How To Make What You Sell (Book, Course, Movement) A Perennial Seller (With Ryan Holiday)
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What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. First off, I'm just excited you're here and hanging out with me. I do not take that for granted.

And excited to spend the next little while with you. This episode is going to be a fun one, just partially because this is the mindset I'm in right now. I'm thinking about this a lot and wanted to bring it to you guys because hopefully you're thinking about it as well. People that come into my world traditionally aren't just people who are trying to figure out how to make money. Most people who come into my world are very impact driven. They're trying to change the world. They've got a message. They've got a mission. They've got something that they care about, they're passionate about, and they want to share with more people.

Those are usually people that bump into me and follow me and hang out with me. So I'm assuming that's you if you are here today. And if so, I want to talk about something that I think a lot about. I don't know about you guys, but

And I think like most people's journeys, when I got started, I wanted to make money. And then I started making money and I realized how shallow that felt. And then I started seeing the results from people that had bought stuff from me. And I saw how fulfilling that felt. And I was like, okay, note to self, focus on helping other people. Money will come, but like that's what's fulfilling is the serving other people. Right. And so for me, it's been, I've been in this business now over, over 20 years, um,

Yeah, like it's crazy. I've been doing this this long. I think about wrestling, like I was obsessed with wrestling and my wrestling career was probably 10 years long. So I've been doing this twice as long as I wrestled.

which is strange to me still when I think about how time works and time flies like my my twins that were born just yesterday or just both graduated from college or from high school sorry not college they haven't just graduated from high school and um anyway so for me it's just I keep I mean time's going faster and faster you know I'm like man I don't know how long I'm gonna be here who knows like um and what am I leaving behind like what's the what's the impact I think and the legacy like what do you leave behind and anyway so that's always on my mind and I think

I know I'm working on my first personal development book. It's been working for four years, which, you know, partially because the last four years have been chaos. Like you get sucked into business and marketing and everything else I do. So I haven't had time just to sit and do nothing but write like some authors do. In fact, I remember when I, uh, when I got my first royalty, uh, when I signed with Hay House, uh,

I just, I don't really read contracts super deep. My team does and lets me know if they're good. And so they're like, yeah, everything's according to what we talked about. So I signed it. And anyway, I get a check in the mail, like a royalty check. And I didn't know what it was for. And I like messaged the publisher. I go, Hey, you guys sent me a check. I,

I don't know why I'm going to send it back or rip it up, whatever. Like, that's your royalty payment. I was like, what? What's a royalty payment for? And they're like, well, most people when you decide to write a book, you take a year off to write the book. So this is the money you get in advance so you can live while you're writing the book. And I was like, oh,

I didn't know people had the luxury of stopping everything else to write. Can you imagine that? Like, I'm still running a company with 400 employees and a million subscribers. And, you know, anyway, so it's just funny. But anyway, sorry, tangent. This is Russell tangent. But I come back and I'm saying, like, as I'm writing this book, I want to write something good. Like, not something that's... That's not true. I don't want to write something that's good. I want to write something that's great, right? So that's the...

that's like the the thing i'm always thinking about and i feel like i have the foundation right now and i feel like there's something really cool i want to share and say and so i'm finally getting in back into the process and things are moving forward which is all fun so that's kind of some of the updates on my book journey but what i want to show you guys today is just this thought that i keep having like how do i create something that lasts beyond me right um

And it could be anything from a book, from a course, from a coaching program, from a, I don't know, whatever the work we're doing. Like if you're going to create it, might as well create it in a way that lasts beyond you, right? So that when I'm gone, that my kids, my kids' kids and their kids can hopefully profit from this thing, right? And right now I'm sitting in one of my libraries with a whole bunch of old books. I'm looking at these things. I'm looking, man, the amazing stuff these people left behind that, you know, outside of me, most people don't know about this stuff. They're not geeking out about it. They don't realize that like,

Man, some of the best men and women of our time, of all time, have written words and left them behind, and most people don't know about them. And you guys know about some of the people, right? And the question is, like, why do we know about some of the people, not others? Like, what goes into writing something that lives beyond the author's life or the moment, right?

And again, it doesn't have to be a book, but obviously for me, I love books. So that's kind of the lens I look through, but like how do we create work that will last beyond it? And Ryan Holiday, who's one of my favorite authors, by the way, I'm sitting in the office right next to my Stoic section. So I've got like some busts of like Seneca and I got paintings of Stoic stuff and then all the books here and then all these old, old Stoic books from them. I mean, they're old, but they're still like...

1700s, but you know, stoicism was way earlier than that, but you know, they're so old, they're cool. They smell good. So I'm looking at all these books and I have a whole stack of every Ryan holiday book next to it. And most Ryan holidays books nowadays are about stoicism, right? His first books, the very first got started, were all about marketing. Um, and there's one book kind of in between that he wrote called perennial seller. And it's like one that no one's ever heard of, I feel like, but I honestly think it's, I don't know. It's one of my favorite books, but the premise of that book is how you create

work or art or something that goes on to live beyond yourself, right? And what's the science behind that and how do you do it and stuff? And so anyway, it's such a good book. But I'm here today to tell you that because I geeked out so much a couple years ago from Hiking Live, I had him come and speak on how to become a perennial seller.

and it was after, I think it was right after Obstacles Away came out, and I was like, hey, I want you to speak at my event. Can you speak on Perennial Cellar? And he was like, do you want me to speak on Obstacles Away? I'm like, eh, that book's good, but I want to write my favorite one, which no one knows about, which is Perennial Cellar. And he's like, okay. So the whole presentation was about that, how to create this work of art that lasts beyond you, and something I reference back to. I listen to it, I read his book about it, and just I think about it a lot, like as I'm creating something, like how to create something that's going to live beyond me. And so there's a lot of,

There's a lot of ideas and things that go into that. But I wanted to share this with you. And so, actually, I'm going to do two things. Okay. This is what you get when you're spur-of-the-moment recording a podcast episode. I'm going to share with you the presentation from Ryan Holiday. Let me come back. I'm going to get permission while I'm editing or recording this. But Annie Grace, who's one of my favorite people in our community...

She's someone who wrote This Naked Mind, which is a book that's gone on to sell millions of copies. She's written a perennial seller and it continues to sell all day, every day. You see some books like...

