Playing Blind Archery

Important Note: This is just a small part of an 8-page Q&A inside my December Newsletter which is focused on the keys to becoming a Renegade Millionaire. To get the full newsletter with additional articles and insights, become a member of my NO B.S. Newsletter before we go to print in a few days.

All of December is dedicated to help build Renegade Millionaires through Definite Goal Setting & Autonomy, which includes…

- An article from Russell Brunson about his definite aims with the Napoleon Hill foundation
- My new article “De-Randomizing Successful Achievement” with both Thoughts & Tactics needed to build your Renegade Millionaire System
- 8-pages of Q&A about creating that clarity and purpose, both in thought and in tactics
- “How I Went From A Struggling, Lost Serial Entrepreneur To Creating The Business Of My Dreams” by our member Kannary Keo
- New Article “4 Ways To Immediately Cash In With Upsells” by Jim Edwards
- And much more…

December’s newsletter is going to print on Monday, so depending on when you’re reading, this is your last chance to get your copy on your desk.

And I guarantee you won’t find a bonus offer like the one we provide for the NO B.S. Newsletter, with over $19,997 of pure money making information, my gift to you.

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Question from Russell Brunson:

I want to go back to Napoleon Hill’s first law of success, Definiteness of Purpose.

When you go into any agreement, whether it’s with a client or a goal for a business or whatever, and you’re picking that definiteness of purpose, what’s the process in your head of finding that clarity around the goal.

I know what it is, my team knows what it is, this is what we’re going toward. And obviously we have the rules and the structure, but I think a lot of people struggle with knowing exactly what target they’re aiming for.

Answer from Dan Kennedy:

You’re absolutely right. I call it “playing blind archery.”

A lot of people, in operating themselves, play blind archery. And a lot of people around them are confused and left to their own devices. Of course, if you shoot enough arrows, some of them will hit the target by accident, but that’s not a very productive or profitable way to approach much of anything, right? The opposite of that is great clarity. Hill used the word definiteness; we can use the word specificity.

Often you start broad and fuzzy. Let’s take Disney, not necessarily the Disney of the moment, but historically. They started with a very broad, big purpose: to be “The Happiest Place On Earth.” There’s no way to implement from just that. If you turn an army of 50,000 employees loose to run parks with the instruction: “Make sure this is the happiest place on Earth!” lots of luck with that. From there, everybody had to start to figure out what that meant. What makes people happy? And what makes them unhappy?

Under the Unhappy List, you get what irritates or annoys them. This is an exercise you can do with any business, because in reality, one of the things you would like your business to be for its customers is “The Happiest Place On Earth.”

The exercise is to ask these two broad questions:
- What makes people unhappy about a dental practice? What irritates them, what annoys them, what scares them?
- On the opposite side of that ledger would be: What would make them happy or happier…or at the very least, less unhappy?

So Walt and team had to crawl their way from the big idea to specificity, then get some principles, laws, strategies, and tactics. Because with a big operation like that, you’re gonna have to break it down place by place, function by function, experience by experience. Checking in at the hotel front desk is one thing, waiting in line to get on a ride is another thing, getting food is another thing, and so on.

I have often started a day with a new consulting client by backing them up from the narrow objective they came in with. They often come to me with some version of “I want a better ad / better advertising / better marketing.”

“But why?”

Often they’ll say, “Because I want more customers.”

“Well, do you really want more customers? Are you sure? Maybe you need fewer customers but better ones.”

So there’s this exploration to get to a clear picture of what success will look like at a benchmark. If you’ve ever assembled anything—some kind of toy for a kid at Christmas or, God forbid, furniture from IKEA—you know that the instructions aren’t nearly as helpful without a picture of what the completed thing looks like. That picture’s really important. It’s visual, factual, statistical; it’s what the success is gonna look like. Only then can you start to engineer it, figure out what’s gonna be required as governing principles for that to happen.

So if you loop back around to Disney, one of the things everybody figured out that would be necessary for happiness was cleanliness. What makes people unhappy about a lot of experiences, at parks and amusement parks and restaurants and public places, is that the locations are dirty. There’s trash on the ground and the restrooms are not clean. A governing principle became “We’re gonna have the cleanest place on earth.” Now we can move to strategies, tactics, and rules.

For example, a strategy would be to have a trash can every X number of feet, highly visible, more trash cans per square inch than any other place, so nobody’s got an excuse not to use one. They’re reminded all the time, “Hey, throw your trash away. There’s a trash can right here!”

Tactically, we’re gonna have a whole army of people in special uniforms running around and cleaning up. Not only are they cleaning the place up, their guests see ’em cleaning the place up, and therefore they realize they’re supposed to keep the place clean too.

Next are rules. A rule would be that everybody picks up trash. At Disney, you will see executives in suits hurrying through the park or down the boardwalk on their way to a meeting at the convention center, and see them stop and pick up trash. They will not leave it for the trash-picker-upper person, because the rule is that everybody picks up trash.

So this is a process of getting to macro and micro clarity about your purpose and your objectives.

If you take over New York City, and you define as a purpose that you’re going to have it as safe as possible for people to walk around and take the subway from place to place, now the process work begins.

- How the hell are we gonna make that happen?
- What principles have to be agreed upon?
- What rules have to be enforced?
- What strategies can we use?
- What tactics can we use?

Like signage becomes a big issue, as it is at Disney, tactically.

A lot of this stops at the vague end without process. People get together in a business for their annual retreat and they rewrite their mission statement, which is gonna get framed and put up on a wall at every location. They talk about company goals for the coming year, maybe they sing “Kumbaya.” HubSpot’s big convention is coming up and they have former president Obama as their keynote speaker. And no former president could really say anything that would be useful for everybody achieving whatever the stated goals were, but there he is.

In my first sales job, there was a company meeting. I flew from Cleveland to LA. It was the first time I’d ever been on an airplane. In the meeting, the sales manager and one of the three owners sat down individually with each territory sales guy, looked at the numbers, looked at the territory statistics, and set quotas for the coming year, by quarter—basically goals for how many total sales were going to be generated, how many new accounts were going to be opened. That meeting took about a half an hour.

I was brand new and didn’t know anything. I assumed it was possible that there was a system to this. So after the meeting, I asked the stupid question, “How do I do that?”

And nobody had an answer. The owner later said to me, separately and privately, without the sales manager there “You know, you’re the first person to ever ask that question.”

So everybody left the meeting and wandered off, uncertain about anything but the goals written on the wall. Well, that’s not gonna get you anywhere, right? I’m set loose with a company car, a five-state territory, a list of accounts, a list of potential accounts, and a trunk full of samples. Go get ’em. This is no good! There need to be governing principles enunciated, like how you decide where to go in the territory or when you start work every morning. Then there need to be rules, like rain, snow, sleet, if you’re a postal worker. Or the rule is that you visit no fewer than eight accounts a day every day in person, and you’d better be able to prove it at the end of the week.

A couple weeks later, one of the guys from that sales job was sent to spend a week on the road with me, sort of the learn-by-shadowing thing. Nice guy, but here’s what I learned from him: