The Magic Question: Unveiling Forensic Handwriting With Bart Baggett
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Episode Summary:
Is it possible to get what you want in half the time? Forensic handwriting expert Bart Baggett dares you to ask the Magic Question: not only the ones we ask other people, but also the questions that we ask ourselves. They influence our beliefs, which influence our actions, and ultimately our success. Bart discusses a never-before-released 1 minute per day technique to manifest more love, happiness, and success. Even if you have studied Neuro-linguistic Programming before, this technique will surely open your mind to new perspectives. Is your desire to double your income, to get a promotion, to improve relationships, or to simply experience more joy on a daily basis? The answer is in your hands!
Bart Baggett is perhaps best known as the world’s #1 forensic handwriting expert who has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, Today Show and over 1600 radio and TV shows. During his media rise, Bart started an advertising agency for authors and experts and spoke to sold-out audiences in Australia, Taiwan, India, and the USA on both self-improvement and marketing. He launched his latest book The Magic Question to #1 on Amazon with over 100 positive reviews in the first three days.
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The Magic Question: Unveiling Forensic Handwriting With Bart Baggett
I have my friend and guest, Bart Baggett. Bart is perhaps best known as the world’s number one forensic handwriting expert. He’s been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, The Today Show and literally over 1,600 radio and television shows. During his media rise, Bart started an advertising agency for authors and experts and spoke to sold out audiences around the world in Australia, Taiwan, India and on the US. His book is called The Magic Question and it went to number one with over 100 positive reviews in just three days. Bart, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John. Great to be here. I love what you’re doing.
I always like to ask people like you who have accomplished so much if they could take us back to their own story of origin. When you were a little boy, you became fascinated with handwriting or when you were in college, you figured this out. Nobody just gets born and becomes an expert in anything, let alone the world’s number one at anything. Let’s start there.
There are two stories that come to mind and I’m pretty sure you asked me a question about me at fourteen years old, a dorky little kid and insecure. I was going to summer camp with my dad and he turned to me and he goes, “Grab a piece of paper and write this sentence. I’m going to analyze your handwriting.” I said, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t do that. That’s stupid.” He goes, “I may be stupid but just write for me.” He looked at my writing and he told me things which I didn’t know about myself or didn’t want to admit things like low self-esteem, sensitive to criticism, self-conscious, care too much, well think and he said, “The good news is you can learn this.” I said, “I can’t learn that. That’s Dr. Walker. He’s a doctor.” He said, “No, take this book.”
Within about a week I had memorized 30 or 40 little traits from one of the books and that summer camp changed my life because I finally had empathy for other people. I finally understood why the bully acted the way he did. I understood that the arrogant girl was just insecure. It was amazing. In that summer camp, I ended up holding hands with the prettiest girl in summer camp, which was amazing for I was the dorky kid and I’ve got a trophy for best camper. I ended up being onstage analyzing the handwriting of the camp director and telling people he was disorganized.
In that one week, I went from irrelevant to significant. I had empathy, I was popular, and I had status all connected to this interesting skill called hand writing analysis. Fast forward from that moment, once I learned it, you can learn it in a year to the first time I did some radio interviews when I was in college, eighteen, nineteen. I was like, “They’re going to let me get on the radio?” I have all these emotions, significance with this interesting skill. Then I had to figure out how to make a business out of it. That is the second story is how do you turn the skillset, which is either entertainment, interesting, personal development? I’m like the Tony Robbins with handwriting analysis. That’s the kind of positioning for the first twenty years of my life. Now, I do a lot of other things as you know.
Empathy is such an undervalued or often forgotten skill. It is what makes anybody successful, in my opinion, because if you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes for whatever reason, you understand why the bully is the way he is or why someone’s not jumping to a yes quite yet because they’re afraid to make the wrong decision. It has nothing to do with you or what you’re offering. It gives you so much more patience and also focus.
Knowing you personally, that’s one of your strong skillsets in person is that you are magnetic and you teach other people how to be magnetic by this empathic characteristic that you have in space. I love hearing where it all came from. With handwriting, are there certain characteristics that people can do? Let’s say you are disorganized or you’re shy or whatever your challenge is. If I would cross my T dot my I, that would start impacting my personality. Is there anything that you can share that does help us?
Handwriting is nothing more than micromovements frozen on a piece of paper. Just like your eye movements, body language. All of us can know when a puppy is sad or the puppy is happy because you’re reading the body language. It is very simple and the same thing with human beings around the world. The movements and micro movements of the frown on the forehead. Those are all things we universally accept. The problem is a lot of people that claim to be handwriting experts are not. They’re idiots and there’s a lot of bad books out there. I understand that there’s an inherent skepticism because not everyone is as talented as me and Dr. Walker and that luckily, I learned a good path.
One of the things Dr. Walker told me, which I absolutely thought was the craziest idea I’d ever heard, is that if I cross my T bar higher, meaning at the top of the stem instead of the lower part of the stem in writing my name, I will become more successful. I thought that’s insane but the cost of doing it was nothing. If it doesn’t work, I’ve got to change handwriting but if it does work, what could I be in twenty years? I was fourteen, fifteen years old when he told me this. That conscious decision to raise my self-image brought consciously the awareness of how I was behaving and that helped.
Forensic Handwriting: Affirmations don’t work, and I’m not saying that they’d never worked, but they go up against a core belief.
When I write your name, Bart, if I cross the T, the last letter and your first name, a little bit higher, that’s going to over time impact my self-esteem. Is that what you’re saying?
Yes, it impacts your thought processes, which makes you think, “I can do it.” My belief system switched and then eventually, if your thoughts change, your actions change too. I dramatically recall asking the prettiest girl out in school thinking I could be wealthy, all at fifteen, sixteen years old with no evidence board it. I wasn’t that good of a student. I wasn’t that physical. Teams pick me out last. I didn’t do kick ball.
There was no evidence that said I should be the world’s number one anything or that I could write ten books or I’m going to end up having my own radio show or tv show. There’s no evidence. The belief system changed. Part of it was the handwriting, part of it was just the journey of self-improvement and I’ve taken that message into my books and around the world.
People see this tool as an opportunity for transformation. What sets it apart is they go, “I can understand myself and I can reprogram my unconscious mind,” which is a message that everyone loves. They look at Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyers. It’s a shortcut to reprogram your unconscious mind and then people go, “That makes sense. I’m interested as opposed to some guy at the county fair that analyze your hand.” That’s not what we do, especially in the forensic stuff.
The short answer to that is yes, you can change your writing. It’s not the only methodology to change your belief systems, but it worked for me. It’s also even helped one of our friends, Sam Bata. He had a head-on car collision and he could not speak. I don’t know if you know this story but he basically couldn’t talk. I suggested that he try and write and he basically texted me, “I can’t write. I can’t even talk.” He took a pen and he started writing figure eights, which is the fluidity of thinking trait. You see that in all radio host and speakers, especially the echo ones and he said within 30 days, his ability to speak came back just from handwriting exercises.
Hand writing is a shortcut to change your belief system. Is that accurate?
Yes, it rewires your brain. Here’s a guy who couldn’t talk. Now, he can talk and it has to be because he jumpstarts the neuropathways in his brain. His hand was connected to his brain. That’s why brain writing and handwriting are the same thing. I know it works but how specific it works and how quickly it works depends on the individual.
In addition to crossing our Ts slightly higher than we normally will, you said something on underlining your own name twice when you write it or sign a card or something.
[bctt tweet=”Handwriting is a shortcut to change your belief system.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Underlining is a sign of self-reliance and leadership. When I was younger, I didn’t have any of that. I wanted to add to that. If you’re already in a position of leadership, you don’t necessarily have to do that. There are dozens of little things depending on where you are and where you want to be, what you could add or take away. Our certified handwriting experts are trained in this and so they end up being counselors and not everyone should do this and not everyone should do that.
Everyone should have a good self-esteem. The problem with that is if you raised everyone’s self-image, the relationships in the world would end in divorce because they married the person with low self-esteem. They can control her or him, now you raise the self-image, “I don’t take this crap anymore.” You can’t just blanketly change people. That’s a little more customized. The T bar is always a good place to start.