Well, like Girl, Wash Your Face, like sold insane amounts of books and then kind of there's a peak in a valley, right? Whereas Annie's book didn't ever like blow up like, like, you know that, but it continues to sell and increases in sales over time, year after year after year. So she wrote a perennial seller. And I remember she sent an audio message at a year or two, two years ago at one of our inner circle meetings to everybody who wanted to learn how to write in a way that's going to last beyond time.

And so it's a seven minute Voxer message. I'm going to get her permission to put that in this podcast, but it'll help you to take some of Ryan's more like the philosophy stuff and actually break it down to a very tangible, like here's how you write, here's how you structure courses or content where the human mind can remember it and it can be simple, it can be easy. So again, this was a Voxer she sent just to our inner circle group, but man, it was so powerful. I thought I would share with you guys here too. So with that said, we're going to watch this presentation from Ryan Holiday and

How you guys doing? Good?

All right, so everyone in this room is here because you make stuff and you sell stuff. And that's really important and it's lucrative, but you also know that it's really, really hard. Elon Musk once compared starting a company to eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. Does anyone know anything about that?

Of course you keep starting companies, right? So everyone in this room also has a problem, right? We're not rational, sane people or we wouldn't do this. But we do do it. And my argument is that it doesn't matter what you make.

At what scale you make it at, it's really hard, right? Companies, art, work, life, all of it is extremely difficult. And so if you're going to do something difficult, if you're going to do something that's risky, right, you might as well do it right. I'm amazed at the amount of time people spend years of their life starting a business, writing a book, creating a screenplay,

launching some sort of artistic or entrepreneurial career, and then it's over like that because they didn't think about the principles. They didn't think in advance about the ethics and principles

And the principles required to make something that truly lasts, that has the chance to endure. It takes the same amount of time to make something that doesn't last as it does to make something that does last. So you might as well do it right and you might as well do it early on. That's my argument. This is my longhorn. Her name is Domino. She's about 22 years old. So she's older than most of your businesses. Right?

right? But I'm interested in making something that lasts that long or longer. And the truth is, people have been creating sustainable, profitable, interesting businesses for a very long time. Kikkoman Soy Sauce, which I had on my sushi this morning for lunch, was started in 1917. It's over 100 years old. Fiskars Scissors, on the other hand,

dates to the 17th century, right? Zildjian cymbals, right? You've seen them on the drum kit of every band you've ever liked.

started in 1623. They made cymbals and drums for Napoleon's army like 200 years later. So they've been around a long time. There is a locksmith here in Nashville that has been in business since the Civil War. That's a pretty good run, right? People have doors. They need to lock them. They lose their keys. It's been a sustainable, enduring business.

There's a restaurant here that's been in business since 1907, pretty good run. The Grand Old Opry just down the street from here.

1925. Again, pretty good. I had dinner at a steakhouse last night across from the Capitol that opened in 1910. People met there as they hammered out the details of passing the 19th Amendment, right? That's how long 19th Amendment is the one that gives women the right to vote. That's how long this place has been in business, right? You can do this. You can make something that endures. And if you compare that to the fact that

that most businesses are not only not profitable, but they don't last very long. These businesses are crushing it. One of my favorite restaurants in all of California is the Original Pantry Cafe. It's across the street from the Staples Center. It's open 365, 24/7, so it's literally never closed. You can see here on the door, there are no locks on the door because it has never closed.

Now, what I love about the pantry is that it's an all-cash business. So they probably haven't been paying taxes. They've been crushing it for 100 plus, almost 100 years now. It's a good run. I would rather own the pantry and would probably be a better business decision than whatever the highest rated Michelin star restaurant in Los Angeles is, right? And which one is likely to still be here a decade from now or five decades from now?

BMW has been in business for so long that the ad campaign, the ultimate driving machine, is 50 years old. So again, when you find something that works, that totally nails what customers want, you don't have to do it over and over and over again. You can create a growth machine that continues, that perpetuates itself. And I think that's the point. When you make a business that lasts this long, it has to be profitable. No one can subsidize losses for profit.

for years and years on end, you look at something like Craigslist, right? Craigslist, 1995, pretty good run. Last year, Craigslist revenues were about a billion dollars.

900 million in profit, right? I'd rather own Craigslist than WeWork, right? So the point is you want to make a business that's got sound principles, that does a really good job for people, that has a chance to endure. It's not about chasing who's hot right now. It's about who has the chance to keep going. ClickFunnels, 2014, pretty good run, right?

Let's see where it can go. Are they building in the principles? Are they thinking about the big picture? And where can they go? And what's interesting, though, is that you might think, oh, the longer a business has been in business, that probably means it's sort of coasting to a stop. It's on its way out. Actually, in economics, they have a term for this. Basically, what's classic economics?

stays classic, becomes more classic over time. They call this the Lindy effect. It's named after a restaurant in New York City near Broadway. They sell a pretty good cheesecake. But the Lindy effect says that every year you're in business, it increases your half-life. It increases the chances that you'll still be in business a year later. The point being, we're not tomorrow going to stop reading Shakespeare. The Great Gatsby isn't going to become irrelevant tomorrow. People aren't going to

stop caring about Star Wars tomorrow. The longer a thing is a classic, the longer it will stay a classic.

So instead of thinking, how can I squeeze the most out of my business right now? You want to be thinking, how can I keep this business around? How can I keep it going? Because that's where the profits are going to come, not next year, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, right? So what are the principles then? What are the ideas that we have to think about in the creative phase, in the operations phase, in the marketing phase?

that gives us a chance to do this? How can we be around in 80 years from now or 100 years from now? What is that going to take, right? So I've thought about this a lot. I've sort of reduced it down to some ideas that I wanted to share with you guys today. And I think the first one is uniqueness, right?

you have to do something that is fundamentally unique and different. I think too many businesses go, oh, where are the lucrative keywords? What's everybody else doing? What seems like a competitive or an exciting niche? Rather than realizing that,

That's already owned by someone else who got there first, right? One of the best business books of all time is a book called The Blue Ocean Strategy. They say don't look for competition in the sort of bloody red ocean. Go to the blue ocean, the un-

crowded waters, that's where you'll make something that truly stands out. So when I'm thinking about a book project or I'm thinking about a business idea, I'm thinking, where is the least amount of competition? I'm thinking, where can I have a monopoly? Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, the founder of Palantir, the first investor in Facebook, he has a great line. He says, competition is for losers.

