and that’s what makes being good at my job and being, “I like my job” so wonderful: that direct marketing is, the numbers don’t lie. You’re judged on how the customer responds and you also can get out. You can have a program that’s a disaster and you can walk away from it. You don’t have to throw good money after bad. You don’t have to be in a terrible position because you’re testing in small increments and then pyramiding and moving slowly through that process.

And if anybody who thinks it’s easy, it’s not. But it’s a methodical way of thinking about marketing that I’ve always thought as just a wonderful place to be. And so, no, I’m not selling snow to Eskimos, but I can sell a lot of things to Eskimos if I know what the Eskimo needs or wants, and it may be snow but probably not. You’ve got to figure that out and that’s through testing.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so funny, my creative brand, we’re sort of working on it in terms of thinking, boy, there’s probably a certain way you can make that offer with the snow actually appealing in terms of, “This is the perfect kind of snow for making igloos. And we’re going to bring a specific quantity right to where you need it, right when you need it. It’ll be so much more convenient in having to find the best snow for your igloo-making.” I guess that’s mixing the offer side alongside the copy.

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, one of the copywriters in The Advertising Solution that I wrote about, I think it was John Caples. He said something like there’s very little difference between a $50 cigar and a 50-cent cigar, and it’s how you position it and how you make it worthwhile, and make it fit the needs of the customer. And I believe that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’d love to hear, so you’ve had the privilege of working with, as you mentioned, some of the greatest copywriters who’ve ever lived. And so, I’d love to hear then, what’s going on inside their brains in terms of what makes them more persuasive than the rest of us and how can professionals get some of that magic?

Brian Kurtz
You know, It’s really hard work. When I say I’m not a copywriter, I say that because I don’t have the discipline that most copywriters have. Their brains work differently at the highest level. I mean, there are copywriters and there are copywriters, but their brains just work differently. And what I find, and the one characteristic, and there are a lot of them. I have a blogpost, and I think it’s in my book, in Overdeliver, it’s the seven characteristics of every copywriter, every great copywriter, that I ever worked with.

And the one that sticks out is insatiable curiosity, that you have to have this need to go deeper, you know, you get the answer but it’s not the answer, and you’re always looking for that next tidbit, that next level of knowledge that’s going to enable you to write copy that’s going to sing. In fact, Gene Schwartz, who’s one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived, used to say, “I don’t write copy. I assemble copy.”

Pete Mockaitis
And let’s talk a bit more about this point of, “I don’t write copy. I assemble copy,” and “what’s not in this book.” I think that’s an interesting perspective. So, the distinction between writing and assembling, what is it?

Brian Kurtz
So, I’ll give you a story. I had a copywriter, I wanted him to write for a newsletter of mine. It was a newsletter that was written by a naturopathic physician, and I gave him back issues, I showed him packages that have been written before, the usual start package that I give a copywriter. And he looked at it, and he said, “There’s nothing new here. There’s nothing exciting. And I don’t think I’d be able to write an exciting package for this because most of the stuff is kind of duds, like it’s basic. It’s important but it’s not cutting edge.”

And so, I said, “I have a feeling that there’s more here. Why don’t you talk to the guru, the doctor who’s behind the newsletter, and just talk to him and see what you can find out. Maybe there’s more here, again, what’s not in the newsletter.” And, lo and behold, he had a long call with him, and he came back to me, and he goes, “Do you know that your editors are rejecting a lot of the things that he wants to put in the newsletter that’s exciting, not because they’re irresponsible but because they want to be careful that it’s not information that they feel they can back up, and they don’t want to put it in because they feel like, you know, for legal reasons.”

And so, he just took it on himself. And this is, again, the beauty of having a copywriter who’s going to go after the information. And he basically took all the things that were on the cutting room floor and was able to resurrect some of them with additional research. He couldn’t resurrect everything because some of it was controversial, but he was able to resurrect a lot of it.

So, that’s an example of assembling copy and being able to find content that you wouldn’t normally get without an extra inquiry. I also think this idea of assembling copy is what Gene Schwartz would do. He would go through the book, like if I gave him a book to do a direct mail piece for, he would go through the book and he would start writing what he calls “fascinations” from the copy. And that would give him the best nuggets for the direct mail piece, and that enabled him to figure out what’s not in the book.

So, while we might know some things that might not be in the book, he would figure it out because he’d get so far with a certain fascination or a certain bullet point, and he said, “Oh, there’s this next level, and I can get to that but I need more information.” So, he would go back to the editors to get more information as well.

So, that’s kind of the concept of assembling copy. It is what’s there because you’re going to assemble copy from the content, but it’s then what’s not there. I have other examples in my book about copywriters who just never were satisfied with what was there, and they knew that there was more. And that’s what made the package sing and what made the promotion sing.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say sing, I’d love to get a little bit of a perspective here in terms of what would you say are the kinds of improvements that you’d see like with the same product just different words trying to sell it? Do you get double, triple the response rate when it’s kind of revamped effectively?

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve also seen 5% lifts or 5% here or there, it doesn’t matter. But you do get the 30%, 40%, 50% lifts in response when you do something outrageously different. And I think this is in my book, but I know I wrote a blogpost about it. We had a book in our stable. Marty Edelston, who’s the founder of Boardroom, was a genius and had a real good sense about what our audience was like because he was the audience.

And so, he created a book called The Book of Checklists with the intuition that people loved checklists, they love crossing things off checklists, and he thought it was going to be a winner, he had a package written by not one of the best copywriters but an okay copywriter, and it was a disaster. It was just terrible.

And we thought about it. Now, sometimes you can give up and sometimes you want to stay with it. And we thought about it and we said, “You know, this book is too good but maybe checklist isn’t it.” So, then he made it, we changed the title, same book, and we changed the title to something like The Great Book of Inside Knowledge, or something like that, and we made it like this encyclopedia of knowledge but we didn’t drastically change the promotion but we just revamped it a little bit, like tweaks and whatever, but we changed the premise of checklists to inside knowledge.

And not only did it not do as well, it did worse. So, then again, we said, “You know, the content of this is really good and we think there’s something here.” And we took it to, at that point, our secret weapon copywriter, Mel Martin, who was kind of the master of fascinations, the idea of taking a book, going in it, what Gene Schwartz did too, which was pull the bullet points out of this book. And he revamped the whole thing, and the new title was The Book of Secrets as opposed to “Inside Knowledge.” Secrets is a better word clearly. But then he redid the mailing piece.

And I remember that there were four fascinations on the outer envelope, and he chose them because this was his intuition of what the things that would make people vibrate the most. It was things like, I’m trying to think if I can remember all of them, I don’t think I can, but there was one that was, “How to outwit a mugger in a self-service elevator.” And there was another one that was, “How to know when a slot machine is going to pay off.” Another one was, “What food never to buy in a health food store.”