Within getting people on your team, which is a key factor in getting any kind of success, it’s who you work with and that’s what draws investors. They typically invest in the team first, on the idea second, the famous we invest in the jockey not the horse. Are there any things that people do to screen potential hires with looking at their handwriting?
It’s a useful tool. It’s becoming less useful because a lot of Millennials don’t write cursive and so around the world, you’re seeing a lot of kids don’t know how to write cursive, which is most of the research done in the 19th and 20th centuries on cursive. It’s still useful though. I can glance at a stack of applications and I know who’s going to be lazy, who’s going to be obstinate, who’s going to be stubborn, who’s going to be argumentative and you have to fit the person into the corporate culture.
If you’re doing an executive secretary, for example, you have to know the boss’ personality and if that boss is a real dominant woman, you don’t want to put another dominant woman as her assistant. It’s about compatibility. It’s like finding marriages and marriages can be complex but it’s useful. I’ve never hired anybody in the last twenty years without looking at the writing. Just to confirm either what I already think about them or to look for something hidden and when I have made hiring mistakes, I went back in the handwriting. I’m like, “It was there. I just love the person so much, I let it go.” Now, I’m sold on it.
How did you transition from being such an expert in forensic handwriting into helping create this marketing agency for authors and speakers to help them get more clients?
People are drawn to my story and they say, “You can make a great living selling handwriting analysis. How did you do that?” Of all the crazy skills and yet I’m on TV, I’m on CNN. I travel, I’ve got a school in Taiwan and India and I’ve got books in different languages. They look at that and say, “Teach me. How did you get that done?” I started working with authors and speakers to show them the map of how I integrated online marketing, radio, television, books and information products because even though I work with attorneys and do a lot of high profile cases, a lot of my revenue is from publishing. We write books and let the books and the courses make a transformational difference when I’m not there. That’s leverage.
I can be on a beach or scuba diving and people downloading books. That makes me happy because I’m now using leverage and so people want to know how to do that. I attracted a lot of people. The other thing that I did is we created a couple of different certification programs for who could duplicate my success. They say, “Bart, I’d like to be the number one handwriting expert in Bangalore, India or in Hyderabad or Jordan.”
I teach them how to position themselves so that they can be the Tony Robbins of their city and we teach them in handwriting and LPO stuff. It ended up having lots of students around the world in seventeen countries and they kept asking for marketing advice, so I ended up doing a marketing agency handling with the ad words. We ended up probably spending $800,000 in this one particular niche for forensic experts and we still manage their ad words accounts today.
We have something called the Perpetual Lead Machine and I don’t care what business you’re in, you’re constantly wanting new clients and it’s very similar to dating. Walk us through what those three steps are.
This is from a course I published called Perpetual Lead Machine, which is essentially using an online advertising platform like a downloadable book to start the customer journey, so people end up in a relationship with you. If you’re a dentist or you’re a surgeon or you’re an author or you’re a consultant, whatever you do, everybody has as a customer journey.
The metaphor for dating is such a perfect illustration. I’ve been doing these marketing mastermind calls every couple of weeks for four years and there are dozens of small little steps, whether it’s ad words or Instagram and it’s overwhelmingly confusing. It’s almost like, “How can I create a very simple chart that my clients understood what they’re working on?” If they’re working on a book, we’re going to have a book or a podcast.
They’re working on this thing, it’s going to fall into one of these three circles. In your head, just see three circles on the board. The first one is the meeting phase. You’re doing all this stuff so people can meet you and get noticed. Then the second one is the dating phase and the third one’s proposal. In those three circles, almost all marketing activities fall into one of those circles.
My experience is most of my clients didn’t know what they’re working on. Meaning they’re working on a book thinking they’re dating or they’re working on an article thinking that they’re dating but they don’t have the person’s email lists. It’s interesting getting clarity so you can say, “You don’t have the frontend of your funnel working, which means people aren’t connecting with you. How can you ever get married to them if you don’t connect with them?”
[bctt tweet=”Have a sense of timing when you ask for money.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Marriage proposal would be, “Let’s work together. John, here’s $1,000. Come speak.” Whatever that proposal is, it only comes after a proper customer journey. Just like marriage or proposal only comes after getting to know you and going on dates and before that they have to meet you. You and I can be a in the same room ten times. We may see each other but until we change phone numbers or addresses or Facebook, we’re not friends but we have familiarity with each other.
In my radio show, one of my clients paid somebody $2,500 to book her online radio shows. Her plan was to go on radio and send them all to Amazon to buy her book. That was her plan. When I showed her this chart, she’s like, “I’m going to do all this radio and not get one email address. That doesn’t sound very smart.” I said, “It doesn’t, if you want to continue dating them.”
What do you want then? Do you want $2 from an Amazon book or do you want to sell them at $5,000 transformational coaching package? People think that book or Amazon, all these things but if they fall into the right customer journey, then you can help move them along. An interesting thing is this is not necessarily a new concept but what’s different is the technology.
In 1920, it was newspapers. We read the newspaper. You had to do big print and direct mail, but it’s still the same. You have to get noticed, you have to connect with your customer. They have to get to know, like, and trust you. Then they speak with somebody, connect with them, and then they buy from you. This would work with a $10 book or a $100,000 consulting program.
Maybe you could tell us the biggest mistake you’ve seen in each circle. The meeting process, the pulling people in with some kind of lead magnet, whether it is a short book or a video that you do. What is it that you see with before people start working with you? Either they’re not doing it at all or the video is not giving valuable content. Is there some mistake that you see that people could avoid in the meeting circle?
A lot of entrepreneurs, especially new entrepreneurs, get branding and direct marketing confused. They say things like, “I want to get out there. I want to be known. I want to be famous.” They make these statements as if just having a TED Talk is somehow going to fill your pocket books with money. I flew to Luxembourg and did a TED Talk or TEDx Talk and it was a good use of my time but I have no illusion that that is going to make me money. That is a meeting thing, a TED Talk, a downloadable book, an article, YouTube videos. They’re all meeting. Here’s the deal. If they love that video and they don’t sign up for your newsletter, get into your Facebook, chat, reach out a phone number, you can’t date them again.
The biggest mistake is making this interesting content and not driving them into some lead capture mechanism where you can have permission to talk to them again. One of the beautiful things that happens in the last couple of years with very complicated technology is they can watch a video on Facebook or on my website. I can then go show those same people a video next week because they watched the first video with an email address. That’s something that Google and Facebook figured out with something called a pixel and it’s changed the game. Most of my clients are outside of America, India, and all over Asia.
In India, they’re very willing to put their phone number into a free opt in but in America, they don’t do it. America is very sophisticated. They’ve seen every kind of infomercial. They have sophisticated audiences. In different parts of the world, we can get phone numbers and addresses for $0.03, $0.04, $0.05 but at the US, it’s $1 to $10 to get a qualified lead. Therefore, the biggest mistake would be not getting a permission to stay in touch with them through an email, through WhatsApp, through ManyChat, something like that. That’s the biggest mistake.
We go on from the meet circle to the date circle and in real life. Most people know this. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve been on a date with that make this mistake, which is don’t talk about your ex on your first date with somebody. Have you not heard that? Have you not read that book? You’re monopolizing the whole day talking about how much you hate your ex. In the business context of dating, is there a mistake as big as that that you wanted to share with people not to do?
They need to think about a sequence. If someone agreed to go out with you for the first time and you’ve got three important things to tell them, let’s say you have three hours of stories about your life that you’ll probably get to, what is the first one? If the first story is about your ex, you won’t get a second and third date. Strategically think, “What’s my most interesting content?” One of the ways that I did it, because we’ve had the Handwriting University international brand for twenty years now, maybe 23. We took the last ten or fifteen years of newsletters, looked at all the open rates from hundreds of issues and we selected the five top rated headlines, open rate and click through rates.
I use data, I didn’t just guess to see what people care about. Those articles are like, “What are the five health traits? End of Relationships. Three ways to spot a liar, sexy headlines. Those are the first five dates. Whether I send an email, if I’m on a Facebook messenger, whether I’m repurposing videos through pixeling, all the things that an agency can do.
