Hey Scott. Thanks for joining us.

Morning. How’s it going Dean?

Wonderful, thanks. Listen, I spent the last couple of days here reading your new book cover to cover to cover to cover. I can say that because it is two books in one. It is the most unique book I’ve ever seen. I love it. You’ve got the two books in one package here. So the first book is called ‘Stick Yourself Out There’ and then you flip the book over and it reads ‘Get Them to Come to You’. So what a fantastic idea. How did you get the idea for doing a two in one book like that?

Yeah, I was going to say, the inspiration for this actually came from Quentin Tarantino.I don’t know if you’re a Tarantino Fan.I love him.I think his movies are so much fun and so cool.

And Rodriguez.

Yeah, Rodriguez rules. So I saw Grindhouse last year, which was a double feature, and it had Hard to Kill and Deathproof.

Deathproof, yes.

That was so cool. Kurt Russell like totally awesome. So you watch the movies back to back. You don’t know which one you’re going to get first, but you just show up and you get two for one. And I guess before my time, back in the day, they used to do that all the time with movies. It was always like a double feature. So I thought walking out of that movie ‘I wonder if anyone has ever done a double feature book?’ you know, like a two in one book. And I thought ‘Yeah, I should do that’ because I had this idea to write a book called Stick Yourself Out There, but I knew that was only half of the equation. Because I write books, I give speeches and I coach people about approachability. And what approachability is is you’ve got to stick yourself out there if you want to get them to come to you. So that is kind of the second part of the equation. After you stick yourself out there, and in the book you read the different strategies and practices to do that, when I say get them to come to you, ‘them’ means customers, opportunities, ideas, you know new business opportunities, all these things that you attract your business by virtue of sticking yourself out there, it comes together in a cool little way. So the two in one aspect of the book I just thought ‘What the hell, let’s have some fun with it’. There’s no back cover. There’s no back. It’s just two covers and you flip it over and the book ends in the middle. It’s never been done before. It is totally fun. And let’s face it, most marketing books are ironically kind of boring.

I love in the middle the portion where you have the photo illustrations of what to do now?

Right. I think you’ve got to learn that you can’t depend on your audience to connect the dots. Sometimes you have to punch, yeah, you have to punch people in the face sometimes. So I have this little cheesy picture of me like here is me flipping the book, slowly, slowly. I want people to get the idea, oh okay, I flip over the book and now I read the second half. It’s like choose your own adventure. Don’t go any further.

Yeah, right. I was going to say, let’s talk about some of the ideas here that you’re sharing in the book, and you have broken it up into two parts. ‘Stick Yourself Out There’ has to sort of precede ‘Getting Them To Come To You’. And the way that, something that stuck out to me, and I think it is the quote of the year so far that I’ve heard, is ‘There are no cover bands in the rock and roll hall of fame’. And I put that on my Face page maybe a month ago, when I first heard you say it. And I thought, man, that is so good. But what does that mean to you and how is that applying to sticking yourself out there?

That’s a philosophy I developed when I was in college. I’m a musician. I’ve been playing music my whole life. Writing is my occupation, but music is my life. So when I was in college, and I’m an acoustic kind of coffee shop kind of guy, so I would play out in bars and coffee shops and stuff. And you know, I’d always composed my own music. I wrote music about the important things in my life, which for the most part, at the time, were girlfriends, and I played these songs but no one cared. They didn’t want to hear the songs. They just wanted to hear covers. They wanted to hear American Pie and they wanted to hear Dave Matthews. And I thought why am I doing this? Why would you play cover songs? Because I’ve been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before. It’s in Cleveland. You go there, you don’t see the tribute to Queen and all these cover bands that play all U2’s greatest hits. You just see U2, you just see Queen, because if you want to be the best you’ve got to do your own stuff. You’ve got to play your own material, you’ve got to do your own music. So the philosophy behind that sort of little one liner is you need to be the origin and not the echo. Here’s what I mean by that. It is so easy for business people, and specifically in the world of real estate, to want to just sort of echo someone else’s brand or echo someone else’s philosophy or their approach. The challenge is to become the origin, which comes from the Latin term meaning the only one, the uniqueness. So how can you position yourself as a broker in a way that no one else has? Like instead of just being the best real estate broker in Minneapolis, why don’t you be the best broker in Minneapolis who only works with single parents or the best broker who only works for same sex couples? For example, if you can niche in that kind of way you become the origin, you become the only and you don’t have to do covers because you’re making your own music.