And he didn’t test them because he just had to go out with something, but he had hundreds of these fascinations, and he picked the four that he wanted to put on the outer envelope. And that mailing piece for that same book, the content of the book was The Book of Checklists. In fact, the book was like a vertical book because it was shaped like a checklist, but it was The Book of Secrets. I just bought one on eBay. I didn’t have a copy of it, and I found one on eBay which was neat.

And that book ended up mailing 25 million pieces. We did the single biggest mailing in our history for that book which was nine million pieces. I’m giving you the most severe success that we had but just to show you that revamping a concept and a package and then we also, once we had a winner, he would then test different fascinations on the outer envelope, he would test different headlines. And then you get the incremental lift. You get the 5% better or 10% better.

Now, I think that Book of Secrets from Great Book of Inside Knowledge from Book of Secrets was probably 200% lift from the original, so that was…

Pete Mockaitis
Three times as effective.

Brian Kurtz
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. With the same stuff. Well, that is illustrative. Thank you. Well, let’s see, we also talk about this in the context of writing and mailing. So, let’s take this into the context of a professional at work, maybe they’re writing an email so they’re being persuasive via writing, or maybe they’re just kind of conversing verbally. What are some of the influence or persuasion universals that they can draw from this and use effectively to get yes more often from colleagues or customers?

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I’ll put it in the context of something from my book which was that Marty himself was, I remember the day of his funeral I was going to give the eulogy and I was up at 2:00 in the morning at my kitchen table. And, again, just like I looked at the seven characteristics that made every copywriter great, I wanted to figure out what the things that made Marty great. And I figured out it was there were four things. I guess these are four, I’ll call them four things, I think I called four things to being an extraordinary human being. And there is overlap with what I talk about with the copywriters.

And so, number one, is that Marty outworked everybody. And not outwork like, “I’m going to step on your toes, and I’m going to run rough shot over you, and I’m going to beat you at your game,” and all that. There is some of that but it’s really outworking everyone, to me, is a form of generosity that if you can show by example what you do at a high level, I think you set yourself up by example. And Marty was not a great teacher of what made him great, but he was a great shower of what was making him great. And that was something that I thought was a way that he outworked, and outworking everybody was generosity.

The second pillar of being extraordinary and related to copy, it’s actually one of the same premises, which was possess insatiable curiosity. Marty created publications and books that helped consumers in a variety of areas in their life, whether it was health or finance, and he just never stopped. He was not an expert himself but he was the bloodhound. He was the watchdog. He was the person that was going to possess that insatiable curiosity just like the copywriters did when they went and found the best information for their promotions on the cutting room floor.

The third thing, similar to copywriters when they would go to their peers to get feedback, Marty would surround himself with smart people. I always say, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. And, therefore, like I’m in a stage of my career where I see myself as a teacher but I’m also a student. And so, I run to mastermind groups but I’m in three others that I spend a lot of money on and that I go to find new knowledge and new things because you’re never done with learning.

And so, I just thought this two months ago I had a stroke, survived, and I feel fortunate about that. But I feel even more of a need to be a student. Like, I’m not done. And so, you’re never done. And so, that is another transferable characteristic that takes the copywriting, that you’re always learning, and you take it to a bigger thing in your job.

And the fourth pillar was that, and with Marty, it was help other people first. For me, it’s always, contribute first. So, people look at me as a networker and I know a lot of people in the industry and I’m well-connected, but I hate the word networking. I like the word “contribution” to connect. And so, that is a characteristic that if you are always contributing to people around you, and I’ve done it for 40 years, so it’s paid off, not always, but sometimes you contribute too much with nothing in return. But you don’t look for anything in return. And I’ll tell you, what comes back is unbelievable.

So, Marty, the publications that we had and the books we had were to help people live a better life, and help more consumers than he would ever have thought he’d be able to do in his lifetime. But it was always about helping first, contributing first, and then what came back was a flood of satisfaction and things that he never could’ve predicted and I never could’ve predicted by living my life this way because I followed his premise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are some great principles. And I’m intrigued by a few of those things. You mentioned a stroke and, one, hey, we’re so glad you’re doing better.

Brian Kurtz
Oh, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And, two, that gets me thinking about sort of health and sustainability because doing those things, that’s some extra effort that’s required. So, any pro tips for handling that stuff without burning out or getting into some health trouble?

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, that’s a good question because I got into health trouble and I don’t think it was stress. It was more like just burning the candle at both ends and travel. And I think that you have to listen to your body. I don’t think I have any pro tips, so to speak, because I don’t do as I say, not as I do. But I think that you want to control what you can control. You want to obviously eat well and exercise and all of that, but you want to control the stress in some way. So, whatever it is.

It’s funny, I just started meditating but I know meditation is a great way or yoga or whatever, running, bicycling, whatever. But one of the things that I do to alleviate stress is umpiring baseball. And you’d say, “Well, how is that relaxing? You miss a call and there’s somebody coming at you with a baseball bat.” And I think, for me, and it’s not that I want everybody to become an umpire, but I want people to understand that, for me, umpiring is a place where I go where I focus on something other than my work where I have to be focused, otherwise, I’m going to get yelled at if I miss a call or I miss something.

And I think you can draw an analogy in whatever you do. If you take it seriously, that if you have something where you’re a serious marathon runner and you’re always trying to beat your time, or you’re a serious meditation person that you always want to increase your meditation practice and you sort of compete with yourself to always get better, but it’s not related to the thing that you spend the most time with.

Now, of course, family is another place where you can go and do that too. So, there’s a lot of places in your life, but I think you need things that are an outlet so, if we talk about work here because this is what kind of the underpinning of this podcast, that to be great at work means you have to be great at other things not related to work, and to find things that you can get out of, thinking about work, for some period of time, is really healthy. So, that would be one. But, again, it’s the normal take care of yourself and do that.

I think in terms of the premise of my book Overdeliver there’s a lot of traps in overdelivering. I titled the book this because, first of all, overdeliver is not a word, so I own the word basically. But it’s two words or hyphenated. But as one word it’s powerful for me because I think you can overdeliver in every part of your life. You can overdeliver just as a marketer. You give away more than a customer would’ve ever expected, that’s an obvious way to overdeliver. You can overdeliver in your relationships by playing a hundred zeroes as opposed to 50/50, and you always contribute without a need to get something in return. You can overdeliver in your relationships so that you are giving more than you ever would’ve wanted, or people ever would’ve expected.

But the dangers, and where stress can come, is when you do it and you’re not – and, again, I’m not perfect at this, believe me – but you overdeliver too much, and then the expectation is too high. And then the next time you come out, and you’re not overdelivering and you’re only delivering well, it’s, all of a sudden, “What are you doing for me lately?” And then if you are, like me, you say, “Oh, no, I screwed up and I put myself in a bad situation,” and that could cause stress and lead to an unhealthy environment.

