The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [43]
In a like manner, even though Bryan is by societal standards far more successful than I am, I still give him advice—about health and nutrition, which is one area I know a lot more about than he does, from my life experience and self-education.
Furthermore, I didn’t just wait for him to ask me for this advice. Once we had become close enough, I called him on it. I basically told him he needed to pay more attention to his health and his eating habits, an area of his life I felt he was neglecting.
That is one of the most powerful things you can give someone, ever: a wake-up call. To my surprise, rather than rejecting, ignoring, or dismissing my suggestions, Bryan actually listened and incorporated what I suggested. As a result I went from being someone he liked to someone he truly valued in his life.
You have to do all of this advice giving with clean intentions, with humility, and in a total spirit of service. Usually, you can’t do it right away. You must already have built up some rapport and trust together. And you must do it extremely tactfully, with a great deal of social intelligence. (If you feel you need to brush up on your own social intelligence—including your sense of tact—a great place to start is the book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman. I highly recommend this book: social intelligence is something we learn almost nothing about in our formal education.)
With all these caveats in place, if you can give someone a loving wake-up call in an area of their life where they’ve got a major blind spot, or just some well-placed advice that helps them overcome a problem or get one step closer to an important goal, they will be forever grateful.
I even gave Bryan quite a bit of marketing advice. How did I, who earns a fraction of what Bryan earns, and who was looking to him for business guidance, give him marketing advice?
Simple. While he’s an absolute master of sales, and of word-of-mouth marketing (the methods he’d used to fill his coaching practice and his other coaching programs), I saw from my own study of copywriting that he didn’t know a lot about direct-response copywriting. I started coaching him on copywriting, and even writing some of his copy for him.
Here are several areas where you can often give valuable advice to—and therefore greatly serve—people who are more powerful and successful than you are. You’d be amazed at how open potential mentors are to receiving help. And if you help them, they will help you. These areas below include, but expand upon, Eben’s triumvirate of health, money, and relationships.
MARKETING AND SALES. I have found that most people who have built their businesses around marketing don’t know jack about sales. And most people who have built their businesses around sales don’t know jack about marketing. If you learn about both, as you should if you want to be successful in life (see Success Skills #3 and #4), you can often provide business advice to a surprising variety of people, as I was able to do with Bryan.
In particular, you should learn about direct-response marketing and copywriting, the type that Eben teaches. Direct-response is all about generating sales and revenue now (as opposed to “brand” or “image” marketing, which consumes large amounts of money to generate revenue in some vague, distant future, if at all). If you can help people generate sales and revenue now, you’ll never be a wallflower; you will always find people wanting to talk with you and wanting your advice.
A few months’ worth of studying direct-response from Eben and others whom we’ll meet in Success Skill #3, and a year’s worth of applying