And that is something, because that leads right into the next thing that I wanted to talk to you about, which was your philosophy that niches equal riches. And I completely agree with you on that, that the biggest thing that often people struggle with is this mindset that well if I focus on a niche I’m going to be limiting myself. I mean my real estate licence allows me to help people buy homes anywhere in the state of Florida. Why would I limit myself by focussing on a niche?

Well there’s a secret behind it. When you focus, when you appeal to the minority, you attract the majority. And I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re singing karaoke and you go into a bar and there is a bunch of people there. If you’re signing karaoke you don’t sing to the entire room because people are just ‘Oh, he’s a drunken idiot. I don’t want to pay attention to him’. What if you get down on one knee and serenade the cute redhead in the front row? What happens? Every single person focuses over because when you focus your attention on one you attract the attention of many. So the question you’ve got to start asking yourself is okay, what could my niche be? How could I focus? How could I develop specialised knowledge and pick a lane and essentially, as I call it, become that guy? Because customers, they prefer specialists. That’s what they want. When you have a niche you can achieve some goals that aren’t possible when you’re a generalist. And there’s kind of like two ways to look at it. You can have a niche expertise, and that is essentially what I have. As a writer and a speaker and a coach, my expertise is approachability. And that is a niche because nobody else has that. I own that word. It is mine. I’ve written more books and more articles than anyone. And the cool part is, when you have a niche expertise, when you have that set of knowledge, you’re a big fish in a big pond and your knowledge is cross-industrial. So if you know a specific topic you can apply it to a lot of different people and your client base diversifies and essentially you have these different dimensions you can add to your expertise. That’s one way to do it. Another way to do it is to have a niche market. So as opposed to having a knowledge and a certain expertise now, you have a knowledge on a certain group of people. For example, from earlier I said single mothers. So let’s say you’re a mortgage broker. And you know what? There’s a million mortgage brokers out there. I just did a refi on my house and I went through the mortgage broker that I’ve been using, but it’s like there is a perception that they’re commodities and they’re all the same. So what you could do is, as a mortgage broker, you can specialise. You can say, ‘You know What? I’m only going to work with single parents.’ Then what happens is, instead of knowing one topic, now you know one group of people. And maybe you are a single parent yourself and that is why you got into that niche. You start to develop a variety of different expertise within that scope of that type of person, so you know all the issues that they deal with. And eventually you start to open doors for expanding your business and you expand your client base because you work with one single parent and you know their life and their world and you help them do a refi and they love you. They’re going to tell all their other single parent friends ‘Oh man, you’ve got to work with Dean. He knows what it is like to have four kids and no partner. He’ll take care of you.’ This is a niche market, and whether it is that or an expertise, it is this niche that ultimately is going to stick yourself out there and it is going to help you get noticed, get remembered and get business.

Well people, you know, that’s so true, is that people do hang out with other people like them. Like you’re saying the single mothers probably have a group of friends that are also single mothers. And it is not, you know, that may be a narrow niche. It might not be something that somebody would think of. But think of how many niches there are. You could have an arrangement where you only work with business owners or self-employed entrepreneurs or you only work with first time home buyers. I mean there is so many niches that are available and if you just think about it, immediately it simplifies your business. Immediately it simplifies everything because now you know who your audience is, who you’re talking to.

You also know, I apologise, go ahead.

No, I think we’re right on track there.

