YOUR ATTITUDE

BELIEVE

That's stupid. Where would all the money come from? And who would cook the Big Macs? If everyone were an entrepreneur, who would be their secretaries? The truth in all of this is that few people are meant to be financially independent. That's a basic and necessary fact of our civilization, until such time as its basic heirarchical structure changes. In fact I always get a kick out of hearing that America is a wealthy nation when I know perfectly well that over a third of its population lives in poverty. It's more accurate to say that America has the world's largest overall upper class.

Your belief in whether or not you're going to become one of the successes in any field of business will come across in your thoughts and actions. This belief will influence everything from how you write your ads and salesletters to how you market your product and talk to customers on the phone. It affects the level of energy you devote to developing new products and services, and the quality of those products.

Unless your name is Joe Cossman, you must believe in your product so strongly that you REALLY feel your prospects would be worse off not buying it. Anyone who has had this attitude in promoting a product can tell you the difference it makes. It's worlds apart from the "make me some money any way I can" strategy of some beginners.

Have the strength to stick with your own carefully considered opinions. Never trust an expert just because he's an expert. Many of them became rich and famous decades ago when there wasn't as much competition. They're probably not actually doing as well as you might think these days, because they're using marketing techniques that are seriously flawed, but still getting away with it because of their experience, reputation, business contacts, etc. I know of a couple of very popular guys that simply sell their mailing lists and books and give seminars to make money; the direct mailing pieces they send out are awful and they don't even bother to do follow-up mailings!

In short, veteran businessmen have certain privileges combined with a world of experience, and get away with things a beginner couldn't get away with. The irony is that you will be getting a lot of your education by reading books written by these gentlemen. Some books may contain bad advice because the author has no intention of helping you, or is telling you what worked in 1956, or has simply forgotten some of the most important wheeling and dealing he had to do to get where he is. Looking back into his successful career to uncover the real secrets of his success takes a lot of energy, and it's so easy to write a book like everyone else's instead. By providing bad, misleading or incomplete advice (read "fluff"), the book-writer can lead any number of people down the garden path, which leads straight into mail order hell.

For example, every outer circle advice giver is telling their readers how to do targeted outer circle marketing by finding a mailing list of dog owners, swimming enthusiasts, chocolate lovers and so on. This isn't bad advice, as such, it's just incomplete. What they're not telling you is that the viability of direct marketing is dropping exponentially due to market crowding and growing consumer disgust with what they so eloquently call "junk mail". Many experts like to rant and rave about what's wrong with other people's marketing.

But they never provide statistical proof that their advice creates better marketing than the other guy's. One of my favourite authors has a tendency to give specific examples of other people's supposedly awful marketing documents. But funnily enough, about half the examples he gives look good to me. Before blindly accepting the advice of the experts, judge the evidence for yourself, especially when they don't back up their claims with facts.

CONDITION YOURSELF

It's very simple: pick an event which happens at least once or twice a week that uplifts you and provides you the support you need to believe you're really going to strike it rich in direct marketing. It could be receiving a check of $20 or more, or compliments from satisfied customers, etc. Whenever this event happens, you will remember to immediately produce a "feel good" behaviour. It is crucial that a certain positive mental state, hopefully an extreme one, exist while you are doing this. In order to engrain this behaviour in your brain, to give it impact and strongly associate it with the positive event, it should ... 1) be unique 2) have auditory (sound), tactile (touch), and visual components 3) occur in the same place whenever you do it right after the uplifting event.

Thus a good "feel good" behaviour would be to hold your hand in a certain way, and yell the word "Cowabunga!", while you look at your hand and bang it against your desk. You decide on your own. You may have to decide on one that is less embarassing, if your family or business partners are around. Next comes the important part. Since emotions run both high and low while you're establishing your business, you need this technique to get over the "lows". Just because you regard everything as a learning experience and are determined not to be stopped, doesn't mean you will not get angry, frustrated and down. Luckily, as you will see, a "feel good" behaviour can rescue you from your deep blue funk.

Try this: the next time a frustrating event happens relative to your mail order career, produce the Feel Good behaviour, and watch what happens. Your mood changes, from negative to positive. It is as if the behaviour is reaching back into your mind and telling it "You must be in a good mood, look at what you just did!". The behaviour that you have conditioned to be associated with euphoria will change a negative emotional state to a positive one. Don't take my word for it - try it yourself.