I want them to consume one of those five pieces of content because I know that if they consume that they’ll go, “This is interesting. This applies to me. I can use this in my personal life. This guy’s smart. I thought this was hocus pocus. This guy has a head on his shoulder.” Whatever that emotion or objections that you might get from taking them from, “I’m just kicking the tire. I read about this. It’s pretty cool,” to move in them in the proposal.
In the business world, we have a webinar called the Client Funnel Blueprint. The easy way to think about this and this has helped my clients understood because they look at me and go, “Bart, you’ve got twenty years of content, you’ve got 500 articles, you’ve got 50,000 visits a month. I can’t be you.” I’m like, “You know what’s interesting, you don’t have to.” You only need three pieces of content that’s interesting.
Get them to consume that and then get on the phone with them and ask them to work with you because people don’t need to spend eighteen hours with you to decide to work with you. They can watch one TED Talk and go, “I’ll hire that speaker.” That’s great, seventeen minutes, that’s done. The webinar is probably the best new invention in five years to turn a cold prospect with let’s say you just got the phone number, you sit down for dinner on the first date, one hour later, they know if they want to go to bed with you or not.
We go from the meet circle to the date circle to the proposed circle. The cliché of guy asking a girl to marry is down on the knee, wears the ring. Now, there’s so much pressure that this has to be such a magical moment, like New Year’s Eve and there’s better be fireworks and flowers and the ring is hidden in the food or something. Is there a mistake you see in the business world on the propose? Is it the people don’t even ask for the order or suddenly they go from teaching to selling and they become awkward? What’s the big thing that you see happening that people can avoid here?
There’s an inherent fear in asking for money, especially new entrepreneurs. The people that come through that love in LP or self-help or counseling, then you say you got to be a marketer. You do have inherent fear of asking for it. That is definitely an issue. The bigger issue is not the fear of asking. It’s that they don’t have a sense of timing. If they ask for the money too soon or too late, meaning that if you’re going on sixteen dates with somebody and they don’t kiss you yet and they’re not going to go into seventeenth date, they’re like, “This should have happened already.” If you’re getting all this free content and never asking for them to come to be a client, they’re just going to move on to somebody else who will because what they want is a higher level of connection with you and your company.
If you’re a business owner, understand what state of business you’re in and where you need to invest your time and money.
High level of service. They’re consuming your content because they’re interested. They have a problem, they need solutions and then they want a higher level of solution. The first one is the most obvious is asking too soon. Here’s the biggest issue, especially with let’s say coaching consultants. If you don’t do the middle circle, and this is probably the biggest mistake I see with our author clients, is they think once you meet somebody, let’s say they downloaded the book, it went from meeting to hire me. They never think about, “What do I want to do in between the date? What do I want to do? What’s my best content? What are the articles?” All you need to do is take a few chapters in your book, make an article or video. Let them consume it.
When they finally talk to you or your staff, then they’re going to be ready. It’s a timing issue. For example, I pretty much won’t even take an appointment until they’ve consumed our Client Blueprint Webinar. Here’s the important thing is if they watched the whole webinar, which is only 60 minutes, it took me a long time to craft it, same thing with the other courses or programs, if they consume that, they know at the end of my phone call, I’m going to say, “If you’re a good fit, let’s work together.” There’s no awkwardness in it. They know this is a strategy session. If you’re a good fit and you already know what I do because you watched an hour of video. You know what funnel is, you know what our agency does. If I want to work with you, I’ll ask and you can say yes or no.
It’s completely transparent like five-date rule. If it’s the fifth date, you know what’s going to happen. They asked too soon or too early. Let’s say that someone calls your company and they’ve not looked at your website. You’ve got to spend twenty minutes giving them content on what it is and then you run out of time or energy to then ask for the close. What I do is I automate everything and that’s what we do as an agency is we say, “Let’s automate the meeting. Let’s automate the dating and then let’s automate the selling when possible. Low ticket items and under $100 and people can buy it.” If you’ve got a high-ticket offer, $5,000, $10,000, let’s get people on the phone with you after they consumed all this great content and they’re going to know, like and trust you already and then they’re likely to say yes.
I talk about being a copilot with your potential buyer and when they make the announcement that you’re landing when you’re flying from LA to New York, nobody suddenly says, “What? We’re landing?” You know that’s the expected announcement that’s going to come. What I hear you saying is when you have the right timing, the proposal is inevitable like a plane landing.
They know why you’re there. It’s not like you’re dating a married woman or married guy and that’s just awkward and like, “You want to go out with me?” You should let them know in the meeting and dating phase, “We offer this service.” It’s not a surprise that you offer this service, but if you’re giving away a $10 book and all you’re talking about the whole time is your $10 book and you say, “Let’s talk about my $20,000 coaching program,” it’s a big surprise because you spend all your time talking about your darn book.
Books are lead generators. Books are meeting and dating. If you use it for free, it’s meeting. Sometimes they can just download the book and they get to know you and Amazon. Sometimes it’s dating if they consume this content, but you’d be surprised how many people buy or download my books, they’ve never read them. That’s not just me, that’s everybody. They just don’t consume the material. A book is not leading to proposal but it’s one of the best things you can do to get on the radar of people and increase your credibility.
Your book, The Magic Question: How to Get What You Want in Half the Time, somebody would be smart to buy and read that. It begs the question, can you share with us what the magic question is or do you want people to buy the book?
I’ll give the book away if they’re so inclined to do that. I’ll tell you the secret to do that. The Magic Question is a 66-page book with one technique that I’ve used in my seminars for years on how to change your internal dialogue, ask a better question and you get better results. It’s one of my bestselling books ever and it’s literally one of the shortest books. If you’re interested in knowing how to retrain your brain, how to be optimistic, how to get your kids optimistic instead of negative, it’s a great read. You could definitely buy it on Amazon but here’s the secret. I’ll tie this into this customer journey and I’ll show you exactly what I’m doing, full transparency and why it makes me more money to give the book to your audience than it is for them to buy them.
It builds rapport, it builds reciprocity and you’ll get them for free. On the website, BartBaggett.com, which is my main website, it’s a collection of everything. You will see a cover of different books. If you click on the book of The Magic Question, it opens up a window you can download a free copy. The other books aren’t that way. It’s a secret little place on the page. Just download that, put your email address and then I get permission to be in touch with you and they voluntarily do that and you’re probably like what we’re going to send you. I’ll send you all this great content about changing your life. It’s not spammy and you’ll like that and if you don’t like it you can unsubscribe. You don’t have to spend money on the book.
That’s the free book funnel and we use that and we teach that in all our programs because there’s a perceived value to a book. That book does have perceived value. You can go to Amazon to buy it. You go to Audible. It was 300 reviews on my Audible. I was like, “That’s a lot of reviews for an Audible book. That’s amazing.” They’re like 4.0, 4.9. I felt blessed that I published a great book. It got to be a good book. I’d rather give it away for free and not take the $6 or $10 or whatever and commission is. I want the opportunity to have a relationship with people and I want to be able to connect with them again.
That helps me as a businessman. It helps the customer too because I know if they like The Magic Question, they’re going to love The Unstoppable You program. They’re going to like my other book called The Success Secrets of The Rich and Happy. If I’m in Taiwan or Singapore or USA and I do a seminar, they’re going to be the first ones to show up because they’ve listened to the book. It’s good for everybody and if I give that customer to Amazon or Audible, I can’t get in touch with them again.
One of the things that’s an open loop that’s intrigued me to want to read your book in more depth is RAS. It’s the one in the chapters six. Can you give us a hint on one of those or all three of those letters stand for that make us intrigue?
RAS is Reticular Activating System. In 2002, I wrote a whole chapter about this in my biggest book called The Success Secrets of the Rich and Happy. Then I’m visiting with John Assaraf who became a real close friend in 2000. I went to his first seminar and he was in the movie, The Secret. He did some great work about the brain and I literally was relearning the RAS from him as if I’d never heard it because I literally forgot that I wrote about it. It’s so crazy. How do you forget that you write something? The fact is if it’s such an important concept and I didn’t have it memorized, it was cool to relearn it. It’s part of the brain. I don’t know if it’s a physical part that you can touch, but it’s conceptual part that sorts information based on your beliefs and your values and your circumstances.
