Lead Or Gold

The only strategy you need to get stuff done today.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell and welcome to another episode of Marketing in Your Car! Yesterday I pretty much just talked about Jiu Jitsu and kind of spun it with some business at the end.

Today may be kind of similar. No, there are some good lessons. Tomorrow I am fighting in a Jiu Jitsu tournament. I am in three different divisions, so I probably have ten to 15 matches tomorrow as long as I don’t get tapped out. It is going to be a lot of work and a lot of fun.

One thing, though, is that I weigh-in tonight. Tonight I have to weigh seven pounds lighter than I weigh right now. A lot of you are asking, “How do you lose seven pounds in a day, Russell?” The reality is that I am going to lose seven pounds in less than an hour.

We do it the old school way like we used to do it in wrestling. In fact, I went to my garage and I found a huge thing we had which had all of my old weight-cutting clothes. I had my plastics; I had my sweat suits; I had everything. For me, it was really exciting and nostalgic. It brought back so many memories. There were even my old t-shirts I used to cut weight were in there, my sweatpants, and everything.

I had some fun today and put them on. The pants with my plastics are pretty tight now. I am not quite the size I used to be, unfortunately. It was very, very fun.

Today I am going to work for a couple of hours and then head over to the gym, put on my plastics, and wrestle hard for an hour. In an hour—especially for the fact that I am not fat but I have some stuff on me—I should be able to lose the seven pounds in less than an hour. In fact, my record from cutting weight was 12 pounds in an hour. That was the most I ever did. My record for most total weight loss in a week was 30 pounds.

It is not natural weight loss. Do not ask me to teach you the secret to losing 30 pounds in a week. It is all dehydration. You put these plastic suits on and they suck the water out of you. You literally do not drink for three or four days. It makes me laugh when people say, “You can live without food for a week, but you cannot live without water for more than a day.” That is B.S. I have lived without water for multiple days while sucking water out of my body. It is definitely possible.

It is interesting that when you start cutting weight you stop eating and you stop drinking. Then you start trying to suck the water out of your body. As soon as you start getting dehydrated, your hunger pains disappear. It is kind of cool. You are not hungry, but you are thirsty the whole time. As soon as you weigh in you drink something and boom! Your hunger pains come back. It is interesting. Thirst is definitely worse than food.

Why am I telling you this? First, I am excited and I am going to cut weight today which is kind of a fun thing. The second thing is that I was thinking today about how we are in the middle of a huge project which we are about to launch. You have probably all heard of it, ClickFunnels. I am trying to get all of these things out.

Last night at 10:00 at night I was not done with our stuff. I came back into the office and worked for another three hours to get stuff done. One of my buddies, Xan Spencer (some of you know him) is one of the students who went through one of our courses a while ago. They actually won a Corvette from us and built a huge business.

He moved to Boise, he and his wife, a while ago and they are launching a new business. I showed up at the office last night at 10:00 and he was in there stuffing envelopes for these bracelets he is selling now. I thought, “Isn’t this awesome? We have entrepreneurs here late at night busting their butts to make their dreams come true.”

I was thinking about next week when Todd, our programmer for ClickFunnels, is flying in and we will probably pull five or six all-nighters in a row to get this thing done so we can roll it out and launch it the next week.

I want to talk to you about the fact that you have to set deadlines, otherwise nothing ever gets done. If I did not have weigh-ins tonight at 6:00, I would never lose these seven pounds. Because I do, an hour before I am going to suck it out, I will make weight, and I will weigh-in. If I did not have a deadline for launching ClickFunnels, it would never get done. Because there is a deadline, we are going to pull all-nighters until it is done.

I find it interesting that it does not matter if my deadline is a week from now or six months from now. Any way I do it, the week before I will be pulling all-nighters every single night to get it done. It is just the way it always works.

There is a tape I bought a long time ago from John Carlton and Gary Halbert. They were talking about the concept of silver or lead, “plata o plomo” or something like that. The concept was that when the Mexican drug lords down in Mexico want to change a law, do they try to run it through congress? Congress would be, “No!” We’re not giving you that law. Are you crazy?”

What they do is break into their homes that night, find the people who are the decision-makers, and they come to them with a gun and a bag of silver. They say, “You have two options. You need to change this law. You can do it through “plata or plomo,” through silver or lead. Either we will shoot you and you will die or we will bribe you, give you money, and you will change the law.”

When you have those two options, “plata o plomo,” lead or silver, what are you going to choose? You are always going to choose the money, right? It is a no-brainer, so that is what they do.

When I first heard that story, I started thinking of it for myself. I have to set “silver or lead” deadlines or else nothing will ever happen. Maybe it is just me, but if I do not have those deadlines, they will not happen. When I pick any project, I say, “This is the project and this is the deadline. This is when it has to be done.”

It is not like, “Oh, here is a soft deadline. Hopefully, eventually it will get done.” When you do that, it will keep moving forever. The second you set a hard date and say, “This is the day it will happen, somehow, magically, it will happen. It does not matter if it is a week from now, a month from now, six months or a year from now. Those last two or three days you will be pulling all-nighters to get it done. It is just the way it is. I do not care how much you plan. The week before or a couple nights before, you are going to have to kill yourself to get it done.

Most people just keep pushing it and pushing it. Because of this, they never get to their goal; they never actually hit it. It gets pushed into infinity.

For you guys, I recommend that for all your core projects you set a “silver or lead” deadline. It does not have to be on the project as a whole. Sometimes it is so massive it is hard to do it. Set a goal for each element, though. You can say, “This is step number one in this process I am doing or creating. Step number one is this and my silver or lead deadline is June 16th and it will happen on that day. It is not allowed to happen on June 17th. If I cannot sleep for three days, I will not sleep for three days because it is silver or lead; either I am going to get cash from this or I am going to die.”

If you can trick your mind to really believe this, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. People always ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done?” A lot of it is because of my “silver or lead” deadlines. This is it. In my head I know this is the date and we cannot miss it. Sure, we could miss it, push it, and bump it another week or two. However, when you do that, it just keeps getting bumped and keeps getting bumped.

In my business, in my career, there have been the times I have been soft on my deadlines. We had a site we launched a little while ago and we literally kept pushing it for six months from our initial deadline. We said, “Oh, we will do it,” and we kept pushing it and pushing it. Six months later we finally sat down and said, “Boom! This is the ‘silver or lead’ deadline. It has to happen!” Guess what? It happened.

I hoped this helps you guys understand how to get stuff done. It is how I am going to make weight tonight. I am going to lose seven pounds in an hour. It is how we are going to get 10,000 people on ClickFunnels. It is how we are going to increase our coaching. All these things we are doing have “silver or lead” deadlines attached. If you do not have them yet, it is time to start creating them for yourself.

This is what I have for today. I am at the bank and I am going to pull some money out because my wife has been remodeling our house and this is what husbands do, right? That is my plan for right now. I appreciate you guys and I will let you know how the tournament goes after it is all said and done. Talk to you guys soon.