And what he means is that when you compete, you can lose, but when you're the only one, you're the guaranteed winner, right? So you want to think about where you can own that space. One of the great laws in the 22 immutable laws of marketing, which I also love, they say, you know, invent your own category or invent a way to distinguish yourself inside that category. So when I was even thinking about writing my book,

I'm a perennial seller. I've had a book marketing business for many years. We've worked with some of the biggest authors in the world, including some who are going to be on the stage this week.

And when I was thinking about that, I said to my publisher, hey, I'm thinking about writing a book about this. And they bought it like that because of my track record. And this is the proposal for it. It was great. But then as I started to sketch out this idea, I realized there was a lot of competition in that space. Some of these books are good. Some of these books are not good. But I didn't want to be a loser in that competition. I didn't want to have to fight for an audience reputation.

from those people, right? And again, that law of the immutable laws of marketing, right? It's better to be first than it is to be better, okay? But then they say, if you can't be first in a category, create your own version of that category. So what Perennial Seller ultimately was, was an idea of all these people are talking about how to make a hit book,

But they're talking about it in terms of the New York Times bestseller list. I want to think about it in terms of making a book that will sell for 20 or 30 years. I want to talk about how do you make and market a classic, right? So some questions I think you've got to ask yourself, which is, has anyone ever done this before? Or am I at least doing it in a new way?

When I talk to authors, when I talk to creative people, I go, look, is this the thing that only you can do, right? We're all utterly unique, right? We have unique DNA. No one before ever or ever again in humanity will have the same DNA as you. No one will have the same experiences or experiences

see or learn the same things as you. And so we're totally unique. And then what do we do when we sit down to write an article or create a product or launch a podcast? We go, well, what's everyone else doing? I should do it just like that. And then we wonder why we don't stand out. Or we go, I'll ask people, why are you doing this? They go, oh, I thought it'd be a good way to make money. Or I thought this would be

a cool experience. And no, when I think about a book or when I think about a project, because it is so hard, because it is like staring into the abyss of death, as Elon Musk said, I only want to do it if I can't not do it. Remember in Fight Club, they try to convince the people that they shouldn't be in Fight Club. And it's if after three days, they still haven't been deterred, then you're allowed in. I think entrepreneurship and I think writing books and I think creating projects should have a similar test.

If I can convince you to abandon your idea, it wasn't a good idea and I did you a huge favor. Think about Zappos. Zappos will actually pay you to quit working for Zappos. The point being, if they can pay you to quit, you shouldn't be working there in the first place, right? So do the thing you can't not do. That's the only reason why.

to do it. And then you actually have to do it, right? Whatever you're making, whatever your product is, whatever you're selling. I think way too many people put the cart before the horse. They focus on killer marketing, but they don't think about whether they're actually delivering the goods.

What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. I've got something really cool for you today from my friend Taylor Wells. Taylor spoke at our last Funnel Hacking Live because I wanted him to share a really cool concept about what he calls the revolving pricing method. And today he decided to sponsor the podcast to give you guys more access to this super cool strategy that you are going to love. It's something we've been implementing into our high-end coaching program as well, and it is amazing. But to kind of give you some context about

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Hey, this is Russell Brunson. And I want to jump in really quick to share with you a new assessment I found out that is insanely cool. You guys know I'm obsessed with personality profiles and assessments, but this one is different because not only does it help you understand yourself, but more importantly, especially for us who are entrepreneurs, it helps us understand our employees, our teams, and get people sitting on the right seats in the bus so they can get more stuff done.

I just had a chance to interview Patrick Lanchoni talking specifically about this new assessment they created called Working Genius. And the Working Genius is awesome. Like this test, I had actually blocked out an hour to take it because I was so excited for the new assessment. And it only took me like 10 minutes or less to get it done. Yet, even though it takes only 10 minutes, like you can actually apply this immediately. I took it for myself. I had my team take it.

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These are my Red Wing boots. I'm wearing them right now. I bought them about 10 years ago. They cost 300 bucks. And I thought, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. No pair of shoes could be worth $300. But I'm still wearing them, right? I've walked hundreds of miles in these shoes. I've taken them all over the world. And that's because that's what they're meant to do. Red Wing boots, one of the last boot manufacturers in the United States...

got their start in the early 1900s with a large contract from the US military to supply the troops in World War I with boots. So they have been at it a long time. They know what's good and they know they have proven that they are worth that $300, right? They do the job. It's actually funny when you get a pair of Red Wing boots, they seem so uncomfortable, so stiff. You're supposed to lace them up, put them on and wear them in the shower.

And then they mold to your feet and they fit like a glove forever. There are people who have Red Wing boots that were given to them by their grandfather or their father and they still do the job. So fundamentally, to have something that lasts, it has to do an amazing job. The food has to be good.

The sales product has to deliver, right? The book has to be practical or entertaining. The movie has to make you think or make you cry or make you laugh, right? The supplement has to make you stronger, healthier, whatever it is. The thing has to do the job. But I am amazed at the amount of people I talk to and they're telling me, oh, I'm an entrepreneur. I say, what do you do? And they cannot answer this question. They cannot describe what they do and who they do it for, right?

I go, I have a software company for, you know, businesses. And I go, oh, what kind of businesses? And they go, oh, you know, lots of kind of businesses. Or I say, oh, you're writing the book? Who's this book for? And they go, oh, you know, like smart people or, you know, like Malcolm Gladwell fans. These are not audiences, right? These are not, that is not doing the job. My editor said to me on my first book,

I was thinking about, you know, I was telling her, you know, how I wanted it to be received, how much I wanted it to sell. And she said, it's not what a book is. It's what a book does, right? Entrepreneurship commerce is about delivering value to people in exchange for money. You have to do the job. And every product has a job, right? Even music has a job.

Even music has a job. Max Martin, probably the most successful songwriter in history, he's written for pretty much every band, every pop star in the world. He subjects his music to what he calls the Pacific Coast Highway Test.