If you’re in danger, it’s going to sort information for an exit and it’s going to sort. One of the great exercises is look around the room and notice everything brown or black. If you’re driving, don’t do this at all. Notice everything is brown or black and then close your eyes and then I’m going to ask you to start talking about what you saw and show me everything that’s yellow. Then you’re like, “You didn’t ask for yellow. You asked for brown or black.” Because you were focused on that, your mind deleted everything that’s yellow. You’ll hear a room full of people just moan and these women are wearing yellow shirt and they don’t say yellow because they have their eyes closed.
[bctt tweet=”The questions we ask ourselves influence our beliefs, which influence our actions, and therefore our success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They don’t know because they were looking for that. That’s your belief system. If you ask a better question, you’ll start looking for answers to the question of how can I have more love? How can I feel wealthy? How can I make my spouse feel love? You’ll start finding answers to what you need the most. What’s great about it is it doesn’t feel like work because it’s a question. Affirmations don’t always work and here’s why. I’m not saying that they’d never worked, but they go up against a core belief that says, “I’m not good looking. I’m not rich.” It’s like you’re saying, “I’m going to be a millionaire. I am so successful. I’m good looking,” and your unconscious mind goes, “No, you’re not. You’re a dork. You’re a fourteen-year-old kid.” The affirmations block up against a belief system and until you change your belief system, affirmations don’t work really well.
Questions don’t rub anything. They bypass all the places. They weave in an anagram, unconscious mind and say, “What if I could be a millionaire? What if I was really happy?” It just makes the presupposition that you can have what you’re asking for, like, “How good would it feel to drive a new car every year? How good would it feel?” It presumes that it does feel good. It presumes you can drive a new car every year and it presumes that you have the capacity and money to do it. All those presuppositions, seed, and hypnotize your brain to make stuff happen.
How good would it feel to have Bart Baggett as my guest on the Successful Pitch? I made it happen and I am thrilled. It was fantastic content. Incredibly entertaining. I’m going to start crossing my Ts a little higher and thank you for your generous gift to the audience. How else do you want to drive? Should people be following you on social media, any Twitter handles you want to share?
I’m on Instagram and Facebook, @BartBaggett and if you’re interested in the business model of this customer journey, go watch the webinar. I do it every week. It’s called ClientFunnelBlueprint.com. That will help you, if you’re a business owner, understand what state of business you’re in and where you need to invest your time and money. If you want to work with me, that would be great. Just download and learn as much as you can about some of the things because technology changes fast but psychology and human beings don’t.
Thanks again for being such a great guest.
It’s been awesome. Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Bart Baggett
- The Magic Question: How to Get What You Want in Half the Time
- Perpetual Lead Machine
- Handwriting University
- Client Funnel Blueprint
- The Magic Question – on Bart Baggett’s website
- The Magic Question on Audible
- The Unstoppable You program
- The Success Secrets of The Rich and Happy
- John Assaraf
- Bart Baggett on Instagram
- @BartBaggett – Facebook
- ClientFunnelBlueprint.com
- www.BartBaggett.com
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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Firestarter with Sanyika Street
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
When you are writing, you have to have good human qualities. You’ve got to know how to be transparent and vulnerable and know how to collaborate. Sanyika The Firestarter believed he was none of those. Sanyika Street was originally from Washington, DC. He moved to LA to pursue a career in entertainment. At age 24, he was doing national commercials, movies and TV shows on FOX. By age 32, he had a drinking problem which left him broken. At that point, Sanyika realized that the most important thing he needed to do was to start telling his story. The first fire he lit was the light within himself through video blogging. As he started to feel better, it opened the pathways for him to move into the space of speaking and performing arts. Sanyika talks about his YHUTU approach to rebuilding himself and blazing a trail for others to follow.
Listen To The Episode Here
Firestarter with Sanyika Street
I’m honored to have Sanyika The Firestarter who is an inspirational speaker, a performing artist, and a brand spokesperson. He uses performing art, which is basically the spoken word, music, and storytelling to entertain and inspire people. I’ve seen it in person and it blows me away. He teaches people how to be an innovative leader or how to be a firestarter. He said his mission is to help one million people find their fire and use that fire to light up the world. Sanyika, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.
You have a big backstory that I want to get into. I know that you’re originally from DC and then you moved to LA, which is where we met. Take us back at the time when you moved to LA at 24 or you can even go back further. How did you become The Firestarter?
Firestarter: I’m just a writer trapped in the body of an NFL lineman.
My first name, Sanyika, means leader of his people. A firestarter is basically a leader. The truth is that I’ve been chasing my name my whole life. I think that was in my mother’s infinite wisdom, her giving me a name that I had to live up to. Somebody asked me, they said, “Are you born a leader, or do you have to become a leader?” I said, “You’re born king, you have to become a leader.” I’m born in DC. I’m the youngest of four. I’m the baby. I am bigger than everybody else. I’m 6’8″ and I weigh about 290 pounds.
As I always say, I’m a writer. I’m a writer trapped in the body of an NFL lineman. I’ve been writing and performing since I was in fourth grade doing poetry and then getting into music in my teen years. When I was about 24, I decided to pursue a career in entertainment. I did a show on Fox called The Complex Malibu when I was in DC. When I got kicked off the show, I went back to DC. I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in entertainment.
I moved to LA to pursue a career in entertainment. In my first couple of years in LA, I did about four national commercials. I did a couple of TV shows and another one on Fox. I did a movie. During that period of time I was like, “It’s going to be like this all the time,” and no. Acting slowed down and then I decided to pursue what I love to do, which is writing. I started songwriting for artists. I started songwriting for artists on Konvict Records.
I worked with artists like Nick Lachey and 98 Degrees. We did their reunion album, rappers, independent artists, rock bands, and everybody. The thing I realized is that when you are writing, you have to have good human qualities. You got to know how to be transparent and be vulnerable and know how to collaborate. None of which I knew how to do. During that period of time, I started to slip into depression. I got into a drinking problem. I’ve got two DUIs. The interesting thing about the DUIs is that I got both of my DUIs when I wasn’t even driving. I wasn’t even a successful drunk.
How is that possible? Somebody else was driving but they gave the DUI to everyone in the car?
No, I was in the car sleeping both times. If you’re in a car sleeping and you’re drunk, then it doesn’t matter. It was a dark period for me. I was in depression. The low point for me is working at this crappy production house in the valley in LA. I was working for this tyrant owner. He came up to me one day and he said, “Sanyika, I don’t want you to use your first name with clients anymore because it confuses clients.” At the lowest point of my life, this guy is trying to strip me of my identity. We were at odds. We were arguing that day. That night, I was in tears. I couldn’t believe that I’d let my life get to that point. That was the turnaround point.
[Tweet ” There is no button to click to be a leader, only a button to follow.”]
From that point is when I started to rebuild myself. The first fire I had was the Light Within Me. I started to video blog. I realized that the most important thing I needed to do was to start telling my story. I just started telling my story, video blogging. I went through a period where I wanted to pursue video blogging and doing the YouTube thing, but after getting 50 views on one video, you realize that maybe that’s not the move. I started to feel better. It opened the pathways for me to move into the space of the things that I’m doing now.
The three things that I realized is that you got to approach it on five different levels. I had to start moving into I call it YHUTU. It is start learning more about how to be Yourself, being more authentically me. I had to learn how to be H, Honest. I had to be U to be Useful, T to be Tactical and the last U is to be Unique. What happens is a lot of people start with trying to be unique and then they end up with the U. Uniqueness is not a ploy. You’ve got to find your uniqueness. They call it your unfair advantage. You have to find your uniqueness in the process of identifying who you are to the utmost degree.
The search of finding myself is where I’m at now. After going through the process of identifying who I am, I identified that my voice is a powerful voice for change. I decided to use that to inspire people and to talk about innovative leadership. There’s a sexy word that’s going around called disruption and being a disruptor. Everybody wants to sound like they’re doing something different, but nobody wants to change.
