The Hustle Sucks & What I Learned Through An Intense Immersion Process

Here are some cool highlights from the last seven days!

On this episode Russell talks about how he did not get into the entrepreneurial business to hustle all the time. He also talks about how immersing yourself in something can bring about new connections that you never made before.

Here are some interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:

• Why sometimes the hustle of business sucks, and you need the freedom that you got into this business for in the first place.
• How Russell immersing himself in content during a 10 hour flight is making the current event better.
• And how you can make new connections you never made before when you do more than dabble in information.

So listen below to see what part of the hustle is overrated and how Russell made new connections to talk about during the event and inside his upcoming book, Expert Secrets.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, hope you’re doing good. I am on the way to day 3 of the Expert Secrets event and it’s kind of bittersweet, I’m not going to lie.

So first off, I told you guys some of the crazy journey that happened last week to get back in time for the event and it sucks because we were supposed to be home on Monday. And if we got home on Monday we would have had half a day on Monday, all day Tuesday, and half a day on Wednesday to hang out with the kids and get caught back up, but because we had missed flights and all that kind of stuff, we didn’t get home until super late Tuesday night. So basically we had Wednesday, but on Wednesday I hadn’t had time yet to prepare for the event. So Wednesday was basically me locked in a room busting out 3 days worth of PowerPoint slides and sketches and just getting everything prepped for the event. So I didn’t have much kid time at all. And then boom, the next day we had two events that started. You know it’s just been….so I feel bad. I haven’t been a good dad for the last two weeks. And I had some time; I had a couple hours last night, which was really good actually. Then this morning it was Saturday morning and my poor kids are just like, “You have to go to work again, Dad?” I’m like, “I’m so sorry.”

So first off, I wanna mention is that the hustle that everyone makes sound so amazing and awesome, it sucks and it’s not amazing and it’s not awesome. And I don’t know about you, but I did not get in this business to hustle all the time. There are times when hustle’s important, especially when you’re trying to complete projects, but it seems like the big entrepreneurial message right now, and it’s definitely stemmed from someone I respect. Gary Vaynerchuk is someone I respect, love his stuff. Learned a ton from him, but he’s preaching and prophesying hustle, right. And so because of that entrepreneurs…..it’s becoming a badge of honor. In fact, I saw a funny meme thing that said, “40 hour work week? Yeah I remember my first part-time job too.” Or something like that. Anyway, it’s hilarious.

But the reality is we all got in this business because we were looking for some sort of freedom, right? That’s it. And then the problem is we addicted to the process, because it is really fun, not going to lie. I get so many of my needs met through it, but we get addicted to the hustle and then that becomes the badge of honor, is the hustle. And you completely lose the freedom that were going after when you got started. When we were in Kenya last week, we were hanging out with Stu McLarin, and Stu made a video about hustle. He said initially he was going to dig at Gary V. but he didn’t. Instead he just kind of talked about hustle, and how working your face off is not always the best route. It was awesome, and it kind of went viral for a little bit and he got a bunch of ……ya know, it was cool.

So we talked a lot about that. There’s a time to hustle, but it’s between set hours of like 10 until 4 or whatever. This is my hustle time. Then when the hustle is done, you gotta turn it off and get into quality time mode because that is honestly way more important and it’s the reason why we did this business. There’s number one, so I am driving to the event, excited to hang out and hustle with these guys and share some cool things. But number two, I’m honestly kind of bummed out because I just wish I could stay home today and just have a big pool party with the kids. So there you go, that’s where I’m …..that’s the entrepreneurial conundrum.

And right now I’m headed to the seminar room, my gas light is on, it’s been on for 2 days. I have approximately 12 miles left before I run out of gas. I’m not sure how many more miles it is to the event. But also, I have 10 minutes until the event starts, which means I do not have time to get gas but I might run out of gas before I get there. So there is the second entrepreneurial conundrum we have today. So what do you do? What would you do? Remember those math story problems in school? The train is moving 50 miles an hour you have 13 minutes til whatever. Do you have time to blah blah? You have to figure out the math equation. Anyway, I wish I was smart enough to figure out the math equation because it might be physically impossible for me to get to the event on time. Or, and maybe that my time gamble…..I might have less than 12 miles to get to the event, therefore I will make it to the event and I’ll be there in less than 10 minutes and I could be on time. Or it could be 15 miles to the event and I run out of gas and I’m not going to be on time. Or I fill up with gas and I’m not on time. Which choice do you take? I already know what choice I’m taking. I’m going for it. Worse case I break on the side of the road and call an Uber. So you guys will be part of that. We’ll see what happens.

Alright with that said, I want to talk about something else. Let’s shift to something excited. One of the many amazing things that happened this week is this event’s been awesome. IT’s called Expert Secrets and it’s me going over the outline of the new book. If you watch my Snapchats, about a month and half ago, I ……we were almost done with the book, so it’s sad. I highlighted 200 pages of the book live on Snapchat and deleted them all and started over. People said, “Why in the world would you do that?” And I said, “Well, I had a really good book.” And they’re like, “Most people have really good book are excited about them.” I said, “You know, my goal wasn’t to write a really good book. My goal was to write an amazing book.” So I started all over and spent the next 6 weeks going back through a lot of stuff, deep diving, dissecting every webinar we’ve done that’s been successful and trying to see the internal patterns and trying to figure out things. While we were in Kenya, a trip I probably immersed myself and smashed through, I don’t know, probably…..if I was to count the hours, 70 or 80 hours worth of courses and content specific to this concept that I’m teaching in this book. I don’t know about you, but there’s something powerful and amazing about an immersion. And this is one of the reasons I’m actually grateful for the huge layover, even though it kind of sucked. But it forced me to go through this immersion period. Whenever you immerse yourself in something, the coolest thing is that when you do that these weird connections start being made that aren’t made by reading a chapter in a book a day, you know dabbling into something.