He plugs it in the stereo of a convertible and he drives up and down the PCH in California, Highway 1. Does it actually add to that experience? Does it sound good in a car with the roof down? And if it doesn't, he knows he has to

keep tweaking it and improving it until it does, right? This isn't just what you make. If you're making your thing for you, you're going to have a real small audience for your products. Let me tell you, that is not going to be a sustainable business. Your thing has to deliver real value for real people and it has to deliver it over a long period of time. It has to continue delivering that value generationally if that's how long you want your business to last.

And so that takes work. You have to do the work. And the amount of people I see that think, oh, I'll just hire someone to write this book for me. Oh,

I'll just hire a programmer and they'll make the app for me or I'll outsource that to so-and-so. No, this is really hard. It is a painstaking process. And if you don't do it, if you don't feel like you want to do it, what does that say to your prospective customers? It says that you don't see them as people who matter. It says you see them as marks that you're trying to trick into buying something. My books are hundreds of pages of written manuscripts.

hundreds, thousands of note cards that take years and years to accumulate until I have what I want to say. Every day I save draft after draft in a Dropbox folder. My Dropbox folder is endless because over 10 books I've saved literally forever.

tens of thousands of manuscripts, right? It's taken forever. But that is the iterative process by which you make something that does the job for those readers who then ultimately tell other readers about it. There's an amazing story about Roseanne Cash, Johnny Cash's daughter, and she's a fantastic country musician. She talks about how

early on in her career, she was kind of going through the motions. She was phoning it in and she had this, she had this dream. And in that dream, she's, she sees a singer talking to a man named Art, right? Art is symbolizing the artistic profession. And she goes up to them and she tries to, you know, talk. She tries to insert herself in this conversation. And Art looks at her and he says, I don't respect dilettantes. And then he turns away.

A lot of people are dilettantes, right? They're entrepreneurs, not entrepreneurs. They're not actually doing the work. They want to have a book. They don't want to write a book. They want to have a business. They don't want to build a business. And it's hard. This was a transformative moment in Roseanne Cash's career. She rededicates herself to her craft. She hires better collaborators, better teachers. She starts putting the time in in a way that she never had before.

And that's what makes her one of the great musicians of her generation. You have to do that work. This is a quote from Cal Fussman, one of the great interviewers of our time. He said one of the proudest sentences he ever wrote is, this story needed an ending before it could find its first sentence, so please forgive me for delivering it ten years overdue. How many people are willing to invest...

10 years in secret, in the shadows, backstage, dedicating themselves to getting what they're doing right. It's more fun to have validation, to do the launch, to build the assets, to get the attention. It's less fun, but ultimately much more meaningful and much more important if you're trying to create something perennial to do that work first. And when you're doing that work, it's important that it's

rooted in things that actually matter, right? You have to root your work in. It's not just about putting in the time. It's about going to what is timeless. The movie...

The movie "Lady Bird," right? This movie did not make $100 million at the box office because everyone else was like me. I grew up in Sacramento. I'm the same class that the main character is in, Class 2004, Class of 2005. This movie didn't make $100 million because it really captures what it was like to be a high school student in 2004, right? That would be ridiculous. That's a very small market.

What this movie did was capture what it is, the timeless struggle and angst of growing up, of being different, of not being understood by your parents. It's much more than a movie about a girl. It's a movie about being a human being and coming of age, right? The best products, the best art is rooted in what makes us timeless or what makes us human, what we are.

always have needed and will need. It reflects some part of ourselves back to ourselves. Think about Star Wars, right? Are people still watching the original Star Wars 45 years later? Are they still going to the new movies and to the rides because of the cutting-edge technology?

special effects? No, when you watch the original Star Wars, it looks ridiculous, right? It's almost a half century old. That's crazy. The reason people watch Star Wars, the reason it will be something people watch 100 years from now and talk about 500 years from now, whatever is going on in humanity, is because it's

Star Wars is rooted in what they call the hero's journey. Very deliberately, George Lucas bases the story of Luke Skywalker on the same story as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey character.

Jesus Christ. Every hero's story is encapsulated and touched on in Luke Skywalker's story. He actually says that Joseph Campbell, the guy who coined the idea of the hero's journey, was his Yoda, right? Star Wars is a cutting-edge sci-fi movie for its time, but it was also...

And it remains a timeless story about what it means to be called to something great, right? Called to a destiny that you can't quite understand. That's what makes Star Wars what it is. That's why Disney paid so many billions of dollars for it. That's why people are now taking their grandchildren to see a movie they saw when it came out in the theaters. And little known fact...

Star Wars was beaten at the box office opening weekend by a movie called Smokey and the Bandit, right? So when you root your thing into something that is truly timeless, that truly touches people, it doesn't matter what's happening when it comes out. What matters is that people are always going to want that thing.

About a decade ago now, Guy Kawasaki wrote an amazing book. It's called "Enchantment." It's about creating a sort of whirlwind love affair with your customers, right? This is what Apple does. People are enchanted by Apple products and have been. That's what makes them line up.

you know, days in advance to get them new. And Guy was a big part of that because he worked at Apple for a long time. So this is a classic book. It's never gone out of print. He and I actually have the same publisher, Sells Like Crazy. You could pick it up today. Some of the references might be a little dated here or there, but there's every sort of word in this book still rings true. Now, I would contrast that to another book he wrote after that.

called What the Plus? Google Plus for the Rest of Us. Now, which of those books are people still going to be reading in 10 years, right? So even if he'd written that book about a social network that had lasted, right? Even if he'd written a book about Facebook in 2004 or 2005, right?

It's still not real. It's going to be something you have to update all the time because you're writing about something that is constantly changing. A few years ago, a journalist wrote a book about Uber, and then the CEO of Uber got fired, and then it went public. If you're writing about it, you're trying to capture something that's still changing. If you're trying to beat the breaking news, you're going to be on a treadmill. But if you write something timeless...

like enchantment, that's always going to be something that people need. That's always going to be something that's true. So right, whenever you think about these two books, maybe you're a big fan of what the plus. I would argue that if Guy was really smart and if I was smart, we would have written this book instead, right?

Because people get pregnant every single day. They have no idea what to do about it. And they go, oh my God, please, somebody tell me what I should read, right? When you capture something that's timeless, when you capture a problem that people always have, your thing has a chance to last. And there's a reason this book has sold 20 million plus copies. Actually, it's almost surprising that it's only sold 20 million copies, right? A lot of people have gotten pregnant since this book came out. And maybe a few of them would have been better off reading it.