The idea is that disruption and innovation, it comes as a result of identifying your unique strengths and being a firestarter. Being not afraid to take a few shots when you go out into the world because people aren’t going to understand what it is that you’re doing. Then you’ve got to take a few shots so that you can start leading the way. Eventually, other people are going to start following your path. I speak and perform, and then incorporate those things into my work.
Being a firestarter is being authentic, honest, useful, tactical and unique. What is the distinction between authentic and unique? If you’re authentic, I would assume there’s nobody else quite like you. Doesn’t that make you unique? How do you distinguish those two?
Authenticity means connecting with who you are. It’s the who. It’s the talents that you possess, the gifts that you have. Like yourself, you’re a pitch whisperer. You’re a storyteller. You have to identify those gifts. It’s hard to be authentic because the wave is one of following what everyone else does. There’s a button that you can click online to become a follower, but there’s no button you can click to become a leader. Being authentic means identification. It’s more about identification of who you are. When you think about unique, then you can start to veer away from who you are to start to twist and refine the gifts that you have to put a unique spin or to put a reframe on them so that they can be a little bit different than what everyone else is doing.
Firestarter: It’s hard when you are in a dark period because you’re questioning your value to the world.
If you’re unique, you obviously want to be authentic. Authentic is what layers everything around that. Is that accurate?
Yes, that’s it.
You went on to create a recent campaign, Thank You for Your Service, which is a tribute to the veterans with the Department of Defense. It went viral and it has over 730,000 views. Tell us how that came about.
You and I are both members of an entrepreneur’s community. One of the things that I learned through my dark period was that I didn’t know how to collaborate. It’s hard when you are in a dark period because you’re questioning your value to the world. Your constant unquestionable value to the world is always revealed through service. As you give yourself of service, you get this thing I call executive level reflection.
When I can see my work through your eyes and you can reflect back on me whether or not the work that I’m doing is creating positive change or positive impact, that’s of value to me. When I didn’t know myself, I used to think compliments were praise. When I started to understand who I was, I understood that compliments were data. It was information saying that I’m on the right path.
As I started to offer myself to the entrepreneur’s community that we’re a part of, the community started to serve me, not the other way around. When I started to offer myself in service, then that’s what happened. That’s an important point. I’ve got a call one day from a guy named Mike Navarre who was opening a Farmers’ Insurance Agency in Beverly Hills. He randomly heard that I did spoken word and he said, “Sanyika, I’m doing this launch for this event called Suits for Soldiers, a Farmers’ Insurance initiative. I would love it if you came to my place and you help me open my place by doing a spoken word piece. I said, “Sure.” He asked me to write a piece about being a veteran. I was like, “Sure. I’ve never served in the military. It will be a challenge for me to write something about serving in the military.” That’s what I did.
I ended up serving it and writing a piece about serving in the military. I realized that I’d never served in the military. The thing about it is I realized that the powerful perspective is that most people don’t serve in the military. There’s only about a million active duty service men and women and about ten million in total in terms of veterans. When it came to us, I thought that will be a powerful perspective to share a perspective that says, “None of us know really what it means to say, Thank You For Your Service, and let’s explore that.” I did the piece for him.
We filmed it live on Facebook. I’ve got a call from another guy named Greg Bishop who runs a network called the All Warrior Network. He said this will be great for my network. We went out to a military base in Los Alamitos in partnership with the Department of Defense. They footed the bill on the entire location. We filmed it. We put it out and it went viral.
[Tweet “Networking is for amateurs. Relationships are for professionals.”]
Let’s describe what that looks like. When you say you filmed it, aren’t you in front of some huge jet?
I’m in front of a Black Hawk helicopter. We filmed it on a hangar and in that hangar, there were eight helicopters. One of the lines that sum up the whole piece is that I used to think being in the service was just tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. The truth is 85% of military jobs are non-combat. That line sums up the fact that 85% of the people who serve in the military operate in support of the infantry, the people are on the front lines.
We were in an airport hangar with mechanics. People working on Black Hawk helicopters and many of them have very thankless jobs. They don’t get any rewards or any credit, but they are in there cranking out all day making sure those helicopters run smoothly. Thankfully, they don’t get any praise or get any recognition because the only recognition they would get is if one of those helicopters didn’t work.
Would you mind giving the audience a little sample, so they’ll be intrigued to go and watch the whole thing of what it sounds like and experience your spoken word?
Thank you for your service, but what does that really mean? I never spent a single day on a battlefield. I never had to enlist and leave my life behind. I never woke up at 5:00 for Boot Camp daily grind. I never had to practice ducking a bomb blasts or risk discovering at shrapnel fields. Thank you for your service seems empty sometimes like, “Good morning,” a phrase we say to be polite.
A soldier said to me once, “I appreciate you saying thank you for your service, but do you know our sacrifice? If you want to thank us for our service, then show us the proof. There are a few good men and women need your support, but most of you can’t handle the truth. We go back-to-back tours, winters to springs, summers to fall, we guard this country. If the coronel orders the code red, you want as on that wall. You need us on that wall.”
I used to think being in the service was just tours in Afghanistan or Iraq but the real truth is 85% of military jobs are non-combat. I was just going to say, if you want to hear more about the piece then you can go watch the rest of the video. These pieces are done in spoken word music videos. We filmed them, and I do a spoken word piece. We compose and score music to it like it was a film. These are full productions.
I also heard you give an amazing talk on how to own the stage. Since a lot of the audience are people who have to pitch to get their startup funded or pitch to get new clients, what tips do you have of how someone who doesn’t do spoken word, but they could still learn some things from you about how to own the stage? Could you share a couple of those tips?
The very first thing that I think an audience wants to connect with, and this is the reason in that YHUTU process is because being yourself is the most important thing that you can do. We’ve gone from where people on movies used to have a TV voice and 50, 60 years ago, people had a TV voice and a movie voice. Now, people want to see people who are authentic.
There’s this thing that when you’re having a conversation with someone and it comes across as very natural and free flowing, you’re laughing and joking and saying, “How’s it going?” There are all these natural intonations and fluctuations. As soon as you put a camera in front of someone’s face, they immediately turn into an assassin. All of a sudden, they go cold and dark. They’re trying to find out what to do with their hands and they don’t know exactly what to do. What happens is the same thing on stage.
On stage, people get stage fright. The idea is that the most important thing that you want to do is the same person that you are when you are shaking hands, kissing babies, hugging and laughing with people in the lobby of an event that you’re going to be speaking at. You also want to do the same thing on stage. Whatever you need to do to be your most authentic self, to be you, to be the individual that you are, that’s the most thing because people want to see congruence. They want to see that the person that you are off-stage is the person that you are on-stage. Also, what it does is it shows courage and confidence. Confidence wins immediately.
Firestarter: Strategic is not about gain. It’s about creating relationships. Relationships are the most important thing.
If you show confidence on stage, you have won the crowd. They say in Gladiator, “You win the crowd, you win your freedom.” You win the freedom with your authenticity and your confidence initially. The second thing that I’d say in owning the stage is being honest. We live in the age of everyone is trying to be an expert. The video I did with Thank You For Your Service, we call a social impact campaign.
We you take one broad social issue or a worthy cause. The power of the piece is that I wasn’t pretending to be something or know something that I wasn’t. Nowadays, because of the Internet and the fact that we have access to all this information, it’s amazing that people pretend to be experts when they’re not an expert. You can’t show me how to get a million followers when you only have 500.
Let’s talk about how many followers you do have on social media. Just to acknowledge that.
I have about 1,500 on Instagram. I have about 5,000 on Twitter. On Facebook, I have about a few hundred. Everything is growing.
You’ve gotten over a million social media views with the things you’ve done.
The reason why is because a lot of people say, “I can’t do this until I get about 10,000 followers. I can’t get on stage until I get this or until I get that.” The sky is literally the limit. If you are useful and you provide value, then you can get access to partner with people who have vast amounts of networks through their social media basis because of the value that you bring to the table. That’s what usefulness is about and being tactical in that process means that you want to be able to be tactical and strategic. Strategic is not about gain. It’s about being able to be tactical to create relationships. Relationships are the most important thing. If I go out to a bar and I’m trying to meet a woman, I’m not trying to network. I want to build a relationship with her. That’s my intention, is to build a relationship. Networking is for amateurs, relationships are for pros.
