Two Awesome Lessons From The NCAA Wrestling Tournament

#1 – Belief
#2 – How to make tiny adjustments so you win the match

On this episode Russell talks about being at the NCAA Wrestling Tournament and how if you believe you can win, you can win, and how you can apply that to your business. He also talks about how you can take your mistakes and use them to make adjustments and improvements.

Here are 3 other fun things you will hear on today’s episode:

• How belief is a major force in both wrestling and in business.
• Why Russell won’t critique someone sales funnel before they actually launch it.
• And how Clickfunnels wasn’t a winner until 6 or 7 adjustments were made.

So listen below to hear how Russell used the lessons he learned from wrestling and applied them to his business and how you can too.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, it’s been a little while. I’ve been out traveling the world, gallivanting. I don’t know if that’s really even the right way to use that word, but it sounded cool today. I was in New York all last week, for the NCAA wrestling tournament with my dad. If you guys listen you probably knew that already, and it was great. I was planning on doing a bunch of podcasts from there, I actually saw one of my favorite marketing people in the world. Daegan Smith was there. We sat by each other for most tournaments. I was going to share some podcasts with you guys and him, but it just never happened. It was too crazy of a week, and too much wrestling, too much New Yorking, too much good stuff happening.

Anyway, I’m back now to report and share with you guys some cool stuff. I hope that things are going well. We are a little over a week away from Funnel Hacking Live. We are completely sold out which is a nice feeling to have. So this week I gotta go and work on my presentations, I got some cool stuff I’m going to be sharing with you guys and with our community. I just wanted to make sure that it’s amazing. We were going to launch Funnel University last week, and then this week, and then decided to just kind of put it on hold until after the event and that way we can focus on making the event flawless. Then we will have Funnel University when we get back. So it’s all done and ready and it looks amazing. Our survey software is awesome, just lots of good things.

So that is kind of the game plan from here. So I wanted to share with you guys probably what I think is the most important lesson I learned from the wrestling tournament this weekend, which will relate to you guys even if you’re not wrestling people, which you all should be. That’s an argument and a sales pitch for another day.

So the NCAA wrestling tournament is amazing. IT’s more like the world championship, in fact, Coach Shultz, if you guys have seen Foxcatcher, Mark Shultz, who is the main character in that movie, was my wrestling coach at BYU, and I actually saw him this weekend which was really fun. But one thing that he said is that the NCAA wrestling tournament, because this style of wrestling is only done in America, he said it’s pretty much like the Olympics, the World Championship, which it is. IT’s kind of a big deal. It’s like the Super Bowl of our style of wrestling, which is cool. The best athletes from all the conferences around the country all come to this tournament and it’s a big deal. And it’s really big for wrestling, it’s on TV, which is the only we get on TV ever. So that’s pretty cool, it was just awesome.

We’re in this state, we’re in Madison Square Garden, and the entire stadium is just filled with wrestling fans, which is cool. We had tickets we bought that were on the 12th row, it was right in the middle of Hawkeye fans, which if you know anything about wrestling, you know that Iowa Hawkeyes had a dynasty for the last two decades, three decades. Dan Gable was their coach and built this huge thing and so they’re fans are kind of insane. So we were stuck right  in the middle of all these Hawkeye fans that were just going nuts the whole time, which made it really fun too.

What I wanted to share with you guys, at the NCAA wrestling tournament, for whatever reason, there are tons and tons of upsets, which are the fun ones. You get to see on the big monitor up top, “the number 14 seat’s wrestling the number 1 seat and somehow this dude wins.” How does the 14th seat, who’s got like whatever, 20-10 record, come in against an undefeated guy and beat him? How do these things happen? I was thinking about that and talking to Daegan a lot about it. One part of it is interesting is belief. It’s just weird, if you believe you can win, you can win. But it’s all mental, it’s all this belief. Do you believe you can actually do it? We watched this one guy, he was undefeated, hadn’t lost the entire season, or excuse me, he only once the entire season, and he lost to this guy who wasn’t that good, wasn’t ranked that high, and they met in the semi-finals and I was watching it and I was like, I think this guy’s got a shot of winning the underdog. The only reason why is on paper this guy should not even be close to the number one seat. It’s not even close, but because he beat him earlier in the year, which was kind of a fluke, he had this belief that, “I can beat him.” And because he had the belief he could do it, and sure enough he almost beat him, he lost, but it was crazy close.