The point is, you want to root what you're making in a timeless need, not an ephemeral of the moment need. So one of the reasons my books have done quite well is that I cheat, right? I write about ancient philosophy. I write about Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, people whose works have been proven

Through the centuries, people who have been popular have never gone out of print. Even in the Dark Ages, when people couldn't get their hands on books, people were reading Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, right? So by basing my work on their work instead of trying to invent my own philosophy, I am taking a shortcut, but I'm also making a bet on a proven stock.

essentially, right? And so the obstacle is the way, when I pitched that to my publisher, believe me, they were not excited when I said I had plans for a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. But I knew that this school was tried and tested, and I knew that it worked, and I knew that it resonated with people. Somebody predicted that book would sell...

about 5,000 copies. It's sold well over 500,000 copies. It's on its way to a million copies. It's spawned a whole series and sort of reintroduced a philosophy to millions of people all over the world. And that's not a function of me. That's a function of me choosing something that is timeless, that is real, that really matters to people. So it's about finding... Thank you.

So it's about finding what is timeless in the timely, right? Star Wars does have cutting edge special effects, but it's about a story that is timeless, right? Jeff Bezos, maybe the most successful entrepreneur of all time. He puts this succinctly and brilliantly as always. He says, focus on the things that don't change.

So Amazon is cutting edge. It is experimenting. It does use the latest and greatest technology, but it's to do things that people always want, which is they want great stuff, they want it cheaply, they want it right away. He's thinking about the things that don't change in the customer experience. So I'm not saying you can't make a lot of money selling fidget spinners.

I'm just saying you probably won't be making a lot of money selling fidget spinners 10 years from now. I'm not saying that cryptocurrencies don't have a great future. I'm just saying you'll probably regret being this guy.

So you root what you're doing in what is timeless and what is important. And that this is actually the best marketing decision you can ever make, right? Because you don't want to be on a treadmill of having to reinvent what you're doing constantly. You want the product to go to what people will always want. And though...

I don't believe that the world is a meritocracy. I don't believe that great stuff always finds its audience. That's not true. I'm willing to do anything and everything it takes once I know I have something amazing to get it in front of people who will like it once they know that it exists.

I've held atheist church services in the Bible Belt for author clients. I've sent books into space. When I was the director of marketing at American Apparel, we did ads with porn stars and fashion bloggers. We ran ads that we knew would get banned on purpose so they would get seen by people who wouldn't have seen them in the publications that they ran in.

With James Altucher, we were the first book to ever be sold on Bitcoin. So I'm totally willing to use the trend of something to get attention. I just don't want the trend to be what I live and die by. So even if you made something great, your marketing, you cannot be boring. Being boring is a liability in 2020. It's been a liability always. If you are boring, you have to spend more money on advertising, more money on publicity. And even if you spend that money and you do that work,

your conversion rate will be lower because people won't actually care, right? So when you think about influencer marketing, people are like, oh, you know, who can you get a great deal from? You know, who are the undervalued influencers? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you make something really awesome, I've found influencers absolutely

ask for your stuff and you don't have to pay them for it, right? I have sent tens of thousands of copies of my books out to professional athletes, Olympic gold medalists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and I've never paid a dime for influencer marketing because I have something that people actually want. And then they talk about it because it does the job, right? When your product does the job, when it's interesting, when it's unique, when it stands out, when it's counterintuitive, when it's controversial, right?

You are helping influencers out because they benefit from your stuff and from the attention that talking about it gives, right? So this is important. I think people are trying... Especially people who are sort of marketing-based, they're thinking about where the deals are, they're thinking about the best tactics, and they're missing the strategy, right? The bigger picture, which is you make something that these influencers actually want, that they actually need. And then...

Who are you speaking to when you have this cool thing? What is your platform? And I don't think there is a conference more about the idea of platform than this one. You guys know what I'm talking about, but I'll tell you a little story.

So in 1929, Winston Churchill was driven from public life in Great Britain in the British Empire, mostly because he wouldn't stop talking about Hitler and how dangerous Hitler was. And people said, you're crazy. We don't want to hear from you. Go away. And so he was forced to retreat basically entirely from public life. He retreated to his estate in the English countryside, and he had to sort of regroup. He had to think about what happens when you're

when your sort of access to your audience is taken away by the powers that be. And what he decided was that he was going to create his own platform that wasn't dependent on anyone else, right? He was going to go directly to...

the people. And so between 1931 and 1939, Winston Churchill published 11 books, more than 400 articles, and delivered more than 350 speeches, right? He was more popular in America than he was in his own country. And when it came to drawing America into the Second World War, Winston Churchill's enormous platform, the enormous credibility he had built up, speaking about the same thing over and over, direct

into American homes through the radio, through his popular columns, through his books, was the credibility that he used to basically help save the human race, right? That's what power is. A platform is power. If you have a platform, no one can blacklist you. No one can take your access away. No one can silence you, right? Platform is what matters.

And if Winston Churchill was alive today, if he was building a platform today, he would be thinking about his funnel. He would be thinking about drawing people in. He'd be thinking about converting them into email subscribers or social media subscribers or followers.

And he'd be talking to them and he'd be directly cultivating that relationship, something that couldn't be taken away from him, right? And I think in these sort of politically incorrect times, in a time where politics has sort of dominated the news cycle, where it's harder and harder to get traditional media attention, if you don't own a platform, if you don't have direct

access to your audience, you are in really tough shape. You are at risk of losing everything. So how are you developing that platform? How are you owning your audience? And what is the exchange of value you are creating to develop that relationship? More than 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to be an author, right? That was my dream. But I, and I knew that I'd have to have an email list to tell people about my books, but it's a

It's a catch-22 or it's a chicken-and-the-egg situation, right? How can I get people on an email list if nobody knows who I am and nobody cares what I have to say, right? So what I did was I created an email list where I just recommended books. I thought, if I can just tell people about books that are really good, eventually when I write my own book,

They will want to hear from me. And so in 2009, I started this list. It was so small when I started that I would copy and paste the emails of the subscribers into the BCC field in Gmail. And so eventually I got locked out of Gmail and then I had to find out what an email service was. And so...

painstakingly over many years, I built this list. It started with 50 people. By the time my first book came out, it was about 30,000 people. And this list has grown and grown and grown. In fact, not only has it grown my writing career, but my writing career has grown this reading list.