And then the last thing about your health and all the things that you do in your life, I think that the one thing that can really screw people up, and it screwed me up, and I think people will relate to this, is envy. I think envy, I’ll say envy kills. Envy makes you sick. And the way that I’ve been able to deal with envy, when you see somebody doing something better than you, when you see somebody doing a launch that did well and you never could get there, or you see somebody achieving in some way that you wanted to achieve and you’re not able to get there, that is sometimes your envy is in.

What you have to do is go from envy to gratefulness. And so, the example I can give is if you are at an event, and someone is speaking, and they’re amazing, and you were speaking and you didn’t think you were as amazing, rather than being envious, being able to go to that person and, hopefully, you can talk to them about what they did to do such a great job, and to get that input and to get that information is a way to take envy and turn it into gratefulness to that person for sharing it.

And so, I’m not envious in my life for the most part, but when I am envious and I feel like I’m getting ill of some sort, I go to gratefulness. There’s a book by a guy by the name of Norberto Keppe called, The Origin of Illness, and it kind of speaks to this that envy is the root of all evil, and I really believe that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Any other kind of mistakes you think people tend to make when they’re going after over-delivery or they’re going after persuasion?

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, I think you can give away too much. And I don’t know what that line is because I tend to give away too much. But I kind of have figured out, I know it when I see it because, like, I blog every Sunday, and I always invite my readers to give me input, and I give them a lot of free stuff. And so, I’ve overdelivered too much in some cases when I start getting a flood of emails and requests. I have a list of, I don’t know, 11,000 people or 12,000 people, and it’s one thing to send me an email with a “Thanks for that input. My experience has been this,” and just a little share, to a whole list of asking me for advice and opinions.

I don’t want to be not gracious because I’m trying to be as generous as possible, but I charge a lot of money for my time, and I can’t get annoyed by it because that would be disingenuous. Like, in that example, if someone is asking me for my opinion, which would be a consulting call, I kind of lay it out that I charge for consulting. I give them a little piece that I can give them but not much because I don’t have the time. And I feel bad but that’s where I have to dial it back a little bit.

So, I don’t know if that answered the question, but I think when you find your…. I get myself in trouble as opposed to ignoring everybody. I’d rather be on this side of it than on the side of just “I’m too good for you and I’m going to ignore you. If you want to pay me, I’ll give you advice.” I try to create a middle ground and sometimes I get myself in trouble because of that. But, again, I’d rather err on the side of that than on the side of “I’m going to protect myself completely.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Brian Kurtz
One is, “In marketing and in life, everything is not a revenue event, but everything is a relationship event.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or a bit of research?

Brian Kurtz
A favorite study or experience. I think learning how to survey and learning how to get the opinions of your customers to find out what they need as opposed to what you think they need is a basic premise of marketing, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t use enough. So, I would say it’s that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Brian Kurtz
I have at least two. One of my favorite books is Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, the best book on copywriting, marketing, but it’s bigger than that because it’s about human behavior. Another one is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist which is kind of one that I read every year to just remind me of my personal legend and what I’m up to and that I’m still on that path.

And then the third would be Adam Grant’s Give and Take which is an amazing book on giving and taking, but the beauty of that book is that he says early on that there are givers, takers, and matchers in the world, people who give, people who take, and people who match 50/50. And he said the most unsuccessful people in the world, what would you think they are, and you assume it’s takers, and it’s actually givers. But giving, and this goes back to too much over-delivery, that if you give too much, then you’re going to be a loser because you’re never going to take care of yourself.

Then he says, “Who are the most successful people in the world?” And he says they’re also givers because “but you have to give strategically and you have to give.” And that’s the trick, giving strategically, overdelivering strategically. I’m still learning it but I’m always experimenting.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Brian Kurtz
I would say that looking for groups of people that have information that I don’t have. So, I mean, that’s broad and I do it in small groups and I do it in big groups, in masterminds, but I do it in small groups too. Like, going out and always finding that next piece of knowledge, that next person.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Brian Kurtz
So, I would definitely point them to the site for my book which is www.overdeliverbook.com. And on that site is an opportunity to buy my book, but there’s also, you’d come back to the site after you buy the book, and you put in your order number, and there are 11 bonuses on that page. And it’s stuff like a swipe file of going back to 1900, going back to original source, going back, getting a file of things that you can use to help you with your marketing.

So, there’s 11 different things on this site that are just, I guess I have a book called “Overdeliver” so I guess I have overdelivered. So, it’s overdeliverbook.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And all those bonuses are listed right there.

Brian Kurtz
Yeah, they’re all listed on the site, and then you opt in to my list. I don’t do affiliate programs. I blog every Sunday and you’ll get, hopefully, some wisdom once in a while from me. So, there’s just a lot of information there, and I think that’s the best way to connect with me and learn a lot of the things that I spoke about today if your audience is interested.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Brian Kurtz
I always say go forth and multiply, and I think the best way to do that is to contribute to connect, that always contribute first before you ask for anything. Like, tell people what you have to offer them before you ask them for something. And don’t make ask of people out of nowhere. Like, someone who you only know for a short time, don’t make an ask if it’s not appropriate. Because I think if you work on your relationship capital and develop it over a long period of time, that is a great way to live your life. And so, I would say contribute to connect as oppose to networking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Brian, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck with your books and adventures and all you’re up to.

Brian Kurtz
Thank you very much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Jason, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jason Hanson
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your stuff. I mean, you’ve got a fun angle. And I imagine you’re probably not going to give me any really cool stories from your time in the CIA because I’ve pressed before with Navy Seals on the show but they never gave up the goods, so good patriots you all, you guys. So, maybe you could give us a fun story about being on Shark Tank.

Jason Hanson
Well, Shark Tank was a wonderful opportunity, it was a huge blessing because, before, I was doing a lot of consulting to corporations and Shark Tank kind of opened me up to the masses and introduced me to the everyday person, if you will, so it was a great thing. I can tell you one funny quick story. I recorded right after Diamond Dallas Page, he was the wrestler who did his yoga thing, and I just remember getting back after I did my recording and hearing a bunch of screaming and yelling between people. I remember thinking, “Huh, maybe his presentation didn’t go so well.” Fortunately, mine did and, again, it was a fun ride. I had a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so curious. So, I’ve seen the show many times, but are there any surprises, like, “Hey, you must not expect this, viewer, as you’re watching the show”? But it’s really like this for me. Like, just how long are you in front of the Sharks? I understand there’s a very awkward moment where you’re just standing, staring them down while they’re getting the cameras and the lights just right. What’s the inside story of how it feels to be there?