I have had matches in my career where I on paper should have lost to people, but because I had thought I could win, I had this belief for whatever reason, that guy looks weird or whatever, I had this belief that I just knew I could win. I was able to win. It was weird. I remember this one time I was wrestling, there was this guy in my Freestyle Greco club who I beat all the time, didn’t have much respect for him as wrestler. He wasn’t that good. One day I’m at this tournament, and I’m wrestling this other kid from some other state, the kid was good, we’re having a close match, and I’m actually losing going into the third period. My Freestyle Greco coach, I guess there’s not periods in Freestyle Greco, sorry it’s been a while. During one of the injury breaks or injury time or something, my coach came out and tried to tell me some stuff, he’s like, “Hey you need to work on your level change or whatever. By the way, Matt beat this kid  by 8 last match.” And instantly I was like, “Matt beat him by 8.” In my head all the sudden, this kid in my head was no good, and I had a perfect belief that I could beat him, and the last minute and half or whatever it was, I came out there and I tech-falled him. Because all the sudden…..it was the same match. I was struggling this whole match and suddenly my belief switched in my head to this kid should be really easy for me and then he was.

There’s this weird thing about belief, it just beats all odds. If you believe you can win, you can win. I remember last year, NCAA tournament there was a kid that was number 4 team seat, and he became a national champ, and I posted on my Facebook wall and I forgot about it until yesterday, because yesterday it popped up saying, “last year here’s a memory you posted.” And the thing I posted was picture of the kid, and they’re interviewing him at the end. They said, “You were the 14th seat, how in the world did you come here and win this?” he said, “When I got here I looked at the brackets and I looked at all these people and I said, this is who I have to beat to be a national champ so I came and beat them.” It was just pure belief. Anyway, I thought that was important for all of you guys because it’s not skill, it’s not talent it’s not a record, it’s not anything, it’s belief. And that same thing is true in your business.

I think the reason why I win a lot of times, is I just have such belief that what we’re doing is going to change the world, and it just does. So my first question for you is,  how much belief do you have?n Do have belief you can win. So that’s question number one, the second thing I want to bring up and this is the second half of the equation. Is being able to look at a loss and not looking at this devastating thing, but looking at it and trying to figure out what you need to change to win. Good example, in 174 lbs finals, which you guys should Google this match, it’s amazing. Beau Nichols, from Penn State, undefeated the whole year, was supposed to win the tournament, again this other kid, who is a true freshman from Oklahoma, this true freshman had lost to Beau Nichols three times during the year. In fact, in the big tens he got pinned by him. So he no shot of winning, no way he was going to win. He comes into this finals match and him and Beau Nichols lock up, he launches him, throws him to his back, almost pins him, gets a bunch of near-fall points and then Beau ends up trying to play catch up the entire wrestling match and ends up losing, just huge upset. True freshman wins this thing. Everyone’s going nuts. It was amazing. One of those matches, I stood up and I stood amongst all the Iowa guys who were not standing and I gave him a round of applause. To come back and to lose to this kid, the best kid arguably in the world right, and to have to lose to him three times this season, to come back and win, that’s huge. What is it? What causes that?

I remember my junior year in high school, I worked hard all my sophomore that summer long, I had gone Freestyle and Greco and we worked all day long, I just knew my senior year, I would be state champ. Go out there, first match against a kid that had taken 2nd the year before, we go out there to wrestle and I had belief that I could win, but this kid was better than me. And he beat me. It was devastating for me. I knew I wasn’t going to be state champ that year, and I lost my very first match. My dad had recorded the match and then after the match, my dad was rewinding and watching it, rewinding and watching it. My next match happened and he started recording, and he actually recorded over the first match except for about 13 seconds. So we had 13 seconds of footage of this match against this guy named, Nick Fresquez. So my dad, every day for the next four months watched that 13 seconds of film to see what he was doing and how it was working, and he’d do this little funky moves on me. We’d go with my dad and watch this match all weekend long and practice the next week, and we’d drill it, drill it, drill it. And we’d come back and I remember my dad watching this little clip over and over and over again, because it’s all we had. It’s all we had to pick apart what he’d done to beat me. And we focused on that all season land, and I actually wrestled this kid in the state finals. And in the State finals, not only was he not able to do that move on me, but that’s actually the move I used against him to win the state championship, which is kind of a cool turn of events. But what it was all about is, I lost, after I lost I looked at why I lost, and we made adjustments.