I put a reading recommendation thing in the back page of all my books. I give things away, recommendations to people who read the books, who want to follow me. And this list is now 200,000 plus people. And I have monetized it essentially only by sending nine emails over 11 years. And I'm always amazed when I send an email to this list and I say, hey, I have a new book coming out.

They inevitably say something like, oh, I had no idea who you were. I've just been getting this list for the last three or four years and liking the recommendations. I'm going to support you because of what you've done for me. When my book, The Daily Stoic, came out in 2016, I paid $6,000 for the domain Daily Stoic. Actually, it was supposed to be $3,000, and then the guy figured out who I was, and he doubled the price.

But I bought dailystoic.com and I decided the best way to market this book, which is a page a day, would be to write an email every single day that continues the book. And so for more than three years now, I've done this every single day. I did the math a couple months ago. I've given away three full

full books of content for free every, you know, daily for the last three years. And I have no plans of stopping, but that has created a totally separate universe. That's an email list of 200,000 people. We have 400,000 Instagram followers. We have 100,000 YouTube subscribers. We have a podcast with 30,000

10 or 11 million downloads. We've built a whole universe around this thing. We give stuff away and then we monetize it by selling products to a small fraction of that audience who's interested in it. What I've done is I've created a platform. So it doesn't matter whether Barnes and Noble stocks my books. It doesn't matter whether I get reviewed. It wasn't until my eighth book came out that I was ever reviewed in a mainstream newspaper, but it didn't really matter to me. I don't even know if that sold any books. What

Because what I was selling to was the list that I own. I had my platform, right? This is a ClickFunnels landing page that we have that drives our email subscribers, right? You give something away, you capture information, you deliver value to that person, and you monetize it by selling things.

It's pretty simple. It's pretty straightforward. But people don't do it and they don't deliver real value. And then they wonder why they have to spend so much money advertising to drive people to that list. Right. You deliver something timeless and great. You can create a platform that no one can ever take away from you, that only you can ruin by not respecting and not putting in the work.

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And so the final thing I thought I'd talk about is, and this is related to platform, but we can kind of call this tribe, right? It's not just capturing some email addresses, but it's about building a real community, creating real relationship with these people, creating something that goes beyond just an email that's delivered every single day. Stefan Zweig, one of my favorite fiction writers, he wrote, "I had acquired

What, to my mind, is the most valuable success a writer can have? He said, a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who look forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint. If you're not thinking about that every time you send out an email, every time you send out a tweet or an Instagram post, if you're not thinking about the trust that these people have given you and that you don't want to disappoint them, that you want to deliver value to them, you're thinking about it the wrong way. My favorite band, they're the band that...

their intro music played when I walked on stage is Iron Maiden. And I saw Iron Maiden play in San Antonio a couple months ago. You wouldn't think Iron Maiden, a band that's been a band for more than 40 years and has probably not been on the radio for 39 of those years, that's never been on MTV, they've never been cool. They sing 12-minute songs about, you know, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and they have three lead guitarists who play enormously long, ridiculous guitar solos.

You wouldn't think that they'd be selling out the AT&T Center in San Antonio 40 years in, but they are, right? And what was incredible about the show is not just that it was sold out, but how generationally diverse the audience was, right? I will admit it was mostly dudes. It was a lot of dudes.

But they have built an incredible tribe of people. Kevin Kelly talks about the 1,000 true fans. They probably have a million true fans worldwide, right? You have that core audience who's trust, you will not disappoint, who hang on to every word, everything that you make. That is what success looks like. And let me show you what success is translated in that way to Iron Maiden. They fly to each gig in their own 757, piloted by the lead singer. So...

It's an incredible story, right? They don't care that they're not cool. They don't care that they're not getting attention. They don't care that they're not on trend, right? What they care about is that their fans like what they do and that their fans are quietly and slowly converting a new generation and a new generation each time, right? Bruce Dickinson, he's the lead singer. He's the one who has a part-time job for fun as a professional airline pilot.

He says we have our field and we've got to plow it and that's it He says what's going on in the next field is no interest to us We can only plow one field at a time iron maiden their their manager once said somebody came up to him and he said Hey, I really admire you. You're one of my heroes in the music business and their manager said the music business I'm not in the music business. He said i'm in the iron fucking maiden business and

And that's the point. I'm not in the book publishing business. I'm not in the publishing industry. I'm in the Ryan Holiday business. I'm in the business of supporting my platform of speaking to my tribe.

And so are you guys, right? You're in the business of you. You do something unique. You do something special. You do something special. It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. It doesn't matter what other people are making. What matters is the field that you are plowing. And people are paying attention. Lady Gaga was asked if she thought she was the next Madonna. And she said, no, I'm the next Iron Maiden.

And if you think about it, Lady Gaga, besides the recent hit from A Star Is Born, has not really been on the radio that much. But she had one of the highest grossing tours in the world the last few years because she has her fan base, her tribe, which she calls Little Monsters. That's who she's in the business of pleasing, not critics.

Not the streaming services. She's in the business of supporting her tribe. And when you look at the numbers for a band like Iron Maiden, 16 studio albums, a dozen live albums, multiple world tours, 2,000 concerts. They've sold close to 100 million albums. They've hit number one five times, and they have 15 million social media followers.