Yeah.And you also know who your customer isn’t.That is a big part of the entrepreneurial world.And whether or not you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, we all need to think entrepreneurial.And part of that is to know who you aren’t, what you’re not and who your customer isn’t, because then you can say no more effectively and you can also position yourself as a resource. I mean I fully subscribe to the practice of when you say no you’re still marketing.

Yes. Let’s talk about that because that is a great philosophy.

Okay. Let’s say, okay; let’s go back to your example. Let’s say you’re a broker and you focus specifically on small business owners who have ten employees or less. Okay, that’s your niche and that would be a niche market. That’s your niche market. Well let’s say you’re at a networking event or maybe you get an email from someone that reaches out to you and says ‘Hey Dean, I really want to learn about this new rate you guys have, and I’m buying a home and I want to do a mortgage with your company, and I work for a 500 person corporation’ blah, blah, blah. And you start thinking ‘This individual is outside of my scope. I’m not the best person.’ So here’s what you do. You respond to the email or phone or whatever and you say ‘Thanks so much for thinking of me. It sounds like you’re in the right position to make the next move. I’m not the perfect person to help you, and if I did say yes I wouldn’t be giving you the best of my abilities, so here are three colleagues of mine. Some of them work with me, some of them work at different companies. I want you to reach out to them because they work with people like you that work for big companies. I’m an entrepreneurial guy. I work with small businesses. So talk to Dan, Mark and Jackie. Talk to those people and one of them will help.’ You do that; you’ve now set a boundary; number two, you’ve still delivered value; number three, you’ve now positioned yourself as a resource because now you start to brand your honesty. Another practice I subscribe to is finding a way to brand your honesty, and you’ve just said no. You’ve branded your honesty and now this person is like ‘Wow, that guy just, he said, he’s turned away business. He could have made money on me and he said no, talk to my friends, they’re better than me.’ So there’s a sense of integrity that is unforgettable. And now what do you think that guy is going to do? Anytime he meets a small business owner he’ll say ‘You know what, I was going to go to this guy Dean and he wasn’t the right guy for me but he is the right guy for you’. And that is going to ultimately circle back. It will probably take some time, but I mean I do that for my speaking engagements. I’ll say no because it is the wrong fit and two years later they’ll come back and it will be the right fit and everyone is happy.

Right. And it just echoes, there’s some opportunities even for real estate agents geographically.

Yeah.

Like they work in one specific town. Let’s say Winter Haven, where I am here. Somebody wants to buy in the next town over, in Lakeland, and a lot of times people are just, they’ll grab on to somebody who wants to buy and they’ll take them anywhere, even though it is completely out of their normal course of business. They’ll go, they have to now discover the market. They don’t know anything about it. They don’t know what the prices are. They don’t know how to get around in the area. Those kind of things show. But it would be so much better if they had a good contact in that next town to say ‘I’m not the right person. I exclusively work with people in Winterhaven. But Scott in Lakeland knows everything about Lakeland. He’s the guy.’

Right. Yeah, it is like Progressive. If you go to Progressive’s website they give you the better rates of their competitors, and interestingly, for 15 years they’ve been the number one seller of auto insurance online. So I guess it does work.

Yeah, that’s interesting isn’t it, because they’ll tell you who has a better deal than they do?

Yeah. And no one had ever done that before. They were the first organisation to do that about 10 or 15 years ago, which is cool, because Progressive is the name of their company and what they did was very progressive. So they had the brand consistency and everyone started talking about it.

And then when you do limit, when you do narrow your focus like that, you get to be “that guy”  who works with self-employed business owners or works with first time buyers.

Yeah. The concept of being that guy or that girl or whatever, I addressed this in one of my other books because it is always this negative connotation. Don’t be that guy or she’s so that girl. Well yeah, that’s when you’re talking about someone who is getting drunk and puking all over people’s shoes at the bar. That’s not the type of that guy you want to be. But being that guy, being that girl, it is about uniqueness and it is the answer to three questions: what are you known for; what are you known for knowing; and what are you known as? Essentially the goal is to become somebody who reminds everybody of nobody.

