Episode 99 – Think Big, Act Bigger with Jeffrey Hayzlett

Jeffrey: Yes. I started my life and everything in South Dakota. South Dakota is my main home. That's where my wife and I purchased our home home where our children were raised, and we have our business there as well. But then now I have offices in New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Sioux Falls, people all over the the place, and we owned a couple of different companies, and I started about 14 corporate boards for public and private, and then host my own television show, my own radio podcast on CBS as well, I'm an author, a speaker and that's me, that's what I do – and I'm a part-time cowboy. I wish I was a full-time cowboy and eventually someday I will be a full-time cowboy, but right now it's just part-time.

Brian: Well, everybody's got to aspire to something.

Jeffrey: You gotta have a dream. You gotta have a dream, dude. You gotta have a dream.

Brian: Absolutely.

So give me a little background on the book. What inspired you to write it, and what's the main concept of it?

Jeffrey: You know, the biggest thing is I'm sick and tired of people putting the abstract obstacles in their way of getting things done. I don't care whatever it is you want to do, about your business, and it's primary about business, but it's just as much a like book as anything. Think Big, Act Bigger: The Rewards of Being Relentless, because I found that the people who win aren't the lucky ones, they're the relentless ones. Yes, there are some lucky ones that win the lottery and usually most of those people go bankrupt. What I want to do is focus on how you steam roll the obstacles, go around them, go through them, go over them to eliminate all these excuses. I'm sick and tired of hearing people give excuses why stuff can't get done or why you can't do things.

Let's give you a good example whether it's in a business where people say, “Well, we tried that once before.” Or, “We can't activate that because Tuesday is the best day to activate and today is Wednesday.” That's ridiculous. Or, “I want to spend more time with my family.” Well if you do, what's stopping you? That's what I talk about, is what are the stories, what are the ways, what are the obstacles that are getting in our way and what are we going to do to knock through these because you can be a better you.

Brian: And it's always good to be a better you.

Jeffrey: Exactly, yeah.

Brian: And I'm always striving to do that. That's why I love doing this show, it's because I get to speak to people like you and learn some great new concepts and help spread the word a little bit and help educate some other people along the way.

So, tell us a little bit, Jeffrey, about you have 10 main concepts in this book. Can you give us just kind of a broad brush overview of those?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of it, but let's give one that's around focus because I think focus is one of the biggest things you have to do and I don't want to go over all 10 of them, but I'll give you one that's on focus. The biggest part of our problem is we get focus and then we lose focus. In the book I give an example of what you got to do to kill squirrels, because they're evil little creatures. I'm really talking about the business squirrels, but I use this from the movie Up and then there's an Ed Asner character, an old man, and a young boy scout who inadvertently go to a little trip to Paradise Falls, and they run into Doug, the talking dog. Doug has this collar that's been outfitted by this evil genius and you're allowed to be able to hear Doug's thoughts. So it speaks whatever he's thinking. Doug comes up to you to talk, “Hi, I'm Doug the talking dog and I think you're a very nice person,” and all of a sudden he looks away and he goes “Squirrel!” And that's what happens everyday in business, and probably happening in this interview. Right?

It's just about how do we eliminate, and what we've got to do in our daily lives to kill those squirrels that come up. You know, I'll check Facebook [inaudible] and two and-a-half hours later you're looking at the top 10 celebrity photos that turned people's heads or something. It's about getting rid of that trap and focusing in on the things you got to do to be successful. That's really what it is. I use the analogy that it's called hard work because it's hard. It's not easy. It's hard. And that's really what you have to know going in. You have to have great focus.

Brian: I love the squirrel thing. That's one of my favorite things.

Jeffrey: It's a good story. I got a lot of good stories. I like telling stories and most who people know me either in television, with the work that I do on the C-Suite TV, or just when I'm on stage because I do about 150 keynotes a year. I love to tell stories and I think stories is a great way for us to understand what we have to get done.

Brian: So aside from focus, what are some of the other things that really hinder people from achieving their maximum potential?

Jeffrey: There's so much of it. One, let's talk about failure for a minute. Right now we've got this huge culture around failure that it's almost like a badge of courage. They're even seeing a great deal of people in the startup community [inaudible] become valid talk about how many times they've failed. I don't know about you, but failing's for losers. I'm not trying to be flippant about it, but what I want to do is change the way we think of it. Someone once asked me in an interview about this and he said, “Jeff, what's your biggest failure?” I said, “I don't know. I haven't done it yet.” I didn't mean just to pacify them. My point is, I don't think of failures as failures. I think they're just the steps towards getting to success. So rather than wanting to fail fast, how about we start moving fast? How about we keep the focus on that and try some much more positive focus. We should strangle failure. We should choke it off.