In fact, until recently, they had more streams than Lady Gaga did, right? And when I went to this show in San Antonio—I'll show you something I bought because I'm a dork—

This was the Iron Maiden Trooper VIP package that cost $220 and is basically just a collection of tchotchkes that does not include a ticket to the show. That's extra. The $220 gets you a backpack and a t-shirt and a license plate holder, right? And a beer koozie. But...

not only was I excited to pay for it, I rushed to buy it before they sold out of the limited quantities, right? When you make something awesome, when you have true believers, when you have those true fans, they will not only buy what you sell, they will be grateful for the opportunity to buy what you sell. And so that's what you have to be thinking about. And this requires long-term investment and long-term thinking, right? Again, Iron Maiden has been at this 40 years. They've been building slowly for 40 years. There were bands that have

come and gone quicker and faster, bands that hit number one quicker and faster, but a lot of those bands aren't here anymore, right? And so it's about thinking long-term, and people don't do this. Seth Godin talks about in publishing, 90% of the income comes from the backlist.

but almost none of the attention is focused on the backlist. Everyone's focused on what's new. People aren't focused on fine-tuning what's already working because that's less sexy. You don't get to do a launch for something that already exists. Nobody throws you a parade when you increase conversion rate by 1%, right? You get celebrated when you hit...

number one on the New York Times list, but if you fall off, nobody's tracking, right? I'd rather be the book that sells day in and day out and never hits a list than the book that hits the list for the week and then nobody sees again. And in fact, what's really interesting, and I think this shows the short-term bias that way too many of us have, is that the New York Times bestseller list, when you look at the fine print,

it actually explicitly excludes what we call perennial sellers. See this here? It says, "Not included are perennial sellers, classroom reading, textbooks, reference books, eBooks, journals, workbooks, calorie counter, shopping guides, periodicals, and crossword puzzles." Basically, like 50% of all sales are not even included in the New York Times list.

But that's what, so people say they want to make something that matters, right? Whatever industry they're in. But then they measure themselves against lists or trackers that don't matter, right? It doesn't matter what Shawshank Redemption made opening weekend. What matters is that it's made hundreds of millions of dollars since that it's still on television, right? Who knows what a Christmas story did the first year it came out? What matters is that we watch it every Christmas. Same with Elf.

Same with all the other movies that own a category, that own an idea. It doesn't matter that Star Wars was beaten by Smokey and the Bandit. In the long-term race, clearly Star Wars has won. And so this thinking long-term is a priority shift. And it might seem like it's bad business, but it's really what creates a brand and a relationship and a tribe that matters. I love L.L. Bean. L.L. Bean's tags now have this awesome thing. It is pretty...

embroidered into the product is a list where you can track how you've handed this product down to each one of your kids or from generation to generation, right? They are not thinking about making a disposable thing that lasts for a year or two and then you have to throw away. They're thinking about something that you can make

that you can own for so long, right? That you can trust to the next generation. I can give my Red Wing boots to my own kids someday. And yeah, sure, that means they might sell one less copy, but it also means I'm gonna rave about these books to all of you and to everyone, these boots to everyone that I meet, right? And so to the people who aren't your customers, your stuff is still new. And that's why we focus on the backlist. That's why we don't quit on things just 'cause they're a few months old or because we've had a few good years.

We don't just move on to the next thing. We want to make and continue to fine tune and refine what we're making until it has a chance to really last, right?

As Drake would say, I don't care about who you're checking now. I care about who's still going to be around a decade from now. And as an example, this is the La Sangrada Familia in Barcelona. It's set to be finished in 2026. That will be the 100-year anniversary of the architect's death. So greatness can take a long time. It's slower than you think.

you think, right? They were actually just fined something like 35 million euro by the EU because they've actually been building for the last 150 or so years without the proper permits.

But who cares? In the long run, that will be a footnote. No one will remember. What they'll remember is the brilliance of the building. And so sometimes when my projects are taking a little bit longer than I thought, I remember when my first book was coming out, I thought, if I don't get this out right now, it will be irrelevant. No one will care. Well, I was writing a book about fake news in 2012. I was like, you know, four or five years too early. So I was

rushing what I was talking about when I really should have been slowing down. I should have been focusing on what mattered. I should have been focusing on getting it right. I should have been thinking about the Lassen Grata Familia, that it takes a very long time to get what you're trying to do right. And that when you're rushing it, you're actually decreasing your chances of lasting over the long term. This is my donkey. His name's Buddy. Um,

Of course, there's some other principles about making things that last. I know it's not as simple as just those couple principles, right? It's good to be first. You got to get lucky. You have to run your business well. There's lots of great products that people make and then incompetent management prevents it from lasting or enduring, right? You have to reinvest those profits in improving what you're doing and in building out ancillary products and

improving the experience. Maybe your first shot, maybe your first business isn't going to work. Maybe it's about taking multiple shots. It might be your fourth or your fifth or your sixth go at this that it finally works, right? You have to get better. You have to learn. You have to stay at it. There's a million things that go into creating a perennial seller, but these are some of the principles I want to leave you with. And I thought where we would end here is maybe one last big thought, uh,

That I try to remind myself of always whatever I'm working on, however things are going, if they're going great or if they're going poorly. But it's basically this, that life is very, very brief. We do not know how long we're going to be here. The Stoics talk about memento mori, right? That we are mortal, that no one chooses how long they live. Kobe Bryant, we lost tragically, right? He was 41 years old. Think about all the things that he didn't get to do, right? Life is very brief.

Sure. So you have to ask yourself, have I been doing my best? Am I making the market by bringing what I bring to it? Am I creating work that can endure? Am I happy with myself? Am I happy with the process, even if it doesn't? That's what I remind myself. I control what I put in. I don't control what I get out. We control the effort. We don't control the result.

So if I died tomorrow before the book came out, would I know that I didn't leave anything on the table, that I put everything I had out there up until that last moment, that I didn't phone it in, that I didn't take shortcuts, right? Ask yourself, is this the legacy that I want to leave? Have I put my best self out there? Not, did I find the way to make the most money or get the most customers in the shorthand? Did I capitalize on the most trends, but did I make something that really matters, that

really has impact, that has a chance to survive and thrive and keep going when I've, you know, when I've moved on or when I'm not even here anymore. Ask yourself, did I do what I was put on this planet to do? Did you do the thing that only you could do? Did you do the thing you could

couldn't not do, not the thing you thought would be the most profitable, right? Was the joy of doing it enough, right? Because if you don't really love this, if you're not enjoying every moment of it, what are you doing eating glass? This is crazy. Go get a job, right? So are you doing it because you love the process, because you love the moment, right? You could leave life right now. That's what Marcus Aurelius said. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Thank you guys very much. I really appreciate it.