And I know that you, in taking that to the next level, are about having all of that permeate everything that you do, even and especially your business card.

Sure.

What is your philosophy around business cards?

Well the business card philosophy revolves around a key component to what I believe is a success of sticking yourself out there, and that is the seamless consistency of brand touch points. And you’ve got to think of it as branding. And I don’t even like the term personal branding. I don’t like marketing or branding. I talk about that in my new book, about how I hate those words. And it is like let’s not brand, let’s not market, let’s just transfer emotion. Because that’s what it is. It’s a transference of emotion; sales, marketing, whatever. So business cards, I encourage people don’t have one. Now, when I say don’t have one that doesn’t mean don’t carry anything. I say instead of having a business card have a philosophy card. And here’s the difference. A business card has your contact information and looks, unless you work alone, like a bunch of other people’s. It doesn’t give any value, kind of boring, and when people come home from a networking event they have a little stack of business cards and they get back to their desk and they say ‘Who the hell are all these people?’ because nobody remembers. Now your challenge is how is somebody going to remember your business card from the other hundred that are in his pocket from that conference? The answer is, it’s not a business card, it’s a philosophy card. And here is what you do. You sit down with a blank sheet of paper or a new document on Microsoft Word and at the top you ask yourself a question. And I’m going to ask you a question that is, without a doubt, the greatest question of all time. And I collect questions. I have like 6,000 questions. This is number one. Are you ready?

Okay.

Ask yourself if everybody did exactly what you said, what would the world look like?

If everybody did exactly what you said, what would the world look like?

I got this from my mentor, Bill Jenkins. And he says that you ask this question because it becomes a framework for your philosophy. So you literally write like five to ten bullet points. You know if everybody did exactly what I said. And that is what is known as a back to the future question because you’re painting a vivid picture of what the desired outcome is, so now you have a framework from which you can work backwards and essentially give people the tools they need to build that world.

I love that. A back to the future question.

Oh yeah, that’s what it is all about. It’s about starting with the future and getting that outcome and then okay, here’s the deal. If everyone did exactly what I said it would be bam, bam, bam, bam. Now you have like whatever, seven points. These are the pillars of your philosophy. So on the back of the card or whatever, on one side of the card you write ‘Dean Jackson philosophy’ and then you write your points with some contact information. Maybe on the front you could put your picture or a logo or whatever you want. But the key is when someone says ‘Hey, can I have one of your business cards?’ you say ‘I don’t have a business card. I have a philosophy card.’ They’re going to feel like oh yeah, you know? I mean I do this every day and people are fascinated by it. And you hand it to them and they’re engaged immediately. And what they do is, they sort of identify their values for you because they say ‘Oh man, number six is really great. You talk about people, buy people first. I agree with that.’ And now there is this engaging encounter and it is unforgettable and they’re telling their friends. And the best part is, it gives value. And I’ve had people two years later pull my philosophy card out of their wallet and say they still keep it with them.

I’ve got a friend, Dave Kekich, who has a little booklet. It’s about business card size but it is a little booklet and it is called the Kekich Credo. It is 21 of his philosophies about life. I’ll get you one because you would love it. But yours is kind of cool because on the one side it says ‘friend of Scott’ or ‘Scott’s friend’ and then on the other side your philosophy.

Yeah, it’s kind of fun and it’s my brand. And what I’ll do is when I meet people, because it’s got the philosophy on the back and on the front it is a nametag that says ‘Scott’s friend’. And when I meet people I’ll say ‘Here you go. Now that we’re friends’ and give them the card. And it’s fun and it’s cool and it’s who I am. And what is interesting is that people will take that and they’ll wear it like a nametag and they’ll walk around and say ‘Hey, I’m Scott’s friend.’ And they’re like ‘Who’s Scott?’ and then they tell them. Thanks for the free promotion.

Yeah, that’s fantastic. Do you know where I first saw this philosophy ideas? I don’t know if you remember the J Peterman catalogue. Are you familiar with that?