Someone once asked, you know Thomas Edison, or made a comment to him publicly that, “Hey, you failed 10,000 times in making the light bulb.” He said, “No, I found 10,000 ways not to make a good light bulb” or a great light bulb, I don't know what exactly his quote was, but it's pretty close to that, and I think that sums up that he didn't look at those as failures, he looked at those as just steps he had to do to get to where you want to go. I think if your focused on that, on succeeding fast, that is getting towards what you want to in terms of your goals, you'll get there a lot faster.

Brian: Yeah. Mindset plays such a huge part in success and failure. You can get yourself into such a funk that you just can't succeed. So that's a great point.

What are some of the other tips that you like to give people when we're talking about achieving that incredible success?

Jeffrey: Well, the other piece, the other one that I would focus on is around conditions of satisfaction. So what are your conditions of satisfaction? What I mean by that, what's your mutual goals for achieving what you want with key people that you're supposed to be doing it with? And what do I mean by that? Whether you've got a vendor, whether you've got a partner, whether you've got a wife, or a husband, or boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever you've got, or even your kids, you're always setting these promises. I call these conditions of satisfaction, not goals. But these are the promises, things that we're gonna to get done – ways that we're gonna get things done.

What are your conditions of satisfaction? I don't think enough entrepreneurs and enough business leaders think about that. We look at goals. I'm not talking about goals. I'm talking about things that you have to get accomplished. So I don't look at things as goals. I look at things like what's my promise? If you've ever made a pinky promise with your kids to take them to Disney World, that's what I'm talking about. Try to back out of that sucker. They'll kill you. “Dad, you promised. You promised!” Well, the word “promise” takes on a whole new matter of definition. That's why I say what are your mutual conditions of satisfaction, the promises?

For me in my personal business, they're very simple, and I apply these across my life. One is I want to build wealth. I want to make money. That's [inaudible]. I want to have a certain lifestyle that for me and my children and when I pass, I can pass that on. That's what I'm here to do. Second is I want to do things that are interesting. I like to learn. So I like things that are challenging, that cause me tension, you debate things, that challenge me all the way across the board – physically, mentally, whatever, even financially in a lot of cases. Then the third thing is I like to have a lot of fun. If I can't have fun doing what I'm doing, what the hell am I doing it for? Those are my three things.

My question to you is and for those listening, what are your personal conditions of satisfaction? And then are you outlining those and do you know how much money you want to put into the business before you decide to get out? How much time do you want to spend? What's the return you want before you pull the plug, or add in the next level, or do the next step that you have to in that business, or in your life in general.

Brian: Great stuff.

So Jeffrey, if somebody wanted to get ahold of your book, what do you suggest? What's the best way?

Jeffrey: Wellll, to get a hold of it, you need to buy it. So buy it. The best way to buy it is to go Amazon. You can find it there, Think Big, Act Bigger: The Rewards of Being Relentless. You can find it at Barnes & Noble. In fact right now, if you buy the new Galaxy, Samsung Galaxy T2, the new nook, you get my book for free along with three other big books. That's an incentive if you're looking to upgrade your eBook, but we're obviously on iBooks and the Apple bookstore, we're in Barnes & Noble, we're on Amazon and we're in independent bookstores. In fact a lot of airports in airport shops are taking them and I'm stopping through the airports and signing those as I go through. If you want to do that, it's a great chance to pick up one up there, too.

Brian: That's pretty cool. It's like airport Russian roulette, “Was Jeffrey here?” It's so cool.

Jeffrey: Yes, and I'm signing them. Yes, like crazy. In all of the different bookstores, I'm stopping in and signing them at Hudsons and WHSmith and all the other groups that are out there.

Brian: Very cool and you got a lot of great reviews. I'm just looking at this, you got Piers Morgan, Barbara Corcoran, Harvey Mackay and Penn Jillette from Penn & Teller. Some really big wonderful people have given you some lots of reviews.

Jeffrey: Some very good friends and some great people are part of it, and we're just so happy just to have that. It's nice.

Brian: So Jeffrey, if people wanted to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeffrey: You know you can find me anywhere on the internet, but if you look at our website at Hayzlett.com. You can find us on the C-Suite Network, CCTV, tweet me. I'm available all the time.

Brian: Fantastic, and I want to thank you personally for adding me to your C-Suite book club, It's Not About You, It's About Bacon is in there, and I really appreciate that, man.

Jeffrey: You got it. Well, we love bacon, man. Anything with bacon is at the top of my list.

Brian: Amen, brother. Well, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Jeffrey: All right, my friend. Thank you.

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