Jason Hanson
Well, the inside story is you only get one chance, so it’s basically a cattle call where they have people lined up all day. So, they say, “Hey, you’re going on at 10:00, you’re going on at 11:30,” or whatever your time is, and you only get one chance so there’s no do-overs. If you screw up, it is what it is. But I was in the Tank about 55 minutes and, of course, they boil it to less than 10 minutes. So, out of that 55 minutes, sometimes I look brilliant, sometimes I look like the world’s biggest idiot, so you never know how they’re going to blend things together.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. Well, don’t you worry, Jason, we will edit out only the times that one of us look real dumb.

Jason Hanson
I love it. Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Usually, over 98% of the words gets used in most podcasts in my experience, so good stuff. Well, then, I want to hear what you’ve been up to with regard to spy-skill training and, particularly, how that can be useful for workers, those who want to apply some of your CIA brilliance to doing better on the job.

Jason Hanson
Well, so after I left the agency, I started my own company where I do survival training but I also do business coaching and training. And in the business world versus the CIA, there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the meaning of you’ve got to go out, you’ve got to go close deals, you’ve got to work with people, you’ve got to network, and spies are the world’s best salesmen because they’re selling a very hard product. They’re selling treason. But there’s a very distinct cycle that you go through to close deals that I’ve now applied to the business world and anybody can.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, I’d love to hear a bit about that and to hear about not just in sort of sales, prospecting, and customer acquisition perspective, but also in terms of the worker who may not be in a sales role. So, lay it on us, what is the cycle?

Jason Hanson
Sure. So, the cycle is the, I’ll spell it out, it’s the SADR cycle, and it stands for Spotting, Assessing, Developing, and Recruiting. So, kind of the 30,000-foot overview is if you’re in the CIA, or you’re a spy, and you’re going over to Russia, and you’re trying to recruit somebody to spy on behalf of the United States, first you have to spot them, meaning who are the best people that have access to the intelligence you want. Certainly not everybody.

Then, let’s say, you narrow it down to 20 people. Then you have to assess them. Out of these 20, who truly has access to that extreme amount of data you need? And then it boils down even further. And then after you spot and assess, you have to develop them, which really means make them fall in love with you, make them want to help you. And this wining and dining, this is buying them things, it’s like the dating. It’s courtship.

And if all goes well, after you do spotting, assessing, developing, then you recruit them and it’s basically, “Hey, my name is John. I work for the CIA. How would you like to work for us?” Now, it’s a lot more in depth than that, but that’s the cycle and you can apply it to anything and everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, sure thing. So, let’s talk about how we go about doing some of the spotting for starters. How do we figure out great people? And I guess that varies by your context, like great people to hire, great people to maybe buy your stuff, great people that you just want to be networked with internally to be an asset to you and vice versa. But how do you go about doing the spotting in your different context?

Jason Hanson
Sure. So, now in the business world, because of technology it’s super easy. Let’s say I’m looking to hire somebody who’s a Facebook expert, and I personally want to work with the best. So, I can go out and locate by Google searches. I’ve a very good network so I can talk to all my buddies in the business world, and say, “Hey, who are the best guys in the world of Facebook ads?” Then I can maybe get 10 names, maybe 20 names, whatever it is, so that is my “hit list.”

So, whether you want Facebook guys, or maybe you want a PR agency, or maybe you’re looking for an employee that has a very unique skillset, is narrow it down to those 20 people, 25 people, and then that’s when you start assessing them. That’s when you see, “Okay, out of these 20 or 25, who really has the goods?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Then how does one go about doing that assessing?

Jason Hanson
Well, there’s many ways. So, it goes back to, okay, I teach lie-detection skills, so you can interview and ask them questions so you can see if they’re being honest with you. You can run background checks on them to see if they legitimately did what they said they’ve done. You, of course, talk to others, you get referrals, you say, “Hey, show me case studies, tell me references that I can call.”

So, you basically put them through the ringer, not in a bad way, but in a good way, and that quickly weeds people out because a lot of people may not want to do that, or may be arrogant, and you say, “Maybe that guy is not the person I want to work with because they’re not very friendly, they’re not a jerk.” So, obviously, it takes time but if you’re trying to grow a business and you really want to work with the best and be the best yourself, it’s worth investing this time to do the research to find the quality people.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. But I’d love to hear then, so what are some of the secret sauce then when it comes to doing the assessment? Because I think everyone is going to say, “Tell me about a time that you were in a team, and you had a conflict, and how you resolved that conflict.” So, what’s some of the special stuff?

Jason Hanson
So, one of the questions I always ask, and I always start out baselining them. Meaning, I ask them questions that nobody is going to lie about, I see how they act when they’re comfortable, so, “Hey, where are you from? Where did you grow up? How many siblings do you have? What movies do you like?” just generic stuff.

And then, out of left field, I’ll ask them a question such as, “Tell me the last time you stole something,” or, “Tell me the last time you did drugs.” So, questions that hit them hard.

Pete Mockaitis
That just sounds like fun, Jason. I’d want you to interview me.

Jason Hanson
Well, most people will be honest and say, “Hey, in sixth grade, I stole a Snickers bar from the grocery store,” that kind of thing. But when it comes to lie detection, you pay attention to the first three to five seconds of a response. Honest people answer very quickly and their face doesn’t look nervous. But if somebody starts stuttering, or they have the deer-in-the-headlights look after you asked them that question, something is wrong, and you’re probably about to be lied to.

And I have had that instance where somebody did lie to me and, finally, came clean and told me they stole a ton of office supplies from a former employer. So, obviously, I didn’t hire them. But I ask those questions because, very quickly, I can say, “Okay, is this person honest or are they already going to lie to me about stealing or about doing drugs?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so funny, Jason, as you asked me, I had to think for a moment when’s the last time I stole something, and I think it’s probably, I guess if you think about time, like when you’re being paid for your time, like if I’m being paid by a client, and I’m not giving them 100% of my attention but rather 97%, it’s like I’ve stolen that 3% from them. So, that’s the last time I stole, Jason, was by entertaining distractions.

Jason Hanson
And you never stole candy from the supermarket?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think the last time I stole was probably not paying perfect attention with a client. In terms of stealing, I think maybe, boy, in college, I went on a real bender in terms of there’s something called myTunes which when you’re on a shared network enabled you to download music from other people’s iTunes. And, yeah, I probably stole more than 500 songs.

Jason Hanson
Oh, this is basically like Napster you’re stealing from.

Pete Mockaitis
Kind of like Napster, yeah.

Jason Hanson
Yeah, got it.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s some stealing there. Boy, all my sins are coming online, Jason.