Oh yeah, yeah.

On the inside of the, first of all they didn’t call it a catalogue, they called it their owner’s manual, and then on the inside they had their philosophy. It was really kind of, basically said people love cool things, hard to get things. And so this was evidenced to me by this horseman’s duster jacket that I had, is what he was saying. And the people would ask him everyday on the street where he got i. So he decided to start a company that would help people get hard to get things. And it is kind of that whole aura around J Peterman. There was a lot of stuff around them. Very cool. Let’s talk about your idea of having fans and not customers.

Customers, schmustomers.We don’t need customers, we need fans.And here is the difference.A customer is someone that maybe buys from you, maybe doesn’t, maybe once, and that is kind of it.It is a very transactional relationship.A fan is someone who sticks with you.A fan loves your stuff.A fan is beyond satisfied, beyond loyal, they’re insistent.And I got this term, once again to refer make to the music world because that is where most of my examples come from, in my living room I have my coffee table with all the concert tickets of every show I’ve ever seen in my life.It’s great.It’s back from like, you now in the early nineties when I was with my dad going to shows and then up until, what is the last show we went to?We saw G Love and Special Sauce last week.So every show that’s there and you see the memories and you see the autographs and the guitar picks and the stains from the coffee and the beer.And it’s a great trip down memory lane because that is what fans do.So the question is do you have to be a musician, do you have to be an entertainer or a baseball player to have fans?Not at all.There can be fans of you.There can be fans of your philosophy.There can be fans of your company.The challenge is to develop a system for generating, cultivating, being in front of and getting more fans throughout your business practices.That is my whole marketing plan.I have a marketing plan and it is really detailed and really complex, and if you saw it it would make your eyes bleed.So I stopped sharing that with people because it literally made them just ‘I can’t look at that because there is so much crap on it’ because it is like a mind map.So instead I just said ‘Okay, I can boil down my marketing plan pretty simply’ and it goes like this.It is just one sentence.Turn strangers into friends and friends into fans.That’s it.Turn strangers into friends and friends, that’s eight words.That’s my marketing plan.

Everything will take care of itself.

Yeah, and so the equation is the more fans you have, the less selling you do.

And fans talk about you don’t they? Fans bring other fans, turn other people on?

Oh yeah. Well, that’s what they do. Think about Green Day did something really cool. This is after Napster but sort of in that post Napster, post Metallica file sharing BS. And what they did was, Green Day essentially made their own blank CDs. They came out with their own line of blank CDs and it said ‘Green Day’ on it but they were empty. And they would sell them because they would say ‘Here is blank CDs. Why don’t you take these? Make copies of our music. Steal our music. Give it to your friends.’ And it was like, you know, they’re a punk band and it is like the most punk thing you could do. They said ‘Everyone is whining and moaning about people are stealing our music. Well, instead of complaining that people are stealing your music, why don’t you befriend the current and sort of why don’t you just go with it and turn it into an opportunity to reach out?’ So they turned it into a marketing tool. They took their fans, who were telling all their friends about it, and just made it easier.

And now everybody sees the wisdom of that don’t they? I mean it is funny how back then it was, and I guess today it still is, but it is becoming more mainstream to give things away.

Yeah, and they’re promoting interaction between current fans and potential fans. So now the challenge for brokers, real estate agents, service professionals is how can you get that involved? Maybe you could, I’m just kind of throwing ideas out here, maybe you could do a public seminar or a lunch seminar for ten of your customers and tell them each to bring a friend of theirs, who is maybe in the market or has got some questions, just for fun and hang out and do that. You could do that. You could take them out to lunch. I mean why not take your customer out to lunch, have him bring one of his prospects, you bring one of yours, you have a good time? There is so many ways to get the interaction of existing fans and potential fans together that if you create a plan to do it, it pays off man. It will fill your bank account.

Well that leads right into something else that you always say that I love, is that writing is the basis of all wealth.

Yes.