DON'T BELIEVE IN NEGATIVES

1. Chance events, whether negative or positive, ARE NOT strong enough to stop a truly desirous and dedicated person from achieving his goals. Each circumstance (which some people mistakenly label "positive" or "negative") is interpreted in terms of how they're going to get what they want. Each circumstance will help them along the road they're already travelling, or make them change direction as required, but never stop them. You can't stop a dedicated person. It took Abe Lincoln 40 years to become president, and his trip along the way would be seen by anyone else as a just cause for suicide. But Abe had what so few have ... a real desire. It was his destiny. His belief was "I make things happen. I am therefore in control" which reflects what psychologists call an internal locus of control - the belief that one's situation in life is a result of what actions one has taken.
2. Chance events ARE strong enough to stop the undedicated dreamer who sees the forces beyond his control as "positive" and "negative". This produces an unrealistic reliance on chance when something positive happens, and a tendency to throw in the towel when something negative happens. This is known to psychologists as external locus of control, the belief that the events in one's life are largely the result of factors beyond one's control. People with an external locus of control believe "Things happen to me. My life is out of my control".

In my brief mail order career, I have made a list of mistakes too long and embarassing to mention here. Many of them cost several hundred dollars. But the fact that several hundred dollars is a lot of money, merely makes me appreciate the lessons all that much better. Satisfied that I have found a marketing technique that does not work, I move on. At no point have I told myself that I am out of control. Everything that has happened in my business is a result of my actions. The same goes for you! You must think this way.

This is the crux of mail order decision making, where 90% of all people that claim to want a mail order income actually stop after 90 days or less. I needn't mention that a person needs at least 6 months in mail order before he/she starts to get a grasp of the big picture, and can figure out how to offer something valuable and ask for money for it. Anybody in business for less than 6 months was never in business at all.

Every time you make a mistake, ... 1) you have SUCCEEDED in producing a result. 2) this result can, depending on its nature, tell you about mail order statutes, marketing techniques, human nature, etc. 3) what you learn will steer you right in future and make it that much easier to get where you want to go. Want some examples? During my first year, I ...

1) Experimented, experimented, experimented - and lost all the money that experimenters lose - for no good reason. I hadn't figured out that I should be ASKING important people for advice and reading as many books as I could get my hands on. The positive result is that I now can tell other people to ASK for advice and save them a lot of time and money.

2) Right around the time the first edition of this book came out I was broke. Is that bad? Not at all! It forced me to learn how to get free advertising, something I may have been too lazy to do otherwise.

DON'T GIVE YOURSELF AN "OUT"

Right from the start, you should get a 1-800 number, answering machine, computer if you can afford it, quality stationery, printed envelopes, bulk and book mailing licenses, etc. Until you get these things done, you'll have a voice in the back of your head saying "You're not in over your head yet. Why not come back down to earth and stop this self-employment nonsense?" With an "I can always quit if I want" attitude, you'll be sending out mixed messages to yourself and to potential customers. You might think they can't tell that you're only half serious, but they can. So be completely serious. Start in on your business like you're sure it will be a big success. That's the attitude you should have! Create, within your financial means, an office that says "I have a successful business", before you even start marketing. Then make it successful. Get your NEBS and QUILL catalogs and do some shopping.

THE SIMPLEST PROCRASTINATION SOLUTION IN THE WORLD

I ADVERTISE THE PRODUCT BEFORE IT'S FINISHED

A word of caution here - don't advertise too soon. If you've got a book planned down to the chapters, headings and subheadings, then go ahead and advertise based on a realistic schedule of how soon you can finish it. If all you know is that you're planning on writing a book and haven't written anything down yet, don't even think of advertising yet. Don't promise something if you're not absolutely sure of your ability to deliver on schedule. One thing you might consider is to plainly state in your ad, article or press release, the launch date of your product or service. If you think I was finished this book before I began marketing it, think again!

THE PROPHETS OF DOOM (PODS)

A POD will hassle the hell out of you because you're losing money as you start your business, even though it's impossible not to lose money initially. Then when you begin to break even and show a profit the first thing out of their mouth is "Yeah, but that's not much of a profit. Are you sure it's legal? You know, cousin Jed landed himself in jail on account of blah blah blah...". The point is, the POD is not engaging in rational conversation with you. Whether the POD is your mother, father, child, sibling, neighbor, pastor, or paperboy, don't bother arguing with them. I haven't quite figured out why the PODs do what they do, but I think it has something to do with Satan. What they want is to waste your time and energy in pointless, pessimistic conversation and try to make you feel so hopeless that you quit being an entrepreneur and sink back down to the POD's level of mediocrity. Instead of giving them what they want, ignore them.

If they still don't shut up, tell them "Look, instead of listening to you blab on about how my life is supposed to be horrendously unfulfilling just because yours is, I'd rather be doing something constructive. Go ahead and wallow in your stupid misery. Just don't waste my time with it." And if that doesn't work, shoot them. Defeat does not occur when you run out of money. Defeat does not occur when a trusted partner messes up. Defeat does not occur when a book that you spent 6 months writing flops. Defeat does not occur because you have just wasted an hour arguing with a POD instead of working on something constructive. Defeat never occurs within the first 6 months of business, because that's just not long enough to do anything!

Defeat occurs when you decide that you are defeated. Does your decision to quit involve education, gender, race, age or ethnic origin? To be sure, these factors can have their effects. But don't kid yourself that any of them can defeat you.