Jason Hanson
You’re a criminal mastermind.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t bank on this being where we were headed. So, yeah, my apologies. I now have the utmost respect for intellectual property. Okay, cool. So, that’s the assessing. So, then you’re looking for, well, let’s talk about the deception for a bit since you’re a pro here. So, you establish a baseline, and you ask them a question sort of with surprise, shock and awe factor, “When’s the last time you stole something?” and then you look to see if you get a quick response, or a deer-in-the-headlights, or super nervous and stuttering. And what else am I looking for to see if there’s lying or truthfulness happening?

Jason Hanson
So, the feet, we are very terrible at controlling our feet.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Joe Navarro was on the program and we talked about this.

Jason Hanson
And I don’t know him personally but I read his book, a fantastic book, and so I do that too. I mean, I’ll sit, because we’re used to lying with our mouths, people lie all the time with their mouths. So, I’ll see, “Okay, has the feet been still the entire time? But, now, they’re jiggling, now they’re uncomfortably tapping. Is something going on like that?” So, it doesn’t take long. There’s about nine or so things I pay attention to, and I can very quickly tell you if you’re being honest or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear them.

Jason Hanson
Well, again, one of the questions I ask you, when I’m dealing with people who want to JB with me, a lot of times, because I was on Shark Tank, I now get pitch deals like crazy, which is great, except 99% of them are junk, and there’s one that’s actually good.

So, I’ll get someone who says, “Hey, Jason, you know, we made $5 million last year and blah, blah, blah.” I always ask, “Okay, show me the proof,” and that shuts people up very, very quickly. Like, if you’re going to quote numbers to me, show me the proof, show me bank statements, merchant accounts, whatever it may be. But, also, when people are lying, they tend to freeze, if you want another one. So, if they’re very animated but in a liar’s mind, if you retract and stop moving, you’re like going into a tortoise shell, and they think, “Nobody will see me. Nobody will notice me.”

So, the example I like to give is if I went somewhere and left my wallet in a cafeteria, and came back and there were a bunch of people around, and my wallet was missing, and I started saying like, “Who stole my wallet?” I was angry, normal people would be exhibiting normal behavior, and be like, “I didn’t take it. I’ll help you look for it.” I would look for the person who is being the least animated and the most quiet because they would be trying to hide and blend in. They would be “freezing” and most likely they’d be the guilty verdict.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jason Hanson
You’re quiet all of a sudden. What is going on?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about a time in which, oh, man, someone I knew, we’re in babysitting situation, so there’s a home, a homebased sort of like a babysitting daycare situation over the summer, and I was there, and I remember someone had written a nasty letter to someone else, and I knew who did it. And then when they said, “Hey, who wrote this?” I was totally like super quiet, whereas everyone else was like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re right. Who would do that?” Like, that was everyone else was doing, and I was like saying nothing. So, yeah, there you have it, in action it happened.

Jason Hanson
We are very bad liars in real life. So, when I was with the agency, I can lie because it was my job, there’s no guilt associated, but in real life I’m a terrible liar. You could see right through me because we all do the same thing, like I said, we all freeze, we all stutter, we all look nervous in the face, because it’s not normal and natural to lie.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that’s interesting when you mentioned it was your job to lie, and so you did so. And I found that in certain context in which it’s sort of like I’m playing a role or it’s for a joke, it’s like I’m pretty good at it. But then, like impromptu, I’m terrible at it. And so, that’s interesting mindset that you speak to there. Tell me more about that.

Jason Hanson
Well, when it’s your job and, again, with the agency you’re doing it for your country, you’re very patriotic, and there’s no guilt associated with it because that is your job. But if you and I are going down the highway, and we’ve got a dead body in the back of our car, and we get pulled over by the cops, you better believe both of us are going to be sweating bullets and looking nervous because we know if they find that dead body we’re in big trouble.

So, it kind of goes, is there guilt association, where you’re going to be nervous, or is there no guilt? So, what do they say, 2% of the world, or 1%, are psychopaths or sociopaths? That’s why polygraphs are not admissible in courts because there is that very small percentage who can lie and they don’t exhibit normal behavior but 98% of us, 99% of us are normal, and you can see right through us when we’re lying because we have a guilty conscience about what we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s reassuring that I am not a sociopath despite my music grand larceny of my youth. Okay, but you said nine things, I wasn’t counting. But have we ticked them all off or are there a couple more?

Jason Hanson
Well, some of these are when I do, and I don’t know, I don’t have any down, but I’ll tell you another one, a very easy one, and this is when something is missing because a lot of the lie detection stuff I do in corporation is when something goes missing. And so, they’ll bring you in and say, “Hey, find out who stole the stuff in the warehouse, or who the stole money out of the account.”

And if anything ever goes missing, pass a piece of paper around to everybody who is part of that group, and say, “Write down what should happen to the person that stole the money or that stole the stuff out of the warehouse.” And the person who writes the least punishable thing is almost always guilty. Meaning, if you asked you and me, like, “Hey, the person that stole a million dollars from the account, what should happen to him?” We’ll say, “Well, they should get fired. They should go to jail. They should get the electric chair. They should be banned for life.”

Well, the guilty party will be like, “Well, if they return the money, maybe they can keep their job.” Like it’s one of these things, was it the Sesame Street, like, “One of these things is not like the other”? So, you’ll have all these responses which are typical human responses, then you’ll have the one response stands out of it’s not a bad punishment because that’s the guilty party.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so these are sort of fun as we’re talking about assessing people in terms of their honesty and integrity. How do you go about assessing them just in terms of, “Okay, do you really have the goods, the skills?”

Jason Hanson
So, in the CIA, or any intelligence operative, you have to be very resourceful. And it’s not like you’re in the military where you’ve got a platoon or people behind you. You’re pretty much on the street, and you’re alone, and you’re doing your thing, there’s no backups, so you’ve got be very resourceful and creative.

Well, when people work for my company, I want the same thing. I want resourceful people. I don’t want to have to babysit them. So, I like to make up something bizarre and have them either do it or tell them how I would do it. And a bizarre example, I don’t know what just jumped into my mind, is if I said, “Hey, I want a horse in my office in the next four hours. Get a horse in my office.” Could they do that? Do they have the creativity to go Google and rent a horse and figure out how to get the horse?

So, I give them some unique thing where, “Hey, you got three hours to get me this answer or whatever.” Because if they can’t figure that out, then, clearly, they’re not creative and not somebody you want to hire.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they get the job if the horse shows up or how does that work?

Jason Hanson
If Mr. Ed is in my office within four hours, we’re good to go.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, that could get a little costly, and I don’t know what horse rentals run these days. But it’s so funny, when you frame it as a challenge, I think you also get a sense about the attitude, like, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck? This is weird,” versus, “I’m excited.” It’s like, “Heck, yes, let me get on Yelp right now and see what I can do. I’ll post it on Facebook, see if I got someone who can hook it up,” and it’s sort of like, “I’m excited to spring into action to see if I can make it happen just for the fun of it, it’s like a challenge. It’s like do you have what it takes?”