Now that, it sounds kind of, you look at that statement and you say ‘Is that really true?’ and then when you really think about it, everything is about, I’m going to let you talk about what you mean by writing is the basis of all wealth.

Well that is another cornerstone of my practice. And Jeffrey Gitomer, one of my mentors, first taught me that years ago. And yeah, it’s easy for me to say that because I’m a writer and it makes sense because I’m a writer. I think for people who aren’t writers, they might not see the value in it. So I’ll show you a couple of examples of why that is true. First of all, we should break it down because there is three components to that definition. First there is writing. Writing doesn’t necessarily mean writing books. Writing means publishing. Writing means communicating. Writing means clarity of your thoughts and the ability to articulate, as I stumble over that exact word, to articulate them in a way that delivers value. That is what writing is. Maybe writing is simply writing your goals down or looking at them three times a day. I mean I do that. That is a form of writing. So that is one area of it. Basis, writing is the basis of all wealth. So the second component that it is the basis is because writing is the baseline of everything. If you’re a broker, if you’re a real estate agent, you’re being paid for your knowledge and you are a resource. You have this expertise that your clients want. So the question is, is everything you know written down somewhere? That question rules my daily activities. For me, everything I know is written down somewhere and if it’s not, I’ll write it down when I think of it, because I know whether or not things have been written down. So any expertise you have, it needs to be written down because the next question you start asking yourself to leverage it is well, if I’m a broker and I start, let’s say I took 15 minutes in the morning, every morning, just to write out my thoughts about how to become successful in the real estate industry or just whatever, my philosophies from the card, from earlier? What if I wrote about that stuff? Well 15 minutes a day doing that, if you do the math, 15 minutes a day is less than 1% of your total week’s time. It is really not that much. So if you challenge yourself to do that now you have a clarity process that you can revert back to every single day and eventually you’re going to have some good material. It is not all going to be good. I mean I write four to seven hours a day. I mean half of it is crap but you have to do that. You have to get the shanks out of the way. So once you’ve written some cool stuff and you’ve got some ideas you think you know, this would be a great white paper or I could put this on my blog or I’m going to send out a weekly ezine to all of my customers and I’m going to pull one module from each of these. And your question is, now that I have this, what else does this make possible? That is the leverage question.

Yeah. You say so much of it is about really having an outlet too. We’ve been talking about getting your thoughts out there, getting your message out there and a blog is really the perfect place to do that. What are you think stops real estate agents and mortgage brokers specifically from writing a blog?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a real estate or a broker, the same excuses, not reasons.It is the same excuses that people give for not writing and for not blogging, and they’re all kind of related.I’ll give you a couple of examples.The first thing people probably say the most is ‘Well, I don’t have time to write.I don’t have the time.’No, you do have the time, you just choose not to use it for that activity.

Right.

People say ‘I can’t find the time’. Well yeah, because if you try to find the time there is the potential that you won’t find it. When people say ‘I can’t find the time’ or people ask me ‘Scott, how do you find the time to write?’, I say ‘How do you lose the time to write?’

That’s great.

We all have the same amount of hours in one day. Once you realise writing is the basis of all wealth you’ll take time to do it. Instead of finding time, you’ve got to make time. You have to create it as a non-negotiable in your daily schedule. Other excuses that people give, people will say ‘No one is going to read it’. Actually you would be surprised how many people read your stuff online. Whatever you believe and you post it on your blog, I guarantee you there is a thousand people on the internet who agree with you. So you have to put it out there. The other thing is, people will have the excuse well, nobody cares. You’re right, they don’t care. That is why the challenge when you’re writing is to not tell people what you’ve done, but to tell them what you’ve learned, the lessons from what you’ve done and then the practical application of those lessons that makes people money. If you can do that, you can talk a little bit about yourself, but as long as it is practical, as long as it cuts to the chase and as long as you get to the point and give people practical value, then they are going to listen. I’ll give you one final excuse that people don’t write. I think they do it because they, as a business coach I work with a lot of writers. And probably the most common barrier that I work with with my clients is they feel that there is a need for structure and a need for perfection that they have to get over before they can publish anything. And the perfection trap, I get that and I’m not going to really go into that much. You think it has to be perfect. It doesn’t. But the other trap that people will share is that oh well, I don’t know if I should write yet. It’s not perfect and I don’t know how to structure an article. Just make a list. It is so simple. Just make lists. People don’t’ care about reading the story of how you overcame and financial debt and the adversity. Just give me the meat, the guts, the good stuff. Just make a list. Every article you write, just make out ten ways to this, five strategies for this, ten phrases to avoid, and just do it and just give people that chunky, easy to digest material. And it doesn’t even have to be that great. As long as the content is there and the writing style is fairly good then you’re solid.