All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that presentation about becoming a perennial seller. How cool was that? And like I promised you guys, I want to show one more thing. This is an audio message from Annie Grace that she sent to our inner circle talking about how to create a bestselling book and how to structure the content and the ideas and the layout and, um,

It was awesome. So I'm going to post that in here right now for you guys to listen to as well. Just kind of give you one more thing to think about as you are figuring out how to create your perennial sellers. And again, this could be a book. It could be a course. It could be coaching. It could be anything. It could be videos. It could be just when you're creating something, might as well create it so it lasts forever. So I hope you enjoy this. With that said, if you guys enjoy this episode of the podcast, please go rate and review. Let other people know about it. It would mean the world to me. And with that said, thanks so much. And here's a voxer about how to create a perennial seller.

Morning. I wanted to box the book framework. Okay, so how I think about a nonfiction book and a self-help book specifically is in basically Rules of Three, which I have like mountains of evidence that three is really the building blocks of all creation and scientifically at a quantum level, spiritually in basically every religion, etc., etc. So...

I think it's a really good, solid kind of universal principle to think about. So before we get into the threes, the preface, I think.

In the best self-help books that I have seen in the bestsellers, it usually starts with high drama. So it's your backstory, your origin story, but at a moment of high drama. So the car crashed. I woke up at 3 in the morning with a pit in my stomach. I'd just gotten this news. I'd just gotten that news. So it really hooks them in. And you want that story to end with a lot of curiosity about how you figured out what you figured out.

And then the introduction becomes really practical, like what this book will do for you. So the preface is about you, the author. The introduction is really about the reader and specifically what it will do for you. In this Naked Mind, the first two sentences of the first paragraph of the introduction make the big hairy promise, the promise to the point where it's almost unbelievable, but it also makes people hopeful. And if it is a really huge promise, like this book will literally change how you feel about alcohol,

then you might want to say, I know that's a big promise. I need the rest of the book to prove it to you. Just stick with me. Like, what if I'm right? And just overcome that belief. And then you're going to tell them,

The theory, the basic theory of how you're going to do that in really high level. So that's kind of the introduction. You want to give them like a very quick teaser of giving them at least some hope and certainty that your book can deliver on the promise. But I think that promise should be the first sentence of the book, really, starting with the introduction, like the first sentence of the book. Very, very quick. You dive into it.

And then I think about that big, hairy objective. And I say, okay, what are the three key elements? What are the three key points or arguments that are the things that support that? And start with three. Now, if there ends up being a fourth or a fifth, like that's not a problem. But if you start with three and make sure you have three, I mean, I think it's always better to try to have three to the extent that you can. Now, there sometimes is obviously more and less.

But three is just like, it just really focuses your thinking with that level of constraint and scarcity. You have to...

You can't get lost in the details. And I think that's what authors do. They get lost in the details. They get lost in the tangents. They get lost in their own story. And then the book doesn't have a structure. And structure is so vital. And so those three things, and then that could be really the three sections of the book. And then every chapter, you want to break down those three sections really into at least...

Like, you don't have to follow threes the whole way through. Like, it might be four or five points for that section. But the idea is to make...

In each chapter, if you get the three main points and three key arguments, and the chapter should follow the same format as the whole book, this is what this chapter is going to do for you, how it's going to deliver on that, and then tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. And what happens when you do that, and you do it in sort of a repeating structure, the brain feels safe. And when the brain feels safe, it's open, like it's unsafe for brains to say,

their own thinking. They don't like it, right? They're like, oh, this is uncomfortable. And so if your book is presenting new information and especially challenging information, like, well,

Wallace and Ashley, I'm thinking about you with health and eating, like you're overcoming a ton of resistance. So the more the brain can feel predictability in the structure, the more open it can be to the new concepts and the new ideas. So I would even take the three and I apply it to, okay, here's my three main points, my three main arguments. So if I have a chapter on alcohol doesn't really taste good, you just think it does, right? Um,

My three main arguments might be, look, you didn't like it in your first drink unless it was super sugary. Nobody would like pure alcohol. You'd spit it out. It actually is toxic and poisonous to the bodies. Our bodies were designed not to like it. And by the way, in animal and rat experiments, every single animal and rat turned up their noses at alcohol because they instinctually know as an organism with cells that that is not good. And so those might be my three points just off the top of my head.

But then I think about, okay, how do I want to deliver those points? And each of those might have a story, a soundbite.

and a piece of evidence right so there might be three aspects or each chapter might have you know a backstory some evidence and i think evidence and self-help is really really good i think people the like the brain can accept it so much more when there's you know citations and they've brought in some studies which is is relatively easy to do with google scholar and um

Yeah, research can be really easy. If anybody wants to talk to me further about research, happy to have that conversation for sure.

And so the more kind of structure you give and then you just start filling it in. So when you start with the big overall framework, it's kind of like building a house. Like you're starting with the blueprints. I think what a lot of authors do is they start with, um, they start with the stories, the details, they just start writing. And I think that's where you get lost and you get into something that's just stream of consciousness, which works for catcher in the rye, but it's a very different type of book. Um,

And so when you start with the, so where I'd go from that level of kind of high-level brushstrokes, threes, and what are the three main points? So what are all the points I need to make to make this argument? The three key ones, how do those distill down? How do those break down into three? Like, how do I support each of those arguments? How do I support each of those arguments? Because the self-help book is a lot of times a from-to argument. You're here, I'm taking you here, right? And then when

Once you do that, you just outline it. And the outline, I think, is best served if you outline with questions for yourself to fill in later. So what is the story that proved this point to you? What is this? What is that? Because then when you're sitting down with your outline to actually write, when your brain hears a question, it's like Google, it can't not answer it. It's like instantaneous. It just wants to respond to the question. So if you write your outline in question format,

then you sit down to write and you don't have writer's block. It's like so genius. So like, that's just a simple little hack for when you get to the outline. So like my outline for this naked mind was 40 pages. Like it's a long detailed outline because I had thought through all the points and you just keep distilling down. Okay.

Is this granular enough or do I need additional information here? If so, what are the three key points? And like I said, it's a flexible rule, but it's just a framework to kind of help kick things off and get the structure right. Because if the structure is right, the information can become palatable.

And yeah, you can have really books with good structure that aren't actually very good or substantial books that can sell millions and millions of copies. I can think of an example that I'm not going to say out loud, although we did see her speak at one of the Inner Circle events. But like the content is less than I think. And yet the structure was so predictable that it was such the brains just you feel smart when you can predict what's going to happen next, even on a subconscious level.