It’s important that you build relationships and that’s the tactical. Meaning, you need to know what’s of value to someone else and what the things are that you’re trying to accomplish. You need to be open and transparent in delivering those things, so you can create a relationship of mutual benefit. That’s the tactical part. After you are yourself being authentic and honest in terms of what it is that you have to offer, you are useful in terms of the information that you can provide. Also, urgent in terms of being able to deliver it with some level of importance and tactical in your process, then you can figure out how to be unique. You got to be yourself before you start figuring out how to be unique.
I was watching American Idol. This guy was dressed as Michael Jackson and he looked like George Michael. I think that in his mind he thought to himself, “That’s what makes me unique. I’m going to combine two pop stars into the person that I present to the world. That’s me being unique.” Obviously, he was just trying to be two different people. Being unique is about being able to find an innovative angle or reframe that’s going to produce a lot of value. The example that I use a lot is when Al Gore started pursuing a film about how to impact the earth in a positive way. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago the primary way that we described it was called global warming. Everyone said, “Global warming is what’s changing the temperature of the Earth. That’s what we need to fix.”
As people started to hear about that, they would say, “Maybe it’s not warm in certain places. It’s cold.” The climate is going from warm to cold.” They realized that was an unnecessary reframe. They need it to be unique. There was a change in the terminology. They changed it to climate change. When that chant transformed, when the Earth’s dilemma was reframed into climate change, just a unique perspective, then that gave a lot of opportunity for people to frame that conversation and Al Gore did that with An Inconvenient Truth. It subsequently spurred a movement and it also made him a multimillionaire.
[Tweet “You got to be yourself before you start figuring out how to be unique.”]
Good storytellers have this arc where they were at their low and now they’re at the top. I remember watching that movie where you see him going from flying in the Air Force One as a VP to waiting in line like everybody else, go through security at an airport, and then rising back to the top, but going through a rough period. He grew the beard to try and figure out who he was, and he lost a little bit of his identity again.
I think when you look outside of yourself, whether you’re David Letterman or Al Gore, and you no longer have that show or that job and that people identify you so much, it is challenging to remember who is the real authentic self. You walk your talk. You are exactly the same person on-stage as you are off-stage. It’s inspiring to watch you. It’s inspiring to be your friend. I can’t encourage people enough to check out your website FirestarterLive.com.
They should be following you if they want to keep up on these amazing social impact videos and the videos that you’re constantly putting out amazing content on Instagram and other places. Before we get to all those last-minute details, is there any book that you would like to leave as a recommendation that’s inspired you to be authentic or anything that you think would be something that you would want to promote?
I’m going to have a preliminary manual. It’s going to be the preface to my upcoming book. It’s going to be called How to be a Firestarter. It’s going to talk about how to approach and how to embody the innovative leadership. We are moving into a new phase of leadership where we are requiring more transparency and authenticity. That’s what the blockchain is all about.
It’s about transparency and putting forward everything that it is that you’re doing so that people understand the value that you bringing to the world. It’s about creating a social impact so that it’s not about just your game but the world’s game. It’s going to encompass a little bit of art. It’s going to have a little bit of strategies and tools on how to become a better and more innovative leader and some funny quips and quirks that are just uniquely me and to make you laugh a little bit too. How to be a Firestarter, it will be available on my website, Firestarter Live which is also my social media handle as well, @FirestarterLive.
Any last thought you want to leave us with about how we can remember to be firestarters and light up our own life if we tend to lose it?
The Power of Broke
Everyone from Daymond John to The Power of Broke to Al Gore is that there’s this pivotal moment that we hit. Some people call it rock bottom, like Ryan Blair. Some people call it the fork in the road. To me, I call it the lightning rod moment. That’s your lightning rod. It’s the moment that the lightning hits you. That one in a million chance, that one in a million moment where you’re walking down the street, the percentage of a bolt of lightning hitting you is obviously very small to minimal. T
hat lightning bolt hits you and it jolts you. It pushes you back. It knocks you off your feet. What happens is that you have a choice when the lightning bolt hits you, you can stay down on the ground or you can use the fact that you got this one in a million moment so that you can build up the human being that you want to become. Embrace the moment because it informs everything afterwards and tells a story that you’re going to be able to tell on-stage or in the work that you do forever.
Sanyika, thank you so much for sharing your passion, your vision, and your incredible authenticity with us.
I appreciate that, John. It’s a pleasure. John, you are one of the most rooted in-service guys that I’ve ever met in my life. I greatly appreciate knowing you and having you as a friend. It is an inspiration and I appreciate it very much and you’re a great speaker.
Thanks.
Links Mentioned:
- Sanyika
- Thank You for Your Service
- All Warrior Network
- Instagram – Sanyika
- Twitter – Sanyika
- Facebook – Sanyika
- The Power of Broke
- Suits for Soldiers
- www.FirestarterLive.com
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Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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How To Invest in Cryptocurrency
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
If you have been following the world of cryptocurrency, you may have noticed that Teeka Tiwari and Palm Beach Confidential are trending. That is because we are at the doorstep of the next cryptocurrency boom. Teeka is an editor at Palm Beach Research Group LLC and he is responsible for the firm’s flagship service, The Palm Beach Letter and small-cap and cryptocurrency advisory, Palm Beach Confidential. One of the best case uses of the blockchain is helping homeowners, and Teeka provides professional advice to everyday people on how to invest in cryptocurrency. People need to get in the game because putting your money in stocks, bonds, and real estate and calling it a day is no longer enough. Learn from Teeka as he provides insight information on how to invest in cryptocurrency without having to depend on a broker.
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Teeka Tiwari has quite an impressive background as an investment banker and now as an expert in cryptocurrency. He shares with us his incredible story of being in foster care in the UK to making it big in America. He said, “When you visualize the future you want, it becomes a reality. When you focus and outwork everyone else, success is inevitable.” He shares a clear understanding of what the blockchain is and why it’s going to change how we all do business.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Invest in Cryptocurrency
I’m thrilled and honored to have someone I met at a Brenton Woods Economic Summit. His name is Teeka Tiwari and he is the Editor of the Palm Beach Letter and small-cap and cryptocurrency advisory Palm Beach Confidential. He’s a former hedge fund manager and Wall Street executive and he’s widely considered one of the world’s premier cryptocurrency analysts. He epitomizes the American dream. He grew up in the foster care system in the UK and he came to America at sixteen with just $150 in his pocket and the clothes on his back. By eighteen, he’d become the youngest employee at Lehman Brothers. Two years after that, he shattered conventions by becoming the youngest VP in the history of Shearson Lehman. He’s a regular contributor to the Fox Business Network and has appeared on all kinds of shows like CNBC and ABC’s Nightline and a lot of international television networks. Teeka, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. I appreciate it. It’s great to be here.
I have had the privilege of watching you in action on your amazing webinar. I would love to have you start talking about what it was like growing up in the foster care system in the UK. People are familiar with what it’s like here in the US. It’s usually not a pleasant experience, and I’m hoping it’s a little bit better and not so Charles Dickens-ish as we might imagine.
The first time I entered into a system, I was eight years old. I was in a group home where the average child was at least four or five years older than me and some were considerably older. I would love to tell you that it’s a wonderful place and we sang songs, but it wasn’t. It was a place full of violence and danger. It’s a frightening and very dangerous place for an eight-year-old boy to be in. I’d get beaten up and my things would get stolen. I would have to maneuver a chair at my door to stop people from coming into my room at night. It was a terrible time. From there, I went into a foster home with a family, not a bad family, but not the greatest. I lived in a room over an uninsulated garage. At night in the winter, when you would breathe, you would see your breath. It was like being outside. The room was probably 38 to 42 degrees. It was freezing. My final foster family were very nice people and gave me a wonderful home. I can’t say enough good things about them. It’s definitely a hit or miss when you grow up in the system, and I’m fortunate that I did well regardless of what I went through as a kid.
Invest in Cryptocurrency: It’s very hit or miss when you grow up in the system.
What’s interesting to me is the whole nurture versus nature element that causes people to still thrive despite possibly not having the best childhood. What made you come to America at sixteen? That’s a brave thing to do with very little money as well.