That’s a brilliant piece. Another thing, something that I often do is think, you know when you kind of, I know you say this too, but with writer’s block that there is no such thing as writer’s block. You have thinker’s block. And if you just sit down and think for a couple of minutes something will come to you. But one of the fail proof or failsafe ways of getting an idea, getting something that is going to add value, is to start out with the words how to, because there is no possible way to finish that statement without providing some benefit.

Yeah. And I would even take it one step further to give yourself an idea quotient and just pick a random number and say seventeen ways how to blank, and then your brain has to finish that list. So you know force yourself to do an idea quotient. You made a really good point just a second ago when you were talking about the challenges people have with writing. And you said it better than I did just a second ago. Damn it, what did you say?

Not writer’s block, but thinker’s block. That sounded really good to you because I was quoting that right out of your book.

Right. I thought it sounded familiar.

You’re thinking to yourself that really is brilliant right there.

Wait a minute, that was good.That must be mine.I think that is a valid point because that is an excuse, well I have writer’s block.My dog is jumping on me.Hang on for a sec.Yeah, there is no writer’s block.That’s a lie, it’s a dodge, it’s an excuse.Writing is an extension of thinking, so if you have writer’s block you have thinker’s block.So there is a couple of ways you can overcome that.The first thing is to read more books on thinking and creativity, a pretty easy step.There’s a lot of books out there written on creativity that are not creative, ironically, so be careful.Just buy everything Edward De Bono has ever written and you’ll be fine.

He’s brilliant, yeah.

Just read everything he’s ever done and that will keep you, there’s like 30 books. That will keep you busy. And then once you’ve got a baseline for your creative process and your thinking process, maybe you don’t like writing. Maybe you’re better at physically speaking. Well fine, buy Dictate. It’s a transcription software. You speak into a microphone and it transcribes it for you. That’s writing. That is a form of writing. All of these things are. The point is, it is an extension of thinking. So if you want to be a better writer, you’ve got to be a better thinker.

And you know, a lot of times what really stimulates ideas, especially for a real estate blog, would be looking through the local newspaper. Looking through the newspaper, seeing what the headlines are, what is on people’s minds, because that is what people are talking about and you’ve probably got a unique context around that. You’ve probably got some interesting ideas around it. So even if you take the newspaper, you look through the newspaper, there are three articles in the whole newspaper that are applicable that you might have a commentary on that you could literally call up and use that I Dictate service and just talk your thoughts about that newspaper article, link to the article in your blog and then have your commentary on it. I always laugh because I saw a documentary about the makers of South Park and how they said their whole life changed when they realised that they could get story ideas from the newspaper.

Oh yeah. If you watch South Park it is straight from the headlines, like two days later, because they turn it around so quickly.

Yeah, it’s because they’re procrastinators.