Jason Hanson
Because in my business, and I run a few businesses, it’s very bizarre, meaning one day we may be doing X, one day we may be bodyguarding a celebrity, one day we may be doing training on evasive driving and crashing course. It’s all kinds of unique things. And so, the people I hire, I tell them, “It’s not going to be sitting at the desk every single day looking at a spreadsheet. You have to be able to get out of your comfort zone. I may send you to a tradeshow in Washington, D.C. one day, and then the next day you’re going and help me with an interview kind of thing.” So, if they can’t be kind of outside the box and be comfortable in many situations, they’re not going to last in my company.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So, that’s the assessing. And then how about developing?

Jason Hanson
All right, developing. As I mentioned, this the courtship period. This is when you’re making them fall madly in love with you. So, if you’re trying to get somebody to obviously betray their country, to make treason, you need to make sure they love you, that you’re best friends, so this can be a lot of it is the law of reciprocity, meaning I’m taking them out to dinner, I’m buying them a thousand dollar dinner. I am taking them out and buying them new clothes. I am taking them to the nice nightclubs or whatever. We’re hanging out. I’m basically giving them the life they wish they had.

So, you make them fall in love with you. By the time it comes to, “Hey, I’m ready to pitch them,” they feel so indebted to you, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, Jason has bought this, this, and this, and this, then, yes, I’m going to get him X, or Y, or Z, whatever he requires.” Now, developing can take months, it can take years. Obviously, it’s a case-by-case basis in the intelligence operative world, but you don’t ever pitch someone, you don’t get to the point where you’re recruiting them, recruit and pitch the same thing, until you’ve developed them so well that you know there’s 100% chance they’re going to say yes. And that is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I guess what I wonder with developing is so, like do they know who you are and what you’re up to like the whole time that you’re courting them? Or how does that work?

Jason Hanson
No, I’m giving you hypotheticals of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Jason Hanson
So, let’s say I went over to whatever country, let’s just pick China out of the blue. And I would say I’m an American businessman and I maybe work for this tech company back in America, and we’re trying to learn more about missiles or whatever it would be. Obviously, it wouldn’t be missiles, but something. And then I have a big slush fund because I’m over here so they let me take people out to dinner.

So, at first, they have no idea, but the people you’re trying to recruit eventually figure it out. They don’t know 100% sure, but they’re like, “Okay, he probably works for the government.” So, when it comes to the recruiting part, the way you kind of pitch, and there’s many ways, but one way is like, “Listen, Joe, we’ve known each other for eight months now, we’ve known each other for a year, or whatever, and you probably guess I really don’t work for XYZ corporation. I work for the U.S. government and, guess what, I’m a spy. How would you like to be a spy with me? Wouldn’t that be awesome? We could both be spies.” That sounds corny but that is one of the ways you do it and it works. I’m not kidding either.

Pete Mockaitis
“Let’s be spies.” It’s like, “Let’s be friends.” All right. So, I guess in a way, well, I’ll let you comment on that. Why is that an effective way to ask?

Jason Hanson
Well, first, again, you don’t ask until you’re 100% sure, because in the spy world, if you screw up and you go asks, and the guy says, “I need to think about it,” or maybe he’s going to get back to you. Well, if he doesn’t say yes on the spot, the next time you meet him again, you may have a bag put over your head, or you may end up in a foreign prison because he goes and tells the Russian government that you just tried to recruit him.

Pete Mockaitis
Plus, the Chinese are in cahoots.

Jason Hanson
So, you know he’s going to say yes. But it’s effective because you know. In business you’ve got to know your customers, right? Well, when you’re trying to recruit somebody, you know them better than they know themselves. So, you would know in that instance that he wanted adventure, that he was a bored scientist, and that he would love to be a spy. That would be thrilling for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you. So, you’ve zeroed in on a need and you’re delivering on that need.

Jason Hanson
Correct. So, I’ll ask you a question. What do you think, not the number one, but one of the main reasons that people spy for the U.S. if you had to guess?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m going to say they would love to have themselves and their family escape their nation and be in the United States instead.

Jason Hanson
Pretty darn close. It’s education for their children.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Jason Hanson
So, when a U.S. person, when somebody betrays America, it’s almost always for money. But when we’re trying to recruit somebody from some crap old country and they’ve got kids, they want an education for their children. They want to say, “Hey, I want my kids to be able to come to the U.S. where they have the opportunity to go to a great university.” So, once you know somebody’s hot button, that’s when you push it, whether it’s adventure, whether it’s on education, and that’s what you obviously figure out over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I guess they have to be able to get admitted, huh? Or you got ways to make that happen too. We’ve heard a thing or two about how that can unfold.

Jason Hanson
And you know what? I’m just going to no comment, or I can either confirm or deny, or whatever you want to say there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. So, that’s intriguing then. Okay, so fascinating. All right. So, regarding with making them fall in love with you, so we talked about it in a spy content, but let’s talk about sort of a workplace context. So, you probably have less capacity to provide lavish dinners and entertainment, etc. So, what are the ways that you recommend people develop relationships with potential allies stateside without the government slush fund?

Jason Hanson
Well, yeah, it doesn’t take much money. The government, obviously, has unlimited funds, our tax dollars that seem to be unlimited. But, for you and me, we don’t have to spend that much. It’s the little things. I keep going back to courtship. You’re trying to court a woman, and so if you know what they like, “Hey, I know you love whatever book. I bought this book for you.” Or, “Hey, I saw this clipping in the newspaper that talked about seven ways to help your kid with reading, and I know you mentioned your kids having trouble reading.”

So, you do little things to show you care about them. So, it doesn’t cost any money to clip out a magazine or buy, spend 15 bucks on a book from Amazon. But if you’re thinking about them, like, “Oh, Jason really pays attention to me. Jason really cares about me,” and, obviously, when you show somebody you care about them, the more they want to work with you, or work for you, or help you.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, so that’s good. So, you sort of notice. I guess it’s not that different after all. You notice their need. Maybe, in the spy example, it’s education for their children. In this instance, it could be any number of things. And then you sort of proactively make it happen. And you know what’s interesting is people have needs all the time.

And I’m thinking like over the last couple of years, we bought this house and property, and it seems like we had a heck of a time finding different people for the miscellaneous renovations, whether it’s landscaping, or carpet, or carpentry, plumbing, electrical, you name it. It’s like there’s always something. And if someone were to say to me, “Hey, Pete, I found this amazing electrician who’s super reliable at a great price,” that would make me say, “You’re my best friend. You have met an urgent need that is maybe not super important, but urgent in my mind. And so, I love you as a result.”

Jason Hanson
And you’re 100% right. We’re so busy and self-absorbed in the world we live in today that nobody does the personal touch. Like, I’ll write handwritten letters to some of my best customers. I’ll send thank you notes. And most business owners never take the time.