From the age of twelve years old, I had this desire to move to New York and work on Wall Street. I remember I watched some show and they were talking about this new type of person cold a Yuppie, a young urban professional. This is the early ‘80s and I thought, “That’s cool.” I started and I saw all these yuppies who all worked on Wall Street or in the city of London, in finance. I started doing some research on this and I discovered the stock market. The whole idea of being able to buy a piece of paper and be able to sell it later at a higher price blew my mind.
Growing up, I had always seen people trading time for money. I had never seen anybody use their mind to make enormous amounts of money. That idea intrigued me, and it was like inception. It was something in my brain that would not go away. I grew up in horrible poverty and I remembered thinking, “There’s got to be a better life than the one I’m in now.” My focus was get to America and go work on Wall Street. While other kids had posters of soccer stars on their walls, I had pictures of New York. I had travel brochures all over my floor. I would sit there and I would dream about walking the streets of New York City, working on Wall Street and driving a beautiful car. It was very real for me.
The power of visualization is important at any age. I am so grateful that you shared that early visualization and how that came to be. I’m imagining there’s a story of how a young lad from the UK convinced Lehman to hire him. Did you have special skills that they said, “We’ve got to get this guy in?” You probably didn’t know anybody.
I moved to New York at sixteen. I was now eighteen and I was selling typewriter supplies over the telephone, IBM Selectric. This was 1989. I’m making $300 a week and I’m thinking, “This is the American dream. This is amazing.” I met a guy there called Kevin Wong. I would always tell people from the time I came to America, “I’m going to go work on Wall Street.” If I had met you even for two minutes, I was going to tell you about my Wall Street dream. I was telling everybody about my Wall Street dream. I met Kevin, I told him, and he said, “If you’re serious, I know a guy at Lehman Brothers.” I was like, “You do?” He said, “Yes. They’ll treat you like hell, they’ll pay you like hell but they’ll give you a shot.” He gave me a name of a guy called Frank. I called him and he’s like, “Come in for an interview.”
I didn’t have the right clothes to wear to go to Lehman Brothers, so I went shopping. I bought a pair of gray slacks and I didn’t realize that when you buy pants, you have to get them finished. They’re unfinished. My pants are dragging on the ground. I’m wearing fake leather shoes with white gym socks, a pink polyester shirt, a pink polyester tie, and no jacket because I can’t afford one. I walk into Lehman Brothers, which at that point in 1989, 55 Water Street was the highest producing retail brokerage office in the world. It was doing $150 million a year in commission, which was a lot of money for retail.
[bctt tweet=”Visualize the future you want.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I go to the interview with Frank. This guy looks at me and shakes his head and says “You’re a nice kid.” He’s trying to let me down easy. “This is not for you. Thanks for coming in.” I look at Frank and I said, “Frank, I just want a shot. I’ll work for free. I don’t care. Just give me a shot.” There was something about that he liked and he gave me a shot. Back at Lehman, if you work 60 hours a week, they only pay you for 29 hours and they paid us $4 an hour. I was in the door, I would work nights and weekends to make ends meet.
Talk about the determination and passion you had that he was able to see past your clothes to say, “I’m going to give this willing to work for free.” That’s the way you were. That guy must be so happy he gave you that shot. How did you get to be so successful so fast?
I haven’t always been like a natural study at things, but one thing that I have and I consider it the greatest equalizer, is I have an ability to work, focus and outwork anyone. I tried to make myself as useful as possible to as many people as possible to learn as much as I could. Then I read everything on investing, how to give presentations, and understanding and selling to an affluent market. This is not anything people told me to do, I just did it. I would practice presentations because at eighteen, I was driven but I was shy.
Social interactions were very difficult for me, so I knew I had to overcome that. I read a lot and one of the things that I learned was that people cannot tell the difference between somebody who was confident and somebody who just acts confident. That was groundbreaking for me because I wasn’t confident but I could act confident. I could say, “These are the markers of a confident person.” It was a pantomime I’d go through and people would respond to me as if I was confident.
Invest in Cryptocurrency: Make yourself as useful as possible to as many people as possible to learn as much as you could.
Stand up, straight eye contact, all that good stuff that you pantomime. What I’m getting from this is that success is inevitable when you focus in that work with other people and combine that with acting as if you’re already confident and you will be.
I firmly believe that success is an act of will. All creation is an act of will. Some of us were born with these skills and others of us, like myself, had to learn them. These are learnable skills and they have nothing to do with how smart you are at math or how good you are remembering facts. Anybody with average intelligence can become successful in their chosen field. I possess average intelligence and I would say my differentiator is the ability to focus on things that move the needle in my life. I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule, which says, “20% of your actions create 80% of the results in your life.” I focus most of my time on that 20%. I’ll sit down and I’ll say, “What’s the 20% of actions that move the needle in my business life, personal life, and health?” I build my life around that.
I love that because people get overwhelmed and they don’t know what to do first. If you focus on what’s going to get you the biggest bang for your buck and do that first, you’ll be successful in all areas. You have a success story that I heard on your webinar that I’d love to have you share. What did you do that had you become the youngest VP at Shearson Lehman?
I was good at raising assets, creating great relationships with my clients, and generating a lot of revenue for the firm. I was the number one rookie producing broker in my first year. The second year, I was one of the top five producing brokers in the office. I was very good at what I did. They were afraid that I was going to get poached. I could imagine the discussion was, “We’ve got to make Tiwari our VP,” and it meant a lot to me as a kid.
Everyone’s ego gets stroked by that title but back then, that’s fantastic. I know that your expertise is in the cryptocurrency advisory role. All the lessons you’ve learned from your expertise on Wall Street are now being taken to the blockchain. I hear a lot of people saying the blockchain is as revolutionary as the internet was, and we certainly heard a lot about that at the event that we were at. The analogy I loved was the internet didn’t take off until email and blockchain’s killer app is Bitcoin. Can you share with us what you see as far as impact and opportunity around blockchain and cryptocurrencies that are using it?
A blockchain is a form of a database. It’s not that sophisticated. A traditional database has a central repository of information and then you have a lot of people hitting that database for information. The problem with a centralized database is that it’s very easy to manipulate. We’ve seen companies like Wells Fargo go back and change records on their database because it’s a centralized database. There’s no oversight there to prevent that. The blockchain solves this problem and it does it because it keeps an identical copy of the data on thousands of machines. An example of that would be Bitcoin. How do we prevent people double spending their bitcoin?
[bctt tweet=”When you focus and outwork others, success is inevitable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The way that’s done is that say there’s 50,000 machines on the Bitcoin network and they all have an identical copy of the ledger. Before somebody can make a change to that ledger, let’s say I want to spend some Bitcoin or you want to send me some Bitcoin, the note that you’re trying to do that through will compare their version of the ledger with everybody else’s version of the ledger. If everybody else’s version of the ledger says, “John has that money that he can send to Teeka,” it allows the transaction to happen. Those transactions happen in ten-minute blocks of time. All those transactions in that ten minutes are correlated and then tacked on to the block of information that came before and that continues.
What’s the advantage of that? You can’t double spend and you cannot go back and change data in the blockchain because you would have to take control with 51% of all the computers on the network and you’d have to do it simultaneously in order to tamper with the blockchain. Because the Bitcoin blockchain is now so large, there isn’t enough computing power available to try to coopt the Bitcoin blockchain. It gives you the ability to have a universal source of truth that you can rely on. When you can do that, it opens up all these new avenues and applications that never existed before.
One prime example is with stocks. When you go and you buy a stock, the person that you’re buying the stock from might not have the stock that you’re buying. They might be lying about it. There’s this three-day period where the firms have to make sure that this person has a stock, make sure you have the money, then they have to transfer it over. That whole process, which is called trade settlement, costs about $20 billion dollars a year. If you put all of that on a blockchain, it says, “John owns us thousand shares of IBM,” and the blockchain says, “Teeka has this $146,000 to buy the thousand shares.” Then you can do the transaction immediately and eliminate any of the of the back-office functions that chew up so much capital and time.
