Knocking Down The Big Domino

Lessons Russell learned from Tim Ferriss at Joe Polish’s 25K group.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. I am so excited to be with you today. Today I want to share with you guys a story of what happened to me a little while ago in New York. There was this group I wanted to check out and join. It’s Joe Polish’s $25,000 group.

There was an initiation meeting in New York where you pay $10,000 to go there for two days. If you like it, you pay the extra $15,000 to join the $25,000 group.

I wanted to go out there, but there were a couple issues. One, it was the same time as my anniversary. Two, it was in New York across the country. And three, I had to convince my wife that we should be in New York instead.

I pulled off an elaborate scheme to convince her that we needed to be in New York for our anniversary, me and her, then I could go to the meeting. Luckily for me, it all worked out and we were able to do that. We went like four or five days early to New York.

My wife and I got to hang out and have fun the first couple days. On Monday morning we went to the today show and we jumped around behind Natalie Mirales and the others. It was cool, we were on TV. Our kids thought we were rock stars.

That night, we went and saw Wicked the play, and that was really cool. I had never even heard that story before, so that was really fun. The next morning we went to the Kelly and Michael Show. Kelly was gone, but Michael was there, and the co-host was Rebecca Romaine, which was awesome.

The guest was Carrie Underwood, so we got to be two feet away from Carrie Underwood, which was cool. And once again, we were on TV and our kids saw us.

That night we went to a taping of America’s Got Talent, so that was really cool. That was the fun part of the trip for my wife and I. Then the next two days we had the mastermind meeting.

We were there and the mastermind was really good. At the end they had a guy who a lot of you guys have probably heard of. Tim Ferriss got up and spoke.

I really enjoy reading Tim’s stuff, but I don’t think he’s a very good presenter. When he speaks, he’s a little dry and boring for me. I remember he was talking about venture capitalists and stuff that doesn’t really interest me at all. I was zoning out a little bit.

At the end, he opened it up for Q&A, and one person got up and I’ve had people ask me this question before so I kind of almost rolled my eyes when they said it.

They said, “Tim, what question should we be asking you?”

Tim sat there and thought for a minute and said, “Ask me how come I will never let the media follow me around for a day, because they ask me all the time. They want to see a day in the life of Tim Ferriss.”

The guy was like, “All right, how come you never let the media follow you around for a day?”

He said, “Because if you look at my day, I wake up in the morning, I do some meditation, then I eat cereal, then I go on a walk. Then I read some books, then I surf on the internet. If you were to look at what I do every day, you’d think I didn’t do anything.”

He’s like, “I don’t work like most people. Most people have a to-do list of all their tasks for the day. They try to go knock out each to-do one at a time, and at the end of the day if they’ve knocked them all out, they feel accomplished.”

He said, “I work way differently. I like to sit back and look for the one big, huge domino that if I push that domino down, it will knock down and make every other domino obsolete. That’s how I can accomplish so much. I’m not racing and running into the next thing and the next thing. I sit back and I look for the big domino.”

That was his advice. It was interesting because I am very much the opposite. I am someone who sits there and just tries to get tasks done. It has served me well in life, just doing thing after thing after thing. But it also has gotten me in trouble multiple times.

One day I woke up and I had 100 employees working for me, and it was because of that: me running and running and running and not really sitting back and looking at the strategy behind things and waiting to find that one big domino.

I remember when I got back from New York I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic. After I got back from that, I came back and I told my team that. I spent the next three or four days sitting in front of a whiteboard.

We have a wall in our office that is just a big whiteboard, and there’s a couch in front of it. I sat in that couch for days, trying to figure out what is our big domino. What is the one thing we can do that makes everything else obsolete?

It was hard, because I wanted to go and check my email and check the next task. I’m always a hustler, trying to go on and speed to the next thing, and in this case I didn’t do that. I tried to sit back and look at it strategically. It was interesting.

It’s kind of cool if you think about it. I’ve been doing Jujitsu for the last little while, and Jujitsu is kind of a similar concept. In wrestling it’s very aggressive and you’re always going, going, going. But in Jujitsu it’s a lot different.

Jujitsu is a lot slower, a lot more methodical. You’re just looking for the next strategic thing. I enjoy it a lot, but its way different than wrestling in that way.

This kind of feels like the Jujitsu style, where you’re slowly looking for that move that will get them to tap out, as opposed to trying to score point after point after point.

It’s interesting, the different mindsets. I’m in the wrestler mindset, the to-do mindset, let’s knock things out as quick as we can and accomplish stuff fast. I’ve been trying over the last month or so now to focus on what is that one big domino that I’m going to knock down.

It’s been interesting. It’s been fun to look at my business from that standpoint. I just encourage you guys to slow down a little bit, sit back and think about what’s the one big domino you can knock down that makes all the other dominoes obsolete?

If you can find that, you can make a lot more money in a lot less time. That’s what I’ve got for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do like these podcasts, please go to MarketingInYourCar.com or go to iTunes and give some feedback. I’d love to see it. It’s exciting for me. I appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.