I’ll tell you another example. I never sent a text message in my life. I don’t text. Yeah, a personal preference, I have a flip phone, I have no desire to text. But I get people who text me, every once in a while, to try and pitch me, they’re like, “Hey, I got your number from a friend of a friend of a friend. I have this great product. Are you interested?” I’m like, “You didn’t do any research on me whatsoever.” Because in multiple of my books, and multiple articles I’ve written, I mention how I never send a text, and here I am doing it again.

So, most people don’t do the deep, deep research and are lazy, but if you do, you figure out those things, and it’s much easier to close people these days because nobody else is putting in the effort.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like what you’re saying here, Jason, and I’m thinking about the context of, well, hey, just my podcast. I think the plurality of emails I receive these days are, “Hey, I want to be on your podcast,” which is flattering. Thank you. But, you know, it also just feels a little bit like, “You know what, I’m so much more as a human being.”

Jason Hanson
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
“I feel I have so much more to offer beyond just a publicity, opportunity.” And so, I’m intrigued then. If you’re reaching out cold, well, we know what not to do is do zero research and be kind of not at all aligned to kind of how you operate. But what are some of your pro tips when you’re doing, I guess you’re talking about the spotting and assessing and developing? Let’s say that we’re developing from ground zero. We spotted them and we’ve assessed them from afar, like, “Oh, wow, that would be an amazing person to come work for me, or to buy my product, or to promote something.” How do you recommend making the very first steps in this courtship?

Jason Hanson
So, what I recommend is, in the intelligence operative world, you give people gifts and you find out what they want. So, let’s say they love Scotch, I don’t know anything about Scotch, but you give them a great bottle of Scotch, and you send it to them, and give it to them. They’ll think that’s the greatest thing in the world.

So, what I do is if I’m trying to work with somebody or somebody I don’t know out of the blue, I will send them a box of gifts along with my stuff. So, if I know they love – and I’m just making this up – railroad books, or whatever, I may say, “Hey, I’m Jason Hanson. Here’s what I do. Here is a book on railroads. I heard you love these. Also, here are some of my books just so you know who I am, that I’m not a total nutjob who reached out of the blue.”

So, it depends on how big of a customer or a client they could be, but I’ll put together a fancy, nice gift box with all the stuff, showing that I took the time to really get to know them, and spend a hundred bucks because it could be worth a gazillion times that to me. So, I like sending a big box of stuff if I’m really trying to go after somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that because I’m just thinking about sort of podcast pitching. Yeah, no one has sent me a physical gift in advance. Yeah, they send them afterwards, like, “Thank you. I appreciate that,” which is nice of them. Thank you. But that’s good. So, that’s kind of like your introduction, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve learned a little bit about you and I thought you’d like this. Here you go.” And there you have it. And, you’re right, that’s quite rare. That doesn’t happen much.

So, here’s a real pedestrian question, maybe easy for a former intelligence officer. So, let’s say all you have is a person’s website or maybe even just an email address and a name, how do you get their snail mail address for this opening introductory gift?

Jason Hanson
So, yeah, I’d do research, I’d search the email in many place, I’d see if there’s anything attached to it. Now, sometimes they do not. Sometimes all you have is an email and there’s nothing else. Well, then you’ve got have a killer unique email and a totally, not bizarre, but totally unique subject line. So, in the intelligence world, if you want to get somebody’s attention, you want them to notice you, you’re not going to be boring, you’re not going to be weird. You’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to make them notice you and be like, “Hey, let’s be friends. I’m this American businessman. Can I take you out to dinner?”

So, whatever the subject line is, it just can’t be like, “I would like to ask you a question.” It’s got to be like, again, I’m not coming up with anything. For some reason, I keep thinking of horses or talk about horses.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, we can do horses.

Jason Hanson
And you’ve got to write it like you talk. And I use the truth in mine too. I say, “Hey, Bob, I’m sorry to send you this email. I looked like crazy for your physical address but I couldn’t find it so I’m going to keep this short because you’re busy.” And I always use, I’m lucky because I’m a former CIA, so a lot of times the subject line is “Former CIA officer wants to talk to you,” kind of thing. And that gets opened the majority of the time. So, use whatever unique hook you have that’ll make you stand out from the crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. All right, so that’s developing. And how about the actual recruiting?

Jason Hanson
So, yeah, this is the time where you’re going to come and say, “Hey, again, I’m not the American business. I work for the government. How would you like to spy with me? How would you like to…?” And this is where you push whatever the button is, if they want money. Like, I can give some examples. There are many countries in this world where it’s normal to have a mistress. So, it’s not a big deal, the wives know, you don’t throw it in their face, and these guys need money for their mistresses.

So, you would come with a nice fat envelope and say, “Hey, Bob, as you might’ve guessed, here’s who I work for. I’d love you to continue helping us. You’ve been a great friend. And guess what? I’ve got this $5,000 in this envelope, and I can give it to you now, and then give you $5,000 every single month for your help. What do you think?” And you take that envelope out, you put it on the table, you put your hand in it while you’re talking. You don’t just push it over, you make them really, really want it, and you make them say yes, you make them commit. Then you can slide it over to them where they can touch it. It’s not a huge event because you already know they’re going to say yes or you wouldn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. So, you present it such that they can desire it all the more and it’s not yet there until they’ve said yes.

Jason Hanson
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this was fun. I have so much more to ask you about so let me see here. You talk about the concept of active awareness. That sounds great. What exactly is it and why is it good and how do we get it?

Jason Hanson
It is keeping your head up, looking around, not having your head buried in the cellphone, and basically paying attention to your surroundings. So, if you’re trying to close a deal, or even walking down the street, what I do is I play a game, or if I’m walking to the airport, I’ll just quickly describe everybody, like, “White male, red hat, blue shorts, about six foot tall.” “Black female, big earrings, sandals,” whatever it may be, so then I’m looking around, taking in my surroundings.

Most people live in zombie land where they have no idea what’s going around. So, if you’re a business person, observing, seeing what they wear, seeing their office, and really looking around, that may be a key to closing the deal if you see that little nugget of information you need. So, just pay attention. Don’t walk around like a drunk.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re just saying in your head, like the descriptions of what you’re seeing. Like, “Blue wallpaper,” or whatever it is, just what’s there. You’re sort of sub-vocalizing the description of the stuff.

Jason Hanson
Correct. Because it makes your mind think, your mind doesn’t fall asleep, and it forces you to look around in your surroundings so you see what’s going on. That way, you can’t be looking at your feet at whatever digital device you have.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Super. And so then, so that just sounds like a good thing. In practice, what are the advantages of having it?