This is the key, this is why wrestling was such a big important thing for me. There’s some people that are just amazing wrestlers. They come in and they just win all the time, I was never that guy, so I would usually go to a season or whatever, I’d wrestle somebody, and I could beat most people, but against the best people I would lose. So I’d lose and be like, “Wow, why did I lose?” I lost because my elbow’s right, I lost because I was overextended, I lost because I took a bad shot, I lost because of this…and we looked at what the reasons why we lost and then we went back to the room and we practiced and we practiced, and we made adjustments and took away those things that they had the last time they beat me and came back and wrestled again. Sometimes I’d lose to them a second time and it’d be closer, I’d look, “Why’d I lose this time?” make those adjustments, make those tweaks, make those changes and come back and eventually we would win.

That’s the kind of wrestler I was. I was not, again an amazing athlete, but I was amazing at looking at why I lost and making adjustments and come back a second time stronger and harder.

So what happened in this finals match, this guy had beaten him three times during the year, in fact he pinned him two weeks earlier, and he looked at that. “What mistakes did I make? What adjustments do I need to make?” And he came back and was able to beat him in the national finals. So this is the 2nd lesson. I see this all the time in our business, in fact, I’d say with our Inner Circle members, this is where I spend the majority of my time, they go and they create a sales funnel, they create a sales letter, they create all these things, and they go out and they launch it and it doesn’t work. Then they’re devastated emotionally, “I can’t even handle this, I lost this thing. I spent all this time on it, and it didn’t work.” And they’re shattered, and I get  it, but because they haven’t had, I mean most people don’t have a chance to go through wrestling or sports like that where you get beat on and you don’t have an opportunity to go and just quit, you get beat on and you have to go look at the film and figure out why did you get beat on and you make the tweaks and the changes. Same thing is true for us in marketing. We put out a campaign and we launch it and 90% of the time it doesn’t produce the way I wanted it to at first. We get beat. So I have to come back and make adjustments.

I look at the numbers across the whole thing. How much did we spend on ads? Was it high? Was it low? Was it good? How many people opt-in on the landing page? Was it high? Was it low? Was it good? How many people bought off the sales video or the sales letter or the webinar? And we look at every single piece of this process, just like I would in a wrestling match. We break it apart. “What was I doing wrong? Were my elbows out? Was I overextended? Was I shooting far? Is my headline not captivating? Are people not opting in? Are people not buying? Are people not showing up to the webinar?” I’m looking at all the things that went wrong in the process and I’m making little tiny adjustments. I’m not going and reinventing the wheel from the ground up saying “This sucks.” And throw it away and restart.  That’s not how it works. It all comes off of tiny little adjustments. So initially when we created our first sales funnel, we’re trying to make the best possible thing we got, then we launch. People always ask me, “Can you critique this before we launch?” I’m not going to critique it before you launch it, go launch it.  We have no idea what’s going to happen until you’re put in a competition, until you see how you react to the real world, see how people react to you.

I think it drives a lot of my inner circle members crazy sometimes. I’m not going to critique it until we drive some traffic, I don’t want to screw things up. It could be perfect, it could be far off, but we need to let traffic tell us. I don’t want people telling us their opinions, who are coming and looking, “Oh, this is my opinion. You should tweak this.” No let people vote with their credit card. The only thing that matters is people voting with their credit card. If they are willing to pull their credit card out and give you those digits, then you’re right. That’s how you win this match. That’s how you win this game. I never give people critiques ahead of time, I have them launch it, we drive traffic, spend a couple of hundred bucks and then we look at what happened, and then we make the adjustments, and then we come back for the second match stronger. The second match we may not win either, that’s okay you look at the numbers again, you look at every step in this funnel, this page, what’s happening. We then make some tweaks and make some adjustments. Then we come back again and make some tweaks and adjustments, then we come back again and we keep doing that until we have a winner.

Neuracel, our supplement did not win the first time. In fact, if you look at the numbers, it lost the dual meet, it lost tournament. It lost the conference. It lost the semi’s. But then in the end if it wouldn’t matter. I think Neuracel’s like the seventh or eighth variation of it, that’s the one that took off and won. Same thing with Clicklfunnels, when we launched that, it wasn’t the first, second, third or fourth. It was the fifth, sixth or seventh variation that one. So you guys gotta think about that. IT’s not throwing out the whole thing. IT’s looking at what’s happening. Looking at the process and making tweaks and adjusting until you’re right. That’s how you win at wrestling, that’s how you win at business.

So there you go guys. Two things that I hope will help you from my weekend. Number one is belief, number two is getting out there and having the match and making the adjustments you lined to make to win. And if you do those two things in your business, just like in wrestling, just like in anything that’s how you win. Alright you guys, I’m at the office. I’ve been sitting in the parking lot for like 5 minutes because I was so excited about sharing this stuff with you guys. But now, I gotta get back in the game. I got a big match today, got a lot of work to do. Appreciate you guys, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all again soon.