I’ve never heard anybody explain it in terms of ten-minute blocks of time that create a blockchain. Everything the readers and I do is all about what makes a good pitch. What problem are you solving? Who do you help? What problem do you solve? You did a great job of explaining the transparency factor combined with the time savings, which then gives huge cost savings. People will start to get a little bit more in-depth understanding of how the blockchain technology is revolutionizing not just cryptocurrencies, but the authenticity of, “Is that food organic? Is that jewelry or art authentic?”
If we double click on how that’s impacting cryptocurrencies and your expertise in particular, what you offer is insider observations through your ability to focus on in the Palm Beach Letter and the Palm Beach Confidential that is so valuable to people who are overwhelmed and they need someone like you to curate for them. If I want to dip my toe in, where should I start? Is what you’re offering that accurate?
[bctt tweet=”Success is an act of will.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I travel all over the world and meet with development teams, venture capitalists, and the people that are putting together different blockchain types of solutions. My job is to uncover the ideas that are worthy of investment and very few ideas are. There’s a reason why I don’t recommend ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings. It’s because about 85% of them are just fraudulence. Another 10% to 13% of them are bad ideas and maybe 1% to 2% of them are good. You have to go through a lot of different ideas in order to find ideas that will work out over the long-term.
One tip out I’ll leave the audience with is that as you’re examining a coin or use case, you should always think about, “How is this coin going to aggregate users? How are they going to incentivize usage of the coin, adoption of the coin?” Having a great idea is not enough. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s getting people to migrate over and use your solution. The very best projects have great incentives built into them that make it easy to adapt and make it a no brainer for people to adapt their solution. That’s what I try to focus on.
Invest in Cryptocurrency: 85% of ICOs, initial coin offerings, are fraudulent, 10%-13% of them are bad ideas, and only 1%-2% of them are actually good.
There’s been a big shift from tokens being just utility versus now being perceived as security. I’m involved with one that is an asset backed with residential real estate of fractional ownership. That’s our solution. It’s how can we create something that people are understanding and feeling comfortable with because a lot of people understand real estate. I like to say that when Bitcoin gets a cold, the rest of the alternative coins gets pneumonia.
If we’re creating a token that’s backed by actual net asset value of owning small percentages of thousands of homes, we’re not going to be as affected as the other ones that are not backed by assets. I was curious to hear your thoughts on tokens that are backed by assets, whether it’s real estate, gold and art as a potential way that they might have an incentive for people to use it because they understand it.
This is an area of token economics that I’m excited about. What I’m excited about is that we can take previously illiquid assets or assets for the average person could not own a fractional piece because they don’t have enough money and we can tokenize them. For instance, homes, shopping malls, massive buildings, stadiums, these are things that would have required enormous amounts of funding by massive banks that individuals haven’t even been allowed to buy a piece of. Through tokenization, you can create these types of investments that can give you equity ownership directly into a performing asset, can give you income that is directly paid to you via the blockchain, and gives you ownership on something at a fractional level that would never be practical before. You take $100 million building, you can’t make money selling thousand-dollar pieces of it but with the blockchain, you could do that.
That’s why I was so excited to join quantmRE because I saw that there was fractional ownership happening where someone has a million-dollar home and they only have a mortgage payment of $500,000 and they want $100,000 out. Their only option is to refinance it or second mortgage HELOC, which means going into more debt. The ability to give people $100,000 in exchange for owning 10% of their house is fantastic, but it still requires all those investors to wait for that person to sell their house before they get their money back. By tokenizing this, we’re making this illiquid asset of all that equity that’s sitting in people’s homes liquid because now people can buy and sell an asset back token without people having to sell their homes.
To your point, everyday investors who maybe want to get into real estate but don’t have the money to own an apartment building or a rental house can now get in because they’re owning a fraction of a fraction of someone’s home without having to be a landlord. That’s one of the best case uses of the blockchain, helping everyday people who are homeowners and helping everyday people who want to invest. It becomes a great digital on ramp for institutions where your background is. From what I understand, Smith Barney is hiring several hundred people to start analyzing cryptocurrencies for their clients to figure out where they should be going. If people are smart enough to subscribe to your Palm Beach Confidential, they’ll get their own insight information without having to depend on a broker.
I wouldn’t trust brokers yet with crypto research.
They know they need to get in the game because it’s no longer enough for people that say, “Put my money in stocks, bonds and real estate,” and call it a day.
Everybody should have at least a small allocation to crypto. The point that I want to hammer home is that be rational. I recommend if you’re a smaller investor, $200 to $400 per idea, if you’re a bigger investor, $500 to $1,000 per idea. I suggest never put more than 5% to 10% of your liquid net worth into crypto because they’re incredibly volatile. The truth is we are very early in the cycle and some of these ideas won’t make it. Some of them will go to zero. I suggest having a broad-based portfolio and using an equal dollar amount in each one, this way you don’t over own a loser or under own a winner.
It’s a great strategy. If you look at all the dotcoms back in the ‘80s, some made it, some didn’t. Looking at tokens or coins that are backed by actual assets give you some level of comfort that the homes are never going to go down to zero in value. When the housing market went down in 2008, they didn’t go down to zero and now by 2018, they’re all backed up to where they were a little higher. If you’re willing to take a long view, real estate can be a great place to have some of your money in it. With tokenization of it, it becomes a whole new wave because before nobody could get into those assets.
We’re going to see a lot of assets that were once highly illiquid become liquid through tokenization. Another area you’re going to see liquidity come to is in private equity. If you invest in a private equity fund, your money is tied up for seven to ten years and you have zero liquidity. You’ll start seeing private equity funds start to tokenize and a whole secondary market will spring up around private equity as well.
Invest in Cryptocurrency: You’ll start seeing private equity funds start to tokenize and a whole secondary market will spring up around private equity as well.
What is also exciting is that not only do you let people get into something that they haven’t been able to get into and liquid. For those people who want to invest in stocks, you can buy mutual funds. There’s always a certain percentage of people, I call them the “Laptop and Latte Crowd.” Those people at Starbucks with their laptops and they like to invest on their own and think they can outsmart the S&P 500. The blockchain is allowing quantmRE to let people say, “I want to buy homes that are within a certain area code or zip code of where I live because I know this market well. I don’t want to buy all the homes that you own.” When you have that kind of flexibility, you’re allowing people to use their knowledge and creativity to invest in something in a small zoom in way, like monopoly meetings Zillow.
I’m not familiar with quantmRE. This is the first time I’ve ever heard about this project, John.
It’s this concept of using the blockchain to take something that’s illiquid and making it liquid with some social impact thrown in. That goes back to what you said. A good analysis of what’s the incentive for people to adopt using a token that’s backed by an asset. It makes it much more compelling because it’s not so attached to Bitcoin’s volatility.
A lot of people ask, “What’s the point of Bitcoin?” For me, Bitcoin is a store of value. It is the equivalent of digital gold. It’s the world’s most secure way to hold and transfer value. There will only be 21 million of them, and about five or six million of them have been lost forever. When people say, “You can’t go into a store and use Bitcoin to buy a latte,” that’s like saying, “I can’t use my Ferrari to tow a bunch of firewood. It’s not designed for that.”
[bctt tweet=”Focus on things that move the needle in your life and build your life around that.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you start looking at things on a global level, that’s what interests me. You zoom out and it’s the world looking for some digital currencies where they don’t have to pay fees to convert from dollars to pesos, pounds, and euros. You start to get a picture of how big this can be. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your expertise. Your personal story is riveting. How can people follow you on social media? Let us know what’s the best way to keep track of how you’re continuing to give advice.
We have a free eLetter, which you can sign up for at PalmBeachGroup.com. I don’t use a social media channel.
Go there for the free newsletter and that will get you in the world of your expertise. I personally have studied who you are, what you’re doing, and your expertise. It’s a world that once you start to enter, you feel like you’ve gotten some water after crossing the Sahara because it’s so refreshing and so easily understood in a way that’s not with all the hype but with all the insights. That’s what everybody needs.
Thank you so much, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Teeka Tiwari
- Palm Beach Letter
- Palm Beach Confidential
- Teeka Tiwari’s webinar
- quantmRE
- PalmBeachGroup.com
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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