Jason Hanson
Is that you’re more successful because you see what’s going on, you see things other people miss. Before, we talked about Shark Tank, I read every book they’d ever written, I watched every episode, I knew every question they asked, I knew everything about their families, I watched every interview they ever did. I knew them backwards and forwards, and I actually used that, remember I was in there for almost an hour, and they boil it down to 10 minutes, and I know some of the key things like throughout to help me get the deal because I observed their body language, how they were removing what they were wearing. And most people are probably not as observant as I was.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I can’t let that go. So, body language, there’s a lot of ambiguity there, but you mentioned feet earlier. Are there any other sort of just key body language things you notice over and over and over again that prove quite useful as you’re interacting with folks in work settings?

Jason Hanson
Well, most of them are common sense, meaning, “Do they look interested? Are they smiling? Do they lean forward?” Like, when I was on Shark Tank, I could see who was leaning back in the chair, and as I said certain things, they had literally leaned forward. I was like, “All right, I’ve these two. These are the ones I’m going to focus on, dedicate more time because they’re clearly paying more attention at the moment.”

So. It’s all stuff that it doesn’t take a spy to see. All of us can quickly pick up, if they look bored, or leaning forward, or they’re crossing their arms in disgust, or they’re open and they’re being animated and talking because they’re excited so it’s easy to pick up on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And so then, I want to get your take on how do you recommend that we apply some of these approaches to just better advocate for ourselves in terms of we are trying to make the case that you deserve the promotion, or the opportunity, or the raise, or to be heard?

Jason Hanson
Deep research. So, deep research on everybody else. So, if you want a raise, why you deserve a raise of the other five people in your office, and what proof. So, in the intelligence business, you’ve got to have proof for everything. Meaning, when somebody says, “Hey, we need you to take out this terrorist.” Well, what’s the proof that they did something? What is the proof that they’re behind it? If you’re going to take someone’s life, or snatch someone off the streets, you got to make sure you have all the details.

So, the same thing, if you come in, “Why do you deserve a raise?” “So, I’ve been here five years.” “Well, I don’t care if you’ve been here for five years. What have you contributed?” So, have files, have all the, “Hey, I made an extra $5 million for the business off of this project alone.” So, come in, pretend you’re in front of a jury, and you’ve got to have proof beyond reasonable doubts, and if you do that, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get the promotion or get whatever you’re looking for in life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, when people try to apply some of this stuff that you’re teaching, are there any sort of ways that they mess it up, like they’re trying to implement it, and they make this mistake over and over again? What should we watch out for?

Jason Hanson
You have to be authentic. So, when you’re trying to recruit somebody, and you’re trying to make them fall in love with you, if you’re faking it and you’re not showing empathy and really caring about this person, they can see right through it. And it’s the same thing in the business world. So, when somebody is trying to close a deal on me, I can tell when they’re being fake. The old cliché of like, there’s a model sailboat on the table, and it’s like, “You like sailing? I like sailing.” And, of course, you know they don’t know anything about sailing. So, you’ve got be genuine and authentic because people are not idiots and they will spot it.

Pete Mockaitis
I like sailing.

Jason Hanson
I don’t know anything about sailing.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. You like sailing, I like sailing. Well, that’s funny. Back to podcast pitches, a lot of times people been coached to start with a compliment, but it’s sort of like, “I don’t think you’ve ever actually heard the show. That’s just sort of something that you’re saying. All of the stuff someone told you, you’re supposed to do that.” So, that’s good. So, be authentic. Well, that’s interesting. Well, when it comes to be authentic, I mean, you do want something from them, and that is why you’re having that conversation. But you’re still authentic in the sense that – how would you distinguish it?

Jason Hanson
Well, you’re on the authentic of, “Hey, I really want to work with you.” If you’re flattering them because they’re the best at what they do, you’re not using cheesy flattering, you’re being genuine in your compliments to them, like, “Hey, I really do admire how you wrote this book,” or, “I really do admire the way you do your podcast interviews.”

So, you can be authentic and all that, and then, of course, you’ve got to offer them something. So, you don’t want to come out, like in the intelligence world, “Here’s 5,000 bucks. If you do this, I’ll give you 5,000 bucks a month.” You’ve got to have something that’s going to make it worth their while because people are busy. So, what is going to be beneficial for them to work with you? And, obviously, be able to present that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Jason, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jason Hanson
No, I already know your life story and how you’re a criminal, so I think we’re good to go.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the essentials. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jason Hanson
Something I find inspiring, a favorite quote. There was, I think it was a book, like, “Tough times never last, but tough people do.” And, I don’t know, I think it was a book or a quote, it doesn’t matter. So, I love that because in the intelligence world, and also in the business world, there’s always going to be tough times, but you got to keep on trucking, never give up, and those are the successful people.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Jason Hanson
I love psychology. I try and read all kinds of psychology books. Robert Cialdini has written some great books on that. I’m a fan of his. I read sales books because when it comes to business, and when it comes to humans, and when it comes to getting people to spy, it’s all psychology. It doesn’t change.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, Bob Cialdini’s books, Influence, Science and Practice, as well as Pre-suasion are amazing. Any others that you really love?

Jason Hanson
I mean, I’m old school. The old Zig Ziglar sales books just to learn from them, Tom Hopkins. I’m the kind of the guy who reads all kind of books because even if I get just one nugget, it’s worth it for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Jason Hanson
A tool? I’m a gun guy. I love guns. I love knives. I love flashlights. I’m like a gear junkie. If you come to my house, I’ve got tents and sleeping bags and all kinds of survival and outdoors gear.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jason Hanson
Favorite habit? Well, I like and don’t like. I wake up at 4:30 every morning, so not necessarily that I like waking up early, but I like being productive and be able to get a lot of work done that most people are not able to.

Pete Mockaitis
And what time do you go to bed at night?

Jason Hanson
I got to bed at 9:00 p.m. if I can. The latest 10:00 p.m. but, yeah, I’m trying to be in bed at 9:00 every night.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key thing that you share that often gets quoted back to you, a nugget that you’re known for?

Jason Hanson
I teach people anti-kidnapping skills, especially how to take escape duct tape since it’s the number one way people all over the world are kidnapped, so a lot of people know me from teaching people how to escape duct tape.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and while we’re on the topic. What’s the trick for escaping duct tape?

Jason Hanson
Well, it’s going to be hard to say on the radio, but basically when your hands are duct-taped together, and you put them higher over your head, and then bring them down and pull apart as if your elbowing somebody from behind, and that will allow you escape in less than two seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good to know. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jason Hanson
I would point them to CelebrityMethod.com because that is my website where they can find all kind of stuff about me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jason Hanson
Get up at 4:30 a.m., plan your day ahead of time, and work your butt off, and do deep, deep research because most people are lazy these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you, Jason. This has been a lot of fun. I wish you and lots of luck for the book Agent of Influence, and all your adventures.

Jason Hanson
Thank you. I appreciate it.