They are. They’re also smart and they know about fuelling the fire. I’m dong some press releases and doing some interviews for TV and radio for my book right now. And we positioned it not hey, there’s a new book, because number one, no one cares about my book. There are 485 new books every single day. So therefore, mathematically, my book could not possibly be news. Now granted, it is probably the only book out of 485 a day that is going to do the two books in one, the flip flop thing. And that is kind of cool and clever, but that doesn’t tell you anything. So we positioned the most recently press release not how to stick yourself out there, but more specifically, the press release is about elevating your visibility inside your company to solidify job security. So I mean I’m not an expert on job security, that’s not my thing, but I know approachability, I know visibility, and that is a function of sticking yourself out there. So we positioned a press release where it is okay the economy sucks, job stability is wavering, lay offs are abounding, so what are you going to do to stick yourself out there? What are you going to do internally to attract more responsibilities so that you become more valuable and essentially, less likely to be fired? So what we did is, we spun it a little bit. We took what was going on currently, which is the bad economy, and then we filtered that into my area of expertise. And the challenge for each person as brokers, agent, whatever, when you’re out in the world and when you’re reading the paper or online, there is some questions you can ask yourself. You already asked the question if everybody did exactly what I said. You can take it a step further. You can then start to ask yourself what does this have to do with my expertise? How does this example fit into my theory of the universe? What’s my point on that, or if I were going to tell that story, what would be the 15 lessons people can learn from that story? Because telling a story is not enough. I mean if someone tells you a story of how they had this rehab in the slums and how they rehab-ed it and they got all these great deals and they had these awesome contractors and they sold it for triple its value, well that is a great story. My question is what are the 15 lessons you learn from that story? Find a way to extract that and then you’re not a storyteller, you’re now a distiller of wisdom.

You know one of the strategy that we teach the realtors and mortgage brokers is to send a monthly newsletter to all of their clients. And one of the insert pieces that I suggest is having an insert called Know Your News. If you watch David Letterman you’ve seen him do know your <inaudible> or know your current events. And Know Your News is to do something like that. Right from the headlines look at how it applies to your fans and give them your perspective on it, because all these people want to have a unique perspective when they’re in a conversation about something and it would give them something to add to a conversation about what is going on.

Yeah. You’re essentially giving them fuel to become the most interesting person they know.

yes, and that helps doesn’t it?

Boring people are avoided.

Scott, any final words of wisdom or any one thing that you would recommend for our real estate agents and mortgage brokers here?

How about two?

Alright, two.

Okay. One of them really isn’t a piece of wisdom, it is an additional resource that I like to provide for the people listening.

Okay.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a lot of lists and a lot of resources. There’s one particular list that I think would be helpful for the group here. Earlier we were talking about the entrepreneurial thinking process, because whether or not you’re an entrepreneur or whether you work for Remax and there is a thousand people or if it is just you, we all need to understand the basis of entrepreneurial thinking. So I have a little report that I put together. It’s called ’99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur Even if You Aren’t One’. And if anybody wants a copy of this just send me an email and I’ll send you over the link to where to download it because it is a great resource. It is just some cool stuff that I’ve learned that is helpful from over the years. You can just, I guess Dean, if you want to just put my email address on the blog and tell people to send me an email.

I’ll do that.

That is a cool resource because the other part of sending that to everyone is we don’t have enough time to cover everything, so I want to make sure people get the most out of today’s experience with some additional learning. Okay?

Perfect.

And then I will leave you with one final piece of advice.It is so hard to boil it down to like one thing.Well I mentioned this just a second ago.I briefly hit on this.I wrote a blog post the other day called ‘How to Become the Most Interesting Person you Know’ and it did really well and it got a lot of re-tweets and a lot of links and stuff like that.And I guess what I’ve discovered is there is some validity in making yourself more interesting.And I think you’ve seen that as a commonality.Whether it is the philosophy cards or your writing or the questions you ask or your niche, challenge yourself to become the most interesting person you know, because being boring is taking money out of your wallet.

That’s fantastic and true.

That’s all I’ve got man. I’m done.

I appreciate your time Scott. It is great to talk to you. The book, two books in one: Stick Yourself Out There and Get Them to Come to You. I’m going to put links to where people can get your book. I’ll put up some links for your seven other books as well, which I highly recommend. And next book we’ll do it again Scott.

Cool. It’s my pleasure. Thanks Dean.