When you immerse yourself and go crazy into it, all these connections start lighting up that you wouldn’t normally see. And then hooking an event on the end of it, amplified that process. Because I was going through this thing, and I had a 10 hour flight from Amsterdam back to Minneapolis, and my wife passed out right before that flight started. I think it was a 9 or 10 hour flight. Anyway, I took some Ketones with caffeine in it, so I was awake. So for the whole 10 hours I was lit up on fire. And during that time I had my PowerPoint’s out, I had my sketch book out, I had 2 books I was reading and then 3 different courses I went through and I slammed through in 8 to 10 hours all this stuff. And all these connections I had missed before……oh and also going through about 12 or 13 different PowerPoint slides I presented in different webinars formats. I’m pounding through all this information as fast a speed I could and all the sudden I started seeing all these patterns and connections and all these lines connected that I hadn’t seen before. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” For one example, in the Perfect Webinar there’s 3 secrets, right? I’ve always talked about that, and the 3 secrets are tied to 3 belief patterns. But what I realized on that flight all the sudden I saw a weird connection of those 3 secrets weren’t random. I always thought they were random. Randomly picked 3 secrets, but they weren’t. Every webinar that we had that was successful, there was the exact same pattern. Secret number one was very specific on one thing. Secret number two always had to do with something else. And secret number 3 always had to do with another thing. I had partially figured that out…..Stu McLarin and I were in this little car in Kenya driving around. A five or six hour drive we were stuck on talking about stuff. And that popped up in conversation. I was like, “Stu I just realized something weird. ‘this’.” And he was like, “That’s pretty similar to how I do ‘this’.” And I was like whoooom! With this connection. Now I can reverse engineer what I do better because I never even realized these 3 secrets were all tied to these very, very specific types of beliefs. Now that I know that, holy cow! It’s so much easier to do that. So that was amazing.

And then this thought came out of this immersion thing and so many other things. So it’s like all these connections happened. And then at the event I’m on stage teaching these things, for example there’s this one part in the book that we talk about the big domino and the one thing and how to figure that out. And I explained that and I thought that was kind of common sense myself. But then we had this exercise where the group tried to do it and I can’t believe how far……everyone got stuck. And then the more I thought it through the more stuck I got. And we kept going through it and it ended up that 10 minute session, was supposed to be 10 minutes long, ended up going 2 ½ hours. By the time everything was done, we came out with this one sentence. It was like, If you can frame what you do in this one sentence, it becomes the one domino. If you can convince someone of that one thing, every other concern becomes obsolete or disappears. And it was like, when it was done, I had to take a break. My brain was fried. I just got this nugget, that when we come back now after the book, it’s amazing.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I’m telling all this stuff. Maybe wanting to get you excited. Help you realize you should always be at my events because if you’re missing out on any of them you’re insane. Maybe that’s number one. Number two is to get you excited about the book because I am so excited for the book now. These insights, this went for me, what would have been a really good book to something that can and should and will be, I think, the best book ever written on planet earth. Why even write a book if you don’t think it’s going to be that, right? But now I honestly am excited to finish it. And then number three is just to talk about the power of immersion. There’s something to that. To mass learning a whole bunch of stuff in a finite period of time where you start getting these weird connections that you cannot and will not get just by dabbling.

So that’s it, you guys. That is what I got. So I am at the event center. Good news, I did not run out of gas. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get from here to a gas station, but that is an issue for another day, or maybe later on today. But I’m going to go in there and we’re going deep now and taking all these things and plugging them. Everything we worked on the last two days. The stories. The epiphany bridge story. The one thing……the how to build a cult. In fact, figured it out. This is the crazy insight we had, we looked at how all mass movements have been built. So I was going through the book, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, which is a book about how to start mass movements. And I’m reading that book at the same time I’m listening to Dan Kennedy’s Influential Writing Workshop and Perry Belcher’s Secret Sales System. And between those three things there was this weird thing where all three of them crossed over and I had this, I can’t even explain how cool it was. All three of these things crossed over and in the middle there was this one nugget that was just like holy cow. All mass movements have this one thing that is tied to something that both Perry and Dan specifically pointed out, which is also the only way to create offers that convert. And it was just like angels from heaven started singing when I saw that crazy connection and so basically we built this super cool sketched out diagram showing three things that have to go into a mass movement. And the third one is…..that one is essential for you to figure out your one thing, and if you don’t have any way, it’s amazing. It’s like a puzzle where everything is coming together. I love it. Appreciate you guys for listening and hanging out. I am almost walking across a crosswalk now, so I gotta bounce. So I will see you guys all